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Quiet, please!
Noise pollution can damage your health and shatter your peace of mind. Here’s how to turn it down.
Technological fixes aren’t the only way to control noise. Legislation helps. A pub-noise crackdown is underway in the UK, while lawmakers in Brevard County, Florida, in the U.S. have enacted a law to force drivers to keep car stereos turned down. More than 600 citations were issued in accordance with similar legislation in the city of Melbourne, Australia, in 2007.
The European Federation for Transport and Environment suggests a number of measures municipalities should adopt to get a better grip on noise, including reducing city traffic by offering park-and-ride lots and pedestrian-only areas, replacing old stone pavements and brushed concrete with sound-absorbing surfaces and using small roundabouts and interactive speed-restriction signs to slow traffic instead of speed bumps and traffic obstacles, which can increase traffic noise.
Noise Free America wants each state in the U.S. to declare noise “a dangerous form of pollution” and adopt a noise code. The proposed code would ban gasoline-powered leaf blowers, car alarms and loud exhaust pipes. The code would outline fines for the owners of barking dogs, set time frames for construction work and garbage collection and establish a rule stating that electronically amplified sound coming from a car can't be audible more than 10 feet from the vehicle. Other provisions include limits on the use of power equipment, Jet Skis, dirt bikes, snowmobiles, sirens and train horns.
More colourful is the approach of activists in Thailand protesting the noise around Suvarnabhumi Airport near Bangkok. On several occasions in the past 18 months, they threatened to release bunches of balloons to disrupt air traffic in protest against the noise between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. Last February, they made good on their promise, costing the airport more than $500,000 in compensation to airlines for the ensuing delays. That’s above and beyond the earplugs and sleeping pills airport officials have been providing area residents since Suvarnabhumi opened. When faced with the possibility that neighbours would launch homemade rockets along with the balloons, however, civil authorities began negotiations for financial compensation of people living near the airport.
Bloomberg’s solution is even more radical than balloons, bans and rockets. “The individualistic solution to the noise problem—moving to the suburbs—is no longer working. Now we need a more collective or community-oriented solution, because one person’s noise trumps everyone else’s quiet. We need to create community and interdependence.”
Citing local governments (noisy trash pick-up) and businesses (noisy trucks), Bloomberg says it’s easy to pollute when you’re anonymous. “In many places, our sense of community has broken down. We don’t care about our neighbours. We don’t know our neighbours.” As a result, we don’t necessarily care if we keep them awake at night or disrupt their quiet summer afternoons.
His solution? Throw a party or start a carpool. Bloomberg says you’re less likely to offend a neighbour if you drive each other’s children to school each day. Bloomberg tells the story of a former neighbour who was a musician and liked to give boisterous parties. “I’m sure he broke our local Montpelier, Vermont, noise ordinances on many occasions. But he invited me to the parties! Problem solved.” If the party continued after he went home and stayed loud, it only took a phone call to get the music turned down. “We were friends. He borrowed my ladder; I had some of his tools. We were interdependent.”
While passionate about fighting noise pollution, Bloomberg also observes that silence really isn’t found in human communities. “You need to go to a cave or a federal wilderness area for silence,” he says. “A totally silent human community would be a poor human community.”
He tells of a day a few years ago when a family of former neighbours returned for a visit. “We had little kids running around the yards of three families who had come out to see them, yelling and laughing. But we weren’t imposing on anyone because we were all out there visiting. We made a small footprint of noise,” he says, a footprint of happy human voices.
Which is further evidence, if we needed it, that peace and quiet begin at home.
Mary Desmond Pinkowish is a health writer living the quiet life in Larchmont, New York. Ursula Sautter is a freelance journalist living in Bonn, Germany.
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As a teacher, thank you for speaking up about students, learning and noise. Some people think I run a tight ship because my classroom is quiet when they enter, but my students talk when they want, but quietly and appropriately. They understand the need for less noise and in fact as the year progresses they choose having a calm and quiet environment. Most of my students are disadvantaged, live in crowded conditions, this is probably the only quiet they have during their day. Who ever said quiet was a bad thing?
posted by blaber on 7/14/2008 12:10 pm