A world built on fossil fuels is loud. Here’s how advocates are defending peace and quiet. – Grist

Fireworks, on the other hand, I have come to detest. Now, living in a city, every July 4 I feel as a hostage of the relentless booms and the trail of smoke they leave behind.

The “noise” is generally defined as any unwanted sound, or sound that interferes with our ability to listen to other things, and is a form of contamination associated with innumerable health impacts. I am sure that many of you will relate to the feeling of discomfort, stress, even anger can arise from being subjected to annoying noise. But the noise is also or deeply connected with other environmental evils, not always as obviously as smoked fireworks. Many things that cause strong and unpleasant noise also cause harmful air pollution: airplanes, trucks, grass cuts, leaf blowers, construction, demolition. A world construction of fossil fuels is noisy. Some defenders are fighting, defending not only our right to live in clean communities, but also in the peaceful ones.

“It’s really incredible, how much noise impacts so many people,” said Mary Tatigian, who founded a group called Quiet Florida to advocate noise pollution in 2021, when street and air traffic slipped away. A nurse registered for 30 years, was the cure more on the impacts on the health of chronic noise he faced.

“Not only causes hearing problems, it is a cardiovascular problem,” he said. “Its heart rate increases, its blood pressure increases. It is almost like a fight or flight system.” Exposure to noise can interrupt sleep and increase cortisol levels, stress hormone, in the body. It can also bring psychological impacts, such as greater anxiety and irritability. “We use the term” learned impotence “, where you feel that you are subject to this noise, all the time, and there is nothing you can do about it,” Tatigian said.

Tatigian has lived in the small city of Naples, Florida, for about 40 years, and the same house during the last 25. “Four years ago, it was as if the gates were opened,” he said. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the local population shot. Modified exhaust cars became more common on roads, and air traffic to and from Naples airport, mainly charter, they went crazy. “I was on a flight route. I had no idea that I was on a flight route,” he said.

He obtained a noise meter on his mallet, and discovered that low-flying planes on the head of 60 to 85 decibels-85 decibels is the threshold in which regular solid exposure can begin to cause auditory loss, according to the National Health Institutes. Tatigian estimates that he listens from 60 to 70 planes in one day.

In the 1970s, when many environmental risks were focusing and the country was going through legalization to address them, noise between those problems was considered. The 1972 Noose Control Law established a national mandate to “promote an environment for all Americans free of noise that endangers their health and well -being”, as well as financing research and noise education. But the EPA stopped financing the program in the 80s under the Reagan administration, instead of changing responsibility for state and local governments.

“Our knowledge and actions around noise basically stagnated,” said Jamie Banks, founder and president of a non -profit organization called still communities, with which Tatigian is also involved. Since then, efforts to handle noise in different states and locations have been irregular, Banks said, and the regulations that exist, such as laws that prohibit the modified escape in vehicles, rarely apply. The calm communities filed a lawsuit against the EPA in 2023 to try to force the agency to defend the 1972 Noise Law, which is still in the books. “The EPA has mandatory responsibilities defined under that law that is not being carried out,” Banks said.

The case has not yet been heard, and she is not sure what the result will be. But quiet communities are also working to create more base impulse for solutions that sacrifice a variety of benefits, quiet among them. “We are certainly working on noise as a problem, we must also promote tranquility as a valuable natural resource, and one that is frankly in danger,” Banks said.

The group has collaborated with a sustainable landscape certification group called American Green Zone Alliance to help municipalities, parks and universities to the transition to the electrical equipment of the grass, for example. A growing number of towns and cities has approved ordinances that prohibit gas leaves, a notorious source of air pollution and annoying noise benches, but it is also something like that approval of this approval and has to have to do for Smally. Professionals.

“Trying to regulate in this area can lead to the landscapes and the public and the municipalities in conflict,” he said. “That is something that should really be done in a reflexive and careful way that involves all interested parties.”

Erica Walker, an assistant professor of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health at Brown University and founder of a research organization called Community Noise Lab, studies how noise pollution crosses itself with other systemic problems. “Usually, noise is not happening in isolation. It is just a physical stimulus to represent an urban imbalance or a community imbalance,” Walker said. “If we say that noise creates negative cardiovascular health results, it is not just noise. It is socioconomy, it is air pollution, its water quality, its visual quality.”

After having studied noise and other forms of pollution for approximately a decade, he said he can count a lot about a community and its stressful factors because of the way it sounds. A nearby road, for example, has a distinctive sound pattern: if you listen to that, you know what the air (escape) smells and how the night sky will look (illuminated by advertising fences).

It is well documented that low -income communities are more likely to be located with almost environmental risks. And, like a road, those dangers come with noise pollution as well. In a 2017 article published in Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers found that the poorest communities with a high percentage of non -white residents were more likely to face greater exhibitions to noise. The differences became more marked from the most racious secrecy communities.

But Walker has also studied how socioconomic factors feed people’s noisy perceptions. In 2015 and 2016, he helped to conduct a survey in Boston that focused on experience instead of objective volume measures. The results showed that simply having a higher percentage of non -white residents in an area caused people to perceive their neighborhood as stronger, like other factors such as proximity to a housing project. Most respondents were white.

“I am a black person, right? There is a stereotype that we are strong: everyone has that stereotype,” Walker said. “It was really interesting to see, statistically, some of these stereotypes that we really do not think until we find them in the data.”

In contrast to other forms of pollution, the perception of fact has a lot to do how we experience noise and how that can affect our well -being. Go back to that definition of noise: “unwanted” sound.

“As a community noise researcher, I am firmly anti-Cuiet. I don’t believe in tranquility,” Walker said. Absolute silence, in many cases, is an unattainable and equally undesirable objective. (Like my positive experience with Thunderclaps, a strong sound, but one that does not experiment as “noise”). And enforce tranquility can cause damage to groups of people who want certain types of sound, Walker said. For example, the fights on noise have exploded in the gentrifying communities where traditions such as playing music come into conflict with the expectations of new residents. In the search for tranquility, “we have punished people,” Walker said. “We have ignored cultural elements of noise. We have closed the practices that are part of the acoustic culture of a community, because we think it was too strong.”

She is anti-surfing, but pro-peace, an alternative in which everyone in a community can negotiate the sound they want and the sound they can live with.

That commitment can be difficult in practice. Mary Tatigian said she has received many black comments from the bathtub with Florida Quiet, “of people who like to modify their escape, have loud cars, or fly their planes.” A couple of years ago, after his work appeared on television, he said he was flooded with vulgar comments: “And I am not a mojigata, by far,” he added. Some of this was just a threat.

People can quickly defend their right to make as much noise as they want. But in Tatigian’s opinion, communities also have the right to access peace and tranquility. “At least, a person should have that inside his home,” he said.

In the short term, two measures for which Tatigian advocates in his Florida community are more dispersed flight routes to the Regional Airport, so a community does not have to endure the worst part of the air traffic contamination load, and a noise chamber system that could help apply laws on excessively noisy cars, similar to the cameras that catch the cars through the red lights.

But his long -term vision of a healthy and peaceful community would imply cleaner technologies, he said as more electric vehicles, which are known for being silent since engines do not require combustion to work. It also imagines more public transport as part of the solution, as well as a better rail system that could help displace short -distance regional flights. “You have to think outside the box,” he said.

For Walker, the vision of how a healthy community is seen depends completely on the culture, context and priorities of a place. “I think Through Community could be noisy,” he said. “Through the community it is not necessarily calm, but it is in a rhythm.” There is a predictability and a sense of security, he said. Whatever the sound that can, from music, of children playing, from the vibrations of nature, is not unwanted.

– Claire Elise Thompson

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A farewell shot

Not only human health is affected by excessive noise. Wild life can also be harmed, in particular, creatures such as bats and whales that use echolocation to navigate in their environments. Some land developers and managers have task steps to mitigate the effects of noise caused by humans in wildlife. This photo shows that the water buffalo passes under a railroad, equipped with noise deflectors, in the Nairobi National Park in Kenya.