Yours truly is deaf. Powerful hearing aids make it somewhat possible to hear but deafness, combined with tinnitus makes conversation difficult at best, particularly over a smartphone. At the same time, loud noise makes yours truly crazy as it physically hurts and adds stress, especially when wearing said hearing aids.
45 years ago, Great Sand Dunes National park was a destination for the ages for my wife and I as it was silent (I could hear then) and it was wonderful. Silence is golden as it preserves not only sanity but also enables animals of planet earth to conduct business, something becoming ever more difficult, especially for denizens living in the sea.
Human-created noise is more than annoying. Decades of research has implicated it in a host of chronic health conditions, including low sleep quality and high blood pressure, as well as increased risk of heart attack or stroke, diabetes, and even cancer. “Noise is a known psychological and physiological stressor,” says Marie Pedersen, an epidemiologist at the University of Copenhagen who studies how environmental exposures affect pregnancies and children. Wildlife is affected too: Studies show that the auditory landscape is a key component of habitat, and human noise masks critical sounds. Animals listen for prey, predators, and territorial alarm calls, to locate group members, and find sexual partners.
Truer words never spoken.
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