An Uneasy Sense Of Dislocation

Humans, especially those of us in industrialized societies, now use 25 percent of all the energy captured and made available by plants across the world, a percentage that doubled during the twentieth century and is still increasing. In regions where agriculture dominates, our take is much higher. Areas free from the yoke of human management are shrinking. The loss is not evenly spread, however, with forest losses concentrated in the tropics and gains in many temperate regions such as abandoned agricultural land in Eastern Europe. Other terrestrial habitats are also in decline worldwide. The area of cultivated pasture has increased, but natural grasslands have declined by up to 80 percent. The area of coastal and inland natural wetlands has halved globally. We are narrowing the foundation of the rest of the biosphere. Sonic decline is a symptom of the loss of biological diversity. But sonic diminishment is not only an indicator of loss. Sound connects animals in the present moment, sustaining their vitality by uniting them into fruitful communicative webs. The silencing of ecosystems isolates individuals, fragments communities, and weakens the ecological resilience and evolutionary creativity of life.

Every Teardrop is a Waterfall

Sound might also guide us to be better members of life’s community. Listening connects us directly to Earth’s living communities, grounding ethics and action. Lately our ears have received technological help from computerized recording devices. Unlike my bird surveys in Tennessee, these electronic ears hear the entire soundscape and can discern patterns across vast troves of sonic data. This promises deeper awareness of the voices of thousands of animal species, perhaps guiding more effective conservation action. Its rumble penetrates the house and settles in my chest. The air is dry, prickly with smoke from Rocky Mountain wildfires and ozone from traffic and oil drilling. Underfoot, tufts of plastic fiber sprout wall to wall, years of wear evident in their uneven thatch. The tree is a transplant from forests to the east, planted among Austrian pines, Japanese maples, and native cottonwoods in what was shortgrass prairie, now part of the vast spill of suburbia across the Colorado Front Range. The microphone sat in a weatherproof box hung from a tree. Researchers set up and retrieved the device but otherwise left it unattended. Later this sediment of zeros and ones was copied to a laptop computer in the field, then to a server in a lab in Queensland.

Too Marvelous For Words

I press play, and the sounds of the tropical forest reawaken in the miniature magnetic coils and paper cones in my headphones in Colorado. The sound is an obedient phantom, a presence removed by human technologies from its living sylvan bodies, resurrecting on our command. The sound is disembodied but still powerful. I cue the digital sound file to midnight in the forest and drop into shimmering insect sound. At least fifteen species are singing, and their voices cover almost all the audible range, except for the very lowest frequencies. The singers differ in the texture of their sounds, some silky, others raspy or bristly, but they are so tightly packed that I feel as if I’m suspended in a dense, lustrous cloud. The snap of falling water on waxy leaves adds an irregular beat. This is not rain, but the fat drops that fall from the tree canopy in a downpour’s aftermath. A distant croak pops into the lower registers, perhaps a tree frog in the canopy. I drift in the sound, letting the insects carry me through the Bornean night. A few voices hold steady, a bright drone. Some pulse second by second or rasp in short bursts.

This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now

Others swell then recede like ocean swell, cresting every fifteen seconds, then easing back. The forest’s sounds lulled me to sleep. My ears, perhaps starved by suburbia for the diverse voices of forest life, reached into me and dialed back my consciousness. My sleep had a familiar texture, not groggy or fogged, but clear, like immersion in the refractions of water. The only other time I sleep this way is under trees when I’m taking a break from hiking or when I’m in a tent in the forest. For fourteen million years our great ape ancestors slept in tree nests. This dip into sylvan sleep might be a hazy remembrance, wakened by my ears, of a long ancestry. Refreshed, I return to the soundscape of the Bornean forest. As the night progresses, insects continue to dominate, peppered with some thumps and twangs that I take to be frogs. Birds and primates are silent. Many of midnight’s insects have dropped out and now half a dozen species dominate the air. One katydid’s rasps are so soft and low that they are almost like bleats. Many trees in these forests rely on the barbet and its kin to disperse their seeds. Distant whistled bird cries follow a minute later. Bird whistles and fluty notes from half a dozen species build over the next ten minutes. As the sun rises and the day unfolds, cicadas emerge, buzzing like those I am familiar with in temperate forests. A few screech like the whine of a drill or scrape like a knife on a sharpening stone. At dusk, dawn’s crescendo of bird sound returns, then gives way to crickets and katydids. I delight in these sounds, imagining the rich forest around me. But I also feel an uneasy sense of dislocation, especially if I listen for more than a few minutes at a time. My ears are fully immersed in one of the most diverse places known on the planet, but the rest of my body, including all my other senses, is in a rental house in North American suburbia. The rain forest is spiced with thousands of leafy, fungal, and microbial smells. Every tree has its bouquet, and the soil rewards nasal explorations with striking aromatic variegations. I breathe only truck fumes and the exhalations of a house interior, backed by haze from tens of thousands of fracking wells east and north of town, and a dense network of busy roads. Ants, beetles, and leeches swarm the forest floor, necessitating regular plucking from human ankles and legs.