In The Nature Fix by Florence Williams, she writes that “Noise may well be the most pervasive pollutant in America.” Planes fly over our heads, cars drive past with radios blaring, a leaf blower is droning on, and smartphones are steadily ringing, beeping, and blasting noise. It’s not just our ears that are affected by our ever-increasingly noisy world…it impacts our entire body.

 

The Health Impacts of Too Much Noise

 

Williams’ book notes that the World Health Organization identifies noise as a “leading environmental nuisance,” and attributes thousands of deaths per year in Europe alone to heart attacks and strokes caused by high levels of background noise (defined as greater than 55 decibels at night or 65 decibels during the day). The research goes on to show that children in noisier neighborhoods have higher levels of the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine, leading to higher systolic blood pressure. Even reading comprehension, memory, hyperactivity, and quality of sleep can be negatively impacted by too much background noise.

 

“When we hear a negative sound, our body responds to that as a potential threat,” said Joshua Smyth, a biobehavioral health psychologist with Penn State University. “We will respond as if we are becoming stressed… This is the ‘fight or flight’ response. This can disrupt a moment of calm, but it can, over time if that happens frequently, even create a situation where the body perceives it as chronically stressful. If that happens too frequently or for too long a period of time, we can become, in essence, exhausted.”

 

It's not just people who are negatively impacted by too much noise. Wildlife suffers too, through difficulties in finding mates, trouble staying asleep, which affects their fitness and ability to survive predators, and just like in humans, increased stress hormones that cause trickle-down health effects. This is due in large part to “masking,” which according to the National Park Service is the process by which the ability to hear a sound is reduced by the presence of another sound. They use the example of how smog limits our ability to see a landscape, so too does a loud car noise alter our ability to hear a bird singing or a brook babbling.

 

It is for those reasons and more that the Pennsylvania Parks and Forests Foundation (PPFF) developed a new video, “The Role of Quiet in our Pennsylvania State Parks and Forests,” which explores how the gentle and pleasing sounds of nature enhance our experiences in the outdoors and combat some of the threats to our physical, mental, and emotional health posed by too much human-created noise.

 

How Natural Sounds Are Good for Us

 

The authors of the article, “Ecosystem Services Enhanced through Soundscape Management Link People and Wildlife” in the journal People and Nature, note that “A degraded experience with nature can result in the loss of an individual’s personal connection to the environment and the motivation to visit and protect natural areas. Such meaningful interactions with nature… engender broad support for measures that protect natural areas and conserve biodiversity.”

 

Their research shows that natural sounds help in stress recovery, improve cognitive function, improve emotions, and have other psychologically restorative effects. Unfortunately, they also show that nearly two-thirds of protected natural areas in the lower forty-eight states experience a doubling in human-created background sounds, leading to a poorer experience for park visitors.

 

Peter Newman knows about park visitor experiences. As a former park ranger at Yosemite National Park, Newman is now the department head and Martin Professor of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management at Penn State University. Newman’s current research, particularly the positive impacts on human health that come from hearing the sounds of nature, focuses on how being exposed to nature sounds can improve the rate of restoration after a stressful event.

 

Because of Newman’s fascinating research and experience working directly in parks, PPFF interviewed him for “The Role of Quiet” video. During the interview, Newman talked about his experience as a park ranger and how it taught him to think about and understand how people interact with, and benefit from, the environment and “natural soundscapes,” as he calls it.

 

“Parks should absolutely be a part of the public health discussion,” said Newman. “Not only do they protect these really important ecosystem services that protect our water and the quality of air, but they also provide us places to de-stress. They provide us with places that can change how we feel during the day. And I can’t think of anything that’s more important than that.”

 

What You Can Do to Improve Our Natural Soundscapes

 

Since natural sounds are so beneficial to our overall health, and too much human-created noise is potentially bad for us, what can we do to maximize the former while reducing the latter? When you are enjoying a stroll through nature, you can do little things to help, like turning the ringer off on your cell phone, not taking a call while on the trail, using earbuds/headphones while listening to music – or better yet, enjoying the music of nature, and speaking softly to your fellow travelers rather than shouting, along with other suggestions pointed out in PPFF’s video.

 

You can also seek out high-quality natural soundscape areas, of which there are many in Pennsylvania, particularly in the northern part of the state, away from major cities and highways.

 

“Some of the best places in Pennsylvania to enjoy quiet areas are in our state forest system’s designated Wild Areas,” said Seth Cassell, the State Forester of Pennsylvania. The state’s Wild and Natural Areas are large areas of land that were set aside for their wildnerness-like settings and special features. There are 19 Wild Areas in Pennsylvania.

 

“I remember that one of my first experiences with true, dead silence was when I was hunting with my dad. I just remember stopping and I said, ‘Dad, I don’t think there’s a sound anywhere.’ It was like you could almost hear the passage of time; it was that quiet.”

 

“Pennsylvania is fortunate to have 124 state parks and 2.2 million acres of state forest where residents and visitors can find quiet opportunities to rest their nervous system,” said Marci Mowery, President of the Pennsylvania Parks and Forests Foundation. “Yet we must work together and remain diligent to protect these special places from noise encroachment. As our new video points out, both humans and wildlife need quiet for optimum health.”

 

To learn more about state parks and forests, visit PaParksAndForests.org and https://www.dcnr.pa.gov/Recreation/WhereToGo/Pages/default.aspx. View the new PPFF quiet video below and to view many other interesting PPFF videos, go to https://www.youtube.com/@PAParksandForests.