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One Square Inch of Silence was published at the end of March 2009 in time for the authors, Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann, to appear at the Earth Day events in New York's Central Park on April 26th, at the end of their book-launch tour. I was only halfway through the book at that date, reading it over coffee, sitting in the sun by the river in the old Swedish university city of Uppsala during the mid-morning rush-hour of students cycling to classes. In spite of the modest traffic I could enjoy the sounds of river water running, birds singing, and trees soughing in a light breeze on a glorious spring day, in sight of a hillside of blue scillas reaching up towards the castle. It would be hard to find the equivalent relative quiet in an outdoor café in the center of London or New York, or even Cambridge, England, another ancient seat of learning, where the pavements are as congested as the roads and the traffic noise is deafening. The contrast with less densely populated Sweden was thought-provoking. One Square Inch of Silence is a thought-provoking book. It makes you listen to the world with different ears and question the inevitability of the background cacophony you take for granted.
Gordon Hempton describes himself as a Sound Tracker and acoustic ecologist, a term and a vocation he invented for himself. The book recounts a three-month journey in his collectors'-item blue 1960s Volkswagen camper (affectionately referred to throughout the book as the "Vee-Dub") from his home in Joyce, just west of Seattle in Washington State, to "the other Washington." En route he recorded the noise levels in cities and in supposedly quiet places in the National Parks and wilderness areas in between. Journey's end came with a hundred-mile walk from Williamsport, Maryland, along the C & O Canal National Historic Park to Washington. There Hempton and Grossmann had set up a series of meetings to lobby the Director of the National Park Service, the Environmental Protection Agency (about its responsibilities under the Noise Control Act), and one of Hempton's state senators. Only the senator offered any immediate support, but perhaps consciousness was marginally elevated in the bureaucracies by the meetings. The final act of Hempton's pilgrimage was a visit with his father to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery, where the noise of jets taking off at one-minute intervals from the adjacent airport drowned out the daily ceremony of the Changing of the Guard: a chance to sound a last note more in sorrow than in anger.
Hempton first got the idea for "One Square Inch of Silence," the project that gave his book its title, in 1989, when he was awarded a Lindbergh Foundation grant to help preserve the nature sounds of Washington State. He gave up his bicycle messenger job in Seattle to concentrate full-time on the vocation that had preoccupied him since his late twenties: recording the sounds of natural quiet and documenting its apparently inexorable shrinkage. On Earth Day in 2005, he established "One Square Inch of Silence" in the Hoh rainforest in Olympic Park, Washington, despairing of the National Park Service's will to act decisively without outside pressure. He chose Olympic Park because it was the only remaining National Park in which a diverse natural soundscape is uninterrupted for substantial periods by man-made noise. He put a polished red stone, the gift of an elder of the Quileute tribe, on a log about a three mile hike from the visitor center. He then embarked on a campaign to achieve and preserve one square inch of silence in the place marked by the stone by regularly monitoring man-made intrusions. Hempton posts a record of the intrusions on the OSI website (onesquareinch.org) and sends an audio CD of examples of the sounds of quiet, ending with the intrusion in question, to those responsible for the noise, with a polite request for cooperation in preserving the natural soundscape. Alongside the One Square Inch stone he placed a jar in which walkers are invited to deposit accounts of their experiences of natural quiet, the Jar of Quiet Thoughts. (As the book went to press, Hempton reports, rumblings from the Park Service suggested that the bureaucrats were all set to remove his modest installation, categorizing it as an unlicensed intrusion not justified by any "scientific" purpose.)
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