Was it John Muir, dedicated environmentalist and founder of
the Sierra Club, who said, “Passion doesn’t carry a watch”? I dunno.
But from wherever it came, this would-be adage crept into view every
page or so while reading Gordon Hempton’s new Muir-indebted book,
One Square Inch of Silence.

Hempton has spent much of the last 30 years cultivating a taste for
natural quiet. As an Emmy-winning sound recordist and acoustic
ecologist, he’s even carved out a distinguished career from this
love-that-dare-not-speak-any-names. One Square Inch began
as an attempt to mark one of the quietest spots on Earth, a patch of
land tucked deep inside Washington’s Olympic National Park. The book
documents his attempt to preserve the park’s quiet, which means writing
nasty letters to airlines and journalists who pen articles praising
commercial flight. (“It is a sign of America’s good fortune that it has
worries on this scale,” writes long-time Atlantic Monthly Editor
James Fallows in response to Hempton’s sniping.)

While Hempton’s prose is often Muirsian—vacillating between
crisp descriptions of quietude and plainly recorded takes on life on
the road—his attitude toward our noisy world is borrowed from
another environmentalist guru, R. Murray Schafer, the father of
acoustic ecology and author of the extraordinary, though maddening,
1977 book The Tuning of the World. Unfortunately, Hempton’s
views are every bit as overblown as Schafer’s. While there are plenty
of numbers that prove our world is louder today than ever, acoustic
ecology has yet to explain how noise pollution is an environmental
threat on par with, say, global warming. So the fascinating side of
acoustic ecology—the study of “soundscapes,” a term Schafer
coined back in the ’70s—remains crowded out by its practitioners’
self-importance.

This problem is built into One Square Inch‘s very design.
Hempton’s insistence in politicizing what is, at heart, a matter of
taste works against his intentions—it emphasizes rather than
buttresses the quaintness of his passion. With One Square Inch,
we have a paradox: a book as dull as its subject is interesting.