Earth’s Sonic Diversity, Secret Bird Scents, Pandemic-Inspired Sci-Fi, and More
Nonfiction Tending Our Musical Planet What do we lose when the diversity of Earth’s noise is drowned out by humans?David George HaskellIn the beginning was silence. The big bang made not a whimper, let alone a bang. That is because the universe was born in a sea of nothingness without the space and time where sound can exist. In the end, the universe will be reduced again to silence, either collapsed into a singularity or expanded into cold, flat uniformity.
Earth’s musical variety show testifies to the boundless creativity of evolution. As with improvisational jazz, order, narrative, complexity and beauty emerge from the interacting voices of Earth and its creatures. Here, in the bittern’s croak, in the turtle’s cluck and whine, in Miles Davis’s trumpet, is “evolution drunk on its own aesthetic energies.
What do we lose when we lose their songs? Listening to the song stories of other species can make us better members of life’s community, Haskell argues. They signal interdependence and resilience, deep kinship, shared beginnings and likely a shared fate. So they are the “foundations not only of delight,” he writes, “but of wise ethical discernment.”—Kathleen Dean MooreThe Secret Perfume of Birds: Uncovering the Science of Avian ScentVultures and albatrosses find food using scent cues.