7 Shipping Installable Haskell Applications.5 Installing libraries with external C bindings.3.4 Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion).3.2 Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and Xcode 5.Listening and sound give us a sensory foundation for ‘joy, belonging and action’. By silencing them, we silence what made us and what might yet be made. Animal voices are catalysts for innovation.’ The songs of crickets and whales of humans making music through mammoth-ivory flutes of wind through trees and rocks – these and so many other sounds have interacted with and shaped the world around us, like the red crossbill’s call, which has evolved to be higher in pitch than the wind in the trees of its native Rocky Mountains. A future that’s sonically diminished is also creatively diminished, because sounds connect us, and ‘when living beings connect, new possibilities appear. ‘Sounds depart as soon as they arrive’, but the energies and patterns they leave are creative and generative, Haskell explains. ![]() But it can be easy to skip wonder and leap to action without hearing the world speak without really understanding the problem first. This connection could lead us towards empathy, accountability and actions that can come from directed wonder, such as activism or legislative change. Haskell argues that in silencing the world, we silence ourselves, because there’s no separation – despite walls and headphones and technological prowess – between humans and the non-human world. Rachel Carson, author of the groundbreaking Silent Spring, believed that by poisoning the world, we also poison ourselves. Racism, sexism and power asymmetries create dire sonic inequities.’ ‘The burdens of noise – ill health, poor learning and increased mortality – are unjustly distributed. Noise pollution takes its toll on humans, too, and this is borne by lower income and minority neighbourhoods. The blackbird becomes a window into the adaptability of some urban birds – their voices are louder than their rural equivalents, they breed earlier and have higher stress levels. Haskell is a poet–scientist and his song is irresistible. The book is deep with observations and soaring in lyricism. Haskell uses his narrative and scientific skill (he’s a professor of biology and environmental studies, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist) to enthuse others and serve his love for the wild. Together with Haskell’s wider work, the book provides a guide for paying attention and finding emotional connection. This book, then, is an invitation to turn our ears – organs that are ‘always open’ – back to the living Earth, because, while theoretical knowledge of biological and climate decline is important, Haskell says, it’s sensory diversity that stimulates wonder and action. The book explores connected acoustic crises – our failure to hear and celebrate the sensory richness of our world the silencing that comes with habitat destruction the inequities of noise pollution in cities and the destructive sound of industry in the ocean (‘if there is an acoustic hell, it is in today’s oceans’). But this music is at crisis point, because the voices are fragile and human noise is drowning them out. Now, says author David George Haskell, ‘every place on the globe has an acoustic character made from the unique confluence of this multitude of voices.’ Sounds Wild and Broken pulsates with the wonder, joy and music of these wild voices – tectonic plates, rivers, forests, birds (on Haskell’s website you can hear sound recordings linked to places in the book). ![]() And then, life spoke its first words, and has been in conversation with itself ever since. ![]() Most of the Earth’s history has been sonically uncommunicative. Urban blackbirds have louder voices than their rural counterparts Elizabeth Wainwright reviews Geographical’s book of the month for May 2022 – Sounds Wild and Broken by David George Haskell
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