One of the world’s quietest places is an urban park in Taiwan; meet the scientist on a mission to identify and preserve others
- Man-made sound is a silent killer, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton says. ‘When we save quiet, we save everything else. Wildlife cannot exist in noisy places’
- Through non-profit Quiet Parks International, he hopes to map and safeguard Earth’s few truly natural soundscapes, such as Yangmingshan National Park in Taiwan
In 2003, the world went eerily silent for Gordon Hempton. For an acoustic ecologist, losing his hearing was the equivalent of a footballer having a leg snatched away; not only was he out of work, he felt isolated and frustrated.
To compensate for the lack of auditory input, his mind began to produce its own sounds, a condition that would become nightmarish. Eighteen months later, as his hearing was gradually returning, he vowed to save the world’s quiet places.
After years of campaigning, in 2018, Hempton launched Quiet Parks International (QPI). The non-profit is dedicated to protecting silent spaces, from the Zabalo River area in Ecuador (QPI’s first designated “wilderness quiet park”) to Taiwan and the Yangmingshan National Park in its capital, Taipei (the first “urban quiet park”).
“In a very weird way, I lived through the future when I lost my hearing. I became aware of what the world will sound like if quiet disappears,” says Hempton, 67, from his bolt-hole in Joyce, Washington state, where he is sheltering from the wildfires that have been devastating the United States’ west coast. “As soon as I got my hearing back I pledged to myself that I will make a difference.”
Out of this pledge was born, on Earth Day, 2005, One Square Inch of Silence, a slice of wilderness in the Hoh Rainforest, in Washington’s Olympic National Park, that was declared the least noise-polluted place in the US.
