Sounds Wild and Broken

March 1, 2022
In this thoughtful, insightful title exploring one of the five senses, Haskell (The Songs of Trees, 2017) presents a clear-eyed thesis on the impact of worldwide environmental destruction and human noise on what we hear. "Never in the history of Earth have sounds been so rich and varied," he writes, then continues, "Never has this diversity been so threatened." Haskell considers the silence of the earliest life forms on the planet and reflects on the development of the first sounds and the evolution of sensory systems to perceive them. He resigns himself to the progressive loss of his hearing due to age while revealing the intricacies of human ear construction and human limitations in sound registration compared with other species. In the mammal competition, bats win this contest by a mile. Listening for grasshoppers, butterflies, and cicadas, he reflects on the sounds long ago obliterated by the cacophony of human development. With persistent intelligence and understated wit, Haskell uncovers one subtle mystery after another, forming a gorgeous argument for protecting all we long to hear.

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Starred review from January 1, 2022
A joyous celebration of the music of life, from the acclaimed author of The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees. Seamlessly melding history, ecology, physiology, philosophy, and biology, Haskell exults in the delightful cacophony created by birds and insects, wind and sea, human voices and musical instruments as he engages in the practice of "attentive listening" in his travels around the world. "Every vocal species," he writes, "has a distinctive sound. Every place on the globe has an acoustic character made from the unique confluence of this multitude of voices." This multitude of sound, though, is being threatened by noise pollution and habitat extinction, dire consequences of human behavior. Sound, Haskell reveals, is a fairly new development in the planet's history, made possible by the manifestation, 1.5 billion years ago, of cilia, tiny hairs on the cell membrane that help cells move--and also, as in our own inner ears, to sense sonic vibrations. "For more than nine-tenths of its history, Earth lacked any communicative sounds," writes the author. "No creatures sang when the seas first swarmed with animal life or when the ocean's reefs first rose. The land's primeval forests contained no calling insects or vertebrate animals." Flowering plants ushered in life forms such as insects, which filled the air with trills and buzzes, and birds, for whom sound-making "mediates breeding, territoriality, and the alliances and tensions of animal social networks." Haskell's capacious purview includes the origins of musical instruments, some 40,000 years ago; the possibility that dinosaurs made low bugling sounds; the particular cries of birds living above the tree line; and the way sounds, including those made by humans, are adapted to environment and even shaped by diet. He mounts a compelling warning about "the silencing of ecosystems," which "isolates individuals, fragments communities, and weakens the ecological resilience and evolutionary creativity of life." Like "cultural knowledge," Haskell asserts, "sound is unseen and ephemeral" and too precious to lose. Sparkling prose conveys an urgent message.

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