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

Having grown up in the Southeast, I’ve always loved a good summer thunderstorm. Sure, thunder can be loud and sometimes scary, but I associate storms with a feeling of coziness. We would seek shelter in the safety of our home, me and my brother hoping the power would go out (it often did) so we’d have an excuse to light candles and eat ice cream before it melted.

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

“Noise” is generally defined as any unwanted sound, or sound that interferes with our ability to hear other things — and it is a form of pollution associated with myriad health impacts. I’m sure many of you will relate to the feeling of annoyance, stress, even anger that can arise from being subjected to nuisance noise. But noise is also often deeply connected to other environmental ills, not always as obviously as smoky fireworks. Many things that cause loud, obnoxious noise also cause harmful air pollution: planes, trucks, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, construction, demolition. A world built on fossil fuels is noisy. Some advocates are fighting back — championing not only our right to live in clean communities, but also in peaceful ones.

“It’s really unbelievable, how much noise impacts so many people,” said Mary Tatigian, who founded a group called Quiet Florida to advocate against noise pollution in 2021, when street and air traffic noise in her community skyrocketed. A registered nurse for 30 years, she began to learn more about the health impacts of the chronic noise she was confronted with.

“Not only does it cause hearing problems, it’s a cardiovascular issue,” she said. “Your heart rate rises, your blood pressure rises. It’s almost like a fight-or-flight system.” Noise exposure can disrupt sleep and increase levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in the body. It may also bring psychological impacts, like increased anxiety and irritability. “We use the term ‘learned helplessness,’ where you just feel you’re subjected to this noise, all the time, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” said Tatigian.

Tatigian has lived in the small city of Naples, Florida, for around 40 years, and the same house for the past 25. “Four years ago, it was like the floodgates opened,” she said. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the local population ballooned. Cars with modified exhaust became more common on the roads, and air traffic to and from the Naples Airport — primarily from charter jets — went nuts. “I happened to be in a flight path. I had no idea I was in a flight path,” she said.

She got a noise meter on her deck, and found that the low-flying planes overhead ranged from 60 to 85 decibels — 85 decibels is the threshold at which regular sound exposure can begin to cause hearing loss, according to the National Institutes of Health. Tatigian estimates that she hears as many as 60 to 70 planes in a day.

In the 1970s, when many environmental hazards were coming into focus and the country was passing legislation to address them, noise was considered among those issues. The Noise Control Act of 1972 established a national mandate to “promote an environment for all Americans free from noise that jeopardizes their health and welfare,” as well as funding research and education around noise. But the EPA stopped funding the program in the ’80s under the Reagan administration, instead shifting responsibility to state and local governments.

“Our knowledge and actions around noise basically stalled,” said Jamie Banks, the founder and president of a nonprofit called Quiet Communities, which Tatigian is also involved with. Since then, efforts to manage noise in different states and localities have been spotty, Banks said, and regulations that do exist, like laws banning modified exhaust on vehicles, are seldom enforced. Quiet Communities brought a lawsuit against the EPA in 2023 to try and compel the agency to uphold the 1972 noise law, which is still on the books. “The EPA has mandatory responsibilities defined under that law that are not being carried out,” Banks said.

The case has yet to be heard, and she isn’t certain what the outcome will be. But Quiet Communities is also working to create more grassroots momentum for solutions that offer an array of benefits — quiet among them. “We certainly do work on noise as a problem, but we also want to promote quiet as a valuable natural resource, and one that frankly is endangered,” said Banks.

The group has collaborated with a sustainable landscaping certification group called American Green Zone Alliance to help municipalities, parks, and universities transition to electric lawncare equipment, for instance. A growing number of towns and cities have passed ordinances banning gas-powered leaf blowers, a notorious source of both air pollution and nuisance noise — but Banks is also somewhat leery of this approach, which can have an outsize impact on small businesses and has led to pushback from lawncare professionals.

“Trying to regulate in this area can bring landscapers and the public and municipalities into conflict,” she said. “That’s something that really has to be done in a thoughtful and careful way that engages all stakeholders.”

Erica Walker, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health and the founder of a research organization called Community Noise Lab, studies how noise pollution intersects with other systemic issues. “Usually noise is not happening in isolation. It’s just a physical stimulus to represent urban imbalance or community imbalance,” said Walker. “If we’re saying noise creates negative cardiovascular health outcomes, it’s not just noise. It’s socioeconomics, it’s air pollution, it’s water quality, it’s visual quality.”

Having studied noise and other forms of pollution for over a decade, she said she can tell a lot about a community and its stressors by the way it sounds. A nearby highway, for instance, has a distinct sound pattern — if she hears that, she knows what the air will smell like (exhaust), and what the night sky will look like (lit up by billboards).

It’s well documented that low-income communities of color are more likely to be situated near environmental hazards. And, like a highway, those hazards often come with noise pollution as well. In a 2017 paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers found that poorer communities with a high percentage of nonwhite residents were more likely to face higher noise exposures. The differences became more stark the more racially segregated communities were.

But Walker has also studied how socioeconomic factors feed into people’s perceptions of noisiness. In 2015 and 2016, she helped run a survey in Boston that focused on experience rather than objective measures of loudness. The results showed that simply having a higher percentage of nonwhite residents in an area made people perceive their neighborhood as louder, as did other factors like proximity to a housing project. The majority of the survey respondents were white.

“I’m a Black person, right? There’s a stereotype that we’re loud — everyone has that stereotype,” Walker said. “It was just really interesting to see, statistically, some of these stereotypes that we don’t really think about until we encounter them coming up in the data.”

In contrast with other forms of pollution, perception in fact has a lot to do with how we experience noise and how that may impact our well-being. It gets back to that definition of noise — “unwanted” sound.

“As a community noise researcher, I am steadfastly anti-quiet. I don’t believe in quiet,” said Walker. Absolute quiet, in many instances, is an unattainable and even undesirable goal. (Like my positive experience with thunderclaps — a loud sound, but one I don’t experience as “noise.”) And enforcing quiet may cause harm to groups of people who want certain types of sound, Walker said. For example, fights over noise have erupted in gentrifying communities where traditions like playing music come into conflict with new residents’ expectations. In the pursuit of quiet, “we have castigated people,” Walker said. “We have ignored cultural elements of noise. We have shut practices down that are part of the acoustical culture of a community, because we thought it was too loud.”

She’s anti-quiet, but pro-peace — an alternative where everyone in a community is able to negotiate around sound that they want and sound they can live with.

That compromise can be difficult in practice. Mary Tatigian said she has received quite a lot of negative feedback since she began advocating with Quiet Florida, “from people who like to modify their exhaust, or have loud cars, or to fly their jets all over.” A couple of years ago, after her work was featured on TV, she said she was inundated with vulgar comments — “and I’m not a prude, by far,” she added. Some of it was even threatening.

People may be quick to defend their right to make as much noise as they want. But in Tatigian’s view, communities also have a right to be able to access peace and quiet. “At the very least, a person should have that inside their home,” she said.

In the near term, two measures that Tatigian is advocating for in her Florida community are more dispersed flight paths to the regional airport, so that one community doesn’t have to bear the brunt of the air traffic pollution burden, and a noise camera system that could help enforce laws about excessively loud cars — similar to cameras that catch cars speeding through red lights.

But her long-term vision of a healthy, peaceful community would involve cleaner technologies, she said — like more electric vehicles, which are known for being quiet since their engines don’t require combustion to run. She also envisions more public transit as a 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,” she said.

For Walker, the vision of what a healthy community looks like is entirely dependent on the culture, context, and priorities of a place. “I think a thriving community could be loud,” she said. “A thriving community is not necessarily quiet, but it’s in a rhythm.” There’s a predictability, and a sense of security, she said. Whatever sound there may be — from music, from children playing, from the vibrations of nature — is not unwanted.

— Claire Elise Thompson

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A parting shot

It’s not just human health that’s impacted by excessive noise. Wildlife can be harmed by it as well, notably creatures like bats and whales that use echolocation to navigate their environments. Some developers and land managers have taken steps to mitigate the effects of human-caused noise on wildlife. This photo shows water buffalo passing under a railway, equipped with noise deflectors, in Nairobi National Park in Kenya.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Mia Torres / Grist

Parting shot: Dong Jianghui / Xinhua via Getty Images