In Pursuit of Silence Page #4

that both silence,

and an intact soundscape,

protects that

sort of exploration.

(AIRPLANE APPROACHING)

(BIRD CAWING)

JULIE ZICKEFOOSE:

I guess I got hooked on birds

when I was about eight.

I heard the sound of a bird

bathing in a woods pool

behind my house in Virginia,

and I did sort of a jungle crawl

under all this catbrier

and I came out onto

this little blue-winged Warbler

bathing in a forest pool,

and it was the most

beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

I really like

being in quiet places

because I use my ears

for everything.

Primitive man,

if you didn't pay attention

to every little thing

around you,

you were going to be

in trouble really fast,

or you weren't going to

find anything to eat.

And I think, for me,

it's a question of

keeping in touch

with those primal instincts

and just always being ready

for whatever comes your way.

I call what I do

the art of disappearing.

It's a situational awareness,

it's a richness of being,

it's a tapping into

this great show

that's going on

all around you.

(BIRDS CHIRPING)

(DISTANT CAWING)

There's that herring.

These very quiet environments

offer tremendous

opportunities for listening,

but they're also the most

fragile resources we have.

Certainly, the physical beings

we are,

we're built to function

in these places

and to hear

those distant sounds.

If we really lose touch

with our senses,

with our capacity

for deep listening,

I think we'll lose

a large piece of who we are,

certainly of the animals

we once were.

It's just like our muscles,

and if it happens over time,

across generations,

it may not be easily reversed.

To lose our connection with

the world through our senses,

I think would be

a terrible loss,

and everyone knows this.

I mean, the prospect

of being blinded or deafened

I think would be

terrifying to most people.

But in fact,

it may be happening

in a much more

subtle way already.

(VOICES TALKING ON SCREEN)

(MAN SPEAKING JAPANESE)

We humans lived in nature

for seven million years.

(SPEAKING JAPANESE ON SPEAKER)

(SPEAKING JAPANESE)

Following the

industrial revolution

modernization began

which led to urbanization.

Big cities like

Shibuya started to appear,

and at the same time, started to

create overwhelming noise.

Evolution even causes

our genes to change.

But this change doesn't occur

in just hundreds of years.

It's believed to take 10,000 to

30,000 years for this to happen.

In other words,

we're still carrying the genes

which allow us

to adapt to nature

while we are living in

this artificial modern world.

I believe

that humans originally,

from a genetic point of view

prefer silence.

We prefer this,

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