04 Sep 2025 5 min read

Stone Cold Silent

Living in a time of acoustic fossils

The song of a western meadowlark is so beautiful it can tear your heart open. Photo by David Lukas

Have you ever felt like the natural world is quieter than you remember it being? You're not going crazy; you might be noticing a global phenomenon with profound implications for all of us.

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Reflecting on today's newsletter, the poet Kim Stafford adds this thoughtful insight, "What strikes me is how an acoustic desert promotes an imagination desert in the mind. A thought desert, a dearth of relationship in all directions."

When I moved to the North Cascades five years ago, the first thing that caught my attention was an eerie silence everywhere I walked. I now spend my days hiking in nearly three million acres of wilderness, one of the biggest and most pristine places in the United States, but there are countless days when I feel lucky if I see (or hear) a single squirrel or bird.

red squirrel — Red squirrels are the most common animal in the North Cascades, yet I rarely see or hear more than one or two a day, if at all. Photo by David Lukas

This hasn't felt right to me because I imagine that a vast, healthy ecosystem should be brimming over with the sounds and activity of countless animals. Since I was new to this landscape, I started thinking this might be normal for the North Cascades, so when I decided to spend a month in the Sierra Nevada this summer, one of my goals was to compare how many animals and sounds I would find in a landscape that I know very, very well.

Have you ever felt deeply connected to the sounds of a favorite place? Did you grow up enchanted by singing birds in the morning and calling crickets at night? Do you remember sounds like the rustle of animals in the bushes, the thin squeaking of bats in the dark, or the sudden yapping of coyotes in a distant field?

To my dismay, I was shocked to discover that Sierra Nevada forests and meadows weren't bursting with the sounds that I remembered from 15-20 years ago. The Sierra Nevada felt as silent as the North Cascades, and it left me terribly confused.

You can feel how healthy an ecosystem is by how many flying insects you see. Photo by David Lukas

Then I read a news story about the collapse of insect populations, and I think I found the answer. It's now believed that insect numbers are declining at least 2% each year. This doesn't seem like much, but even if the number was 1% it means that we would lose one-third of the world's insects in 40 years, and scientists believe that the reality is far, far worse.

graph of insect decline — Data from a study documenting declines of 75% in insect populations over a 27-year period. Image from Hallman et. al.

This seems like a trivial factoid until you realize that most living things are insects, so it's equivalent to losing one-third of the tree of life within decades. And when you lose insects, you lose the animals that depend on them. For example, the number of birds in North America has declined 30% since 1970, and the loss of insects is thought to be the leading cause.

When we lose buzzing insects, singing birds, and chattering squirrels the silent landscapes left behind are called acoustic fossils and this is happening all over the world. For example, nature recordist Bernie Krause estimates that over 70% of the soundscapes he's recorded on seven continents over the past 55 years have been lost. And a 2021 study that looked at 200,000 sites across North America and Europe found catastrophic declines in nature sounds across the board.

In this short YouTube interview, Bernie talks about a Sierra Nevada meadow that I know very well and how the soundscape changed after selective logging. (You can skip to 0:50 where he plays the recordings).

It turns out that humans are keenly tuned to the sounds of the natural world and that these soundscapes profoundly impact our emotional makeup, as well as cognitive abilities like attention spans, memory, problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity. So, what does it mean if we start losing these soundscapes?

spotted towhee — We need the sounds of nature in our lives. Photo by David Lukas

Few people realize that human hearts and souls depend on natural soundscapes in ways that we're just beginning to understand. If our ears are sounding the alarm, maybe it's time we started listening.

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Since I first learned about this topic in June, I've spent the summer listening closely everywhere I've hiked. You'll be happy to hear that it's not all doom and gloom because there are still times when the air is full of singing birds and the energy of life. I am thankful for these small moments and thankful that I'm now paying attention.

Most of us have forgotten what the natural world sounds like in its full sonic splendor.

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