The Year the Sounds Were Still
At the ripe age of 96, the last 20 years of Sir David Attenborough’s career have been a glorious tribute to his love for Nature and sound. The famous English biologist, broadcaster, author, and natural historian lends his voice — literally — to the quest for education and actionable ideas that can bring humanity into better alignment and harmony with Nature.
The Natural Historian You Know When You Hear Him
Attenborough is famous for his voice. His Wikipedia bio includes a sound clip of his breathy, English accent. He’s distinctive, both with his voice and in the ideas he has shared for years in documentaries and as a broadcaster.
“The Year the Earth Changed,” a documentary released in 2021, is a collection of stories about something I occasionally dreamed about as a resident and driver on the freeways of the San Francisco Bay Area: emptiness and stillness. What would it be like, I sometimes wondered, to have these places empty of humanity?
In March 2020, my dreams were painfully realized. Stillness and at times, total silence in my city were early effects of lockdown efforts to try to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The loss of life, livelihood and disruption to come would be unimaginable — and we’re still in it. But for animals and the earth, other realities that Attenborough and his documentary bring to life, came to pass.
The film documents how, emptied of human activity , sound, and presence, the animals came out, were curious, and adapted — in some cases quickly. As billions of humans took to their homes in the span of mere weeks (or days, depending on where in the world you were), animals changed their behavior too, to find new possibilities and ways to survive.
From cheetahs in Kenya, elephants in India, deer in Japan, to America, Chile, New Zealand and more, the documentary shows us how 2020 allowed scientists to truly measure the human-generated noise effects on animals on land and at sea.
Here in the Bay Area, birds sang at a different frequency and their sound traveled longer distances as human noise levels fell to levels not recorded since the early 1950s.
Human Sound: Impacting Tourism and the Search for Awe
The film shows us how our own desire to be closer to Nature and witness its awe is held back by our use of technologies and tactics that need changing. We’re in our own way, compromising the very thing we seek: Nature’s majesty. In Africa, tourists in noisy all-terrain vehicles desperate to see cheetahs on the hunt sit in vehicles unaware that their motors drown out the call of mother cheetahs calling softly but audibly (predators would kill the cubs) to their babies to come close to enjoy the fresh kill.
The tourist cruise ship industry in Alaska, formerly 1.3million people in 2019 fell to just 48 people in 2020 drowns out whale songs with engine noise. Without it in 2020, mother whales ranged farther for food, took naps, and actually changed their sounds and songs.
Like so much in our world, the time for change and finding new ways is now. 2020 gave us great gifts of perspective, retreat and contemplation of our ways. We were still. There is beauty in this documentary for ideas on how we can make small changes and better coexist amid Nature.
