The New Second-Hand Smoke?

Lately, the New York Times has been devoting substantial column inches, and elaborate photo and video, to noise. Early this summer there was the colorful story of the “Belltown Hellcat,” a supercharged car disrupting Seattle residents’ sleep (and a follow-up article announcing that its 20-year-old driver has since been fined $83,000 by the city). This harkened back to a splashy interactive feature from last year that announced, “Noise Could Take Years Off Your Life,” lest you think this topic not concern you. Noise, that article went on to detail, “can lead to inflammation, hypertension and plaque buildup in arteries, increasing the risk of heart disease, heart attacks and stroke.” And, strangely for a newspaper feature, it included a list of twenty-six experts consulted – with individual hotlinks to their institutional website bios. In case we care to do bibliographic research over our morning coffee?

Now this past weekend there was another heavily illustrated and produced article, this time about noise in Providence, Rhode Island and the activists there combating it. Their slogan is, “Noise is the New Smoking.” (Derived, it should be noted, from an earlier campaign by Elkhart, Indiana activist Bradley Vite, who has called noise “the new second-hand smoke.”)

I’m not averse to attention for the issue – indeed, I am among the Times readership clicking through the twenty-six experts’ hotlinks they provided. However, this run of splashy pieces all point to the same justification for a public concern with noise: human health. And I’m left wondering if that’s the best we can do.

It's the same with governmental attention to noise pollution. Whenever noise is raised as a public issue, the justification is nearly always health – sometimes of animals, in particular sea mammals, but mostly human health. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) included a special section on noise pollution in their 2022 report and framed its urgency this way:

“Today, noise pollution is a major environmental problem, cited as a top environmental risk to health across all age and social groups and an addition to the public health burden. Prolonged exposure to high levels of noise impairs human health and well-being, which is a growing concern for both the public and policymakers.”

This “environmental risk to health” is interpreted almost exclusively as human exposure to loud noise, either sudden or sustained. And its specific health risks are detailed, in turn, by a World Health Organization (WHO) study undertaken in Europe in order to “develop guidelines and provide recommendations for protecting human health from exposure to environmental noise.”

“The health outcomes include annoyance; cardiovascular and metabolic effects; cognitive impairment; effects on sleep; hearing impairment and tinnitus; adverse birth outcomes; and quality of life, mental health and well-being. The noise sources considered in these reviews include road traffic, railways, aircraft, wind turbines, and leisure activities such as attending sporting or concert events, listening to music through personal devices, and other recreational pastimes.”

A list of environmental problems that starts with “annoyance” doesn’t seem particularly urgent, given the current state of our planet. And while the WHO does document actual threats to human life due to noise, the statistic they present as an alarm is an estimated 12,000 annual premature deaths in Europe due to stresses like loss of sleep, and the risk of exacerbating comorbidities such as high blood pressure. To put this number in perspective, scientists led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health calculated that over 61,000 died in Europe from the excessive heat of 2022. UNICEF and the WHO estimated 43,000 deaths due to drought that year in Somalia alone. Floods, crop failures and desertification are currently threatening millions upon millions of lives around the globe due to climate emergencies. Annoyance from excess noise levels, even if it does lead to stresses on the heart and circulatory system, doesn’t really rank.

Which is not to say that noise pollution isn’t a serious problem. But justifying our attention to it by appealing to stress is likely the reason there are hardly any entries for “noise” in indices to the current large crop of books devoted to the climate emergency. While the earth is burning, complaints about noise can seem rather minor, even a bit NIMBY (“not in my backyard”).

Enter the New York Times, whom many see as world-class champions of NIMBY concerns - alongside an oft-related agenda of real estate development and gentrification.

Still, noise pollution is pollution. It is very clearly an environmental issue, and like so many other environmental problems, it has in recent decades hit the red on every possible metric chart. The challenge – and I’ll take this on myself, but I want to put the call out to others as well – is how to discuss noise pollution as a societal and global problem without resorting, as the Times has done, to that ultimate NIMBY concern: personal well-being.

Stay tuned - at a reasonable volume, and not for too long of a sustained period without a break.

Listening to: Night Reign, by Arooj Aftab

Cooking: with Italian mint brought to America by Joe DeGeorge’s great-great-grandmother