Out of the Woods Quotes

“While I applaud all efforts to incorporate authentic nature into cities, not acknowledging noise levels is a serious oversight. Our cities' collective racket is making all of us sick. Our hearts race and breathing speeds. We must talk louder, our voices hitting higher and higher pitches, our faces contorting, trying to communicate and claim our place in the landscape. Hearing lost is epidemic.”
― Julia Corbett, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday

“Our culture associates noise with power and progress. Former Interior Secretary James Watt (who sought to close the EPA’s Office of Noise Control in the 1980s) thought that the more noise we made as a country, the more powerful we appeared. Physically, "noise" is wasted power for it represents wasted sound (that delivers little useful information), and wasted energy (because electromechanical generation emits heat). But psychologically, we perceive noise as proportional to power and therefore enviable. The bigger and noisier the Harley, the better.”
― Julia Corbett, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday

“In the continental United States, 83 percent of the land area is now within two-thirds of a mile from a road. Even in large forested regions, two-thirds of the land is within a football-field-length of a road or a forest edge.”
― Julia Corbett, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday

“Aircraft, snowmobiles, and ATVs disturb a range of animals from harlequin ducks to mountain goats. Stress enzyme levels in both elk and wolves rose in direct proportion to the amount of snowmobile noise; enzyme levels returned to normal when snowmobiles were absent.”
― Julia Corbett, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday

“Cities need to be quieter! Cities need to be darker! City nature should not be a token, an afterthought, a human-dominated and chemical-laden monoculture that bears no resemblance to the wilder spaces around the city (if they still exist). Space for city nature is as vital a priority as space for a hospital, a school, a library. City nature needs thorough consideration of local ecosystems, native plants and animals, and climate; that is not the same as turning an arid vacant lot into a green sea of grass.”
― Julia Corbett, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday

“We often attribute today's short attention spans to electronics, both cell phones and screens, but a powerful underlying contributor to inattention is noise.”
― Julia Corbett, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday

“Noise does not respect boundaries. And the less control you have over sounds you do not want--barking dogs, loud music, the interstate--the more it affects you, and not just your mind, but your body.”
― Julia Corbett, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday

“Rural Americans greatly value animals (wild and domestic) for what they provide, and dislike them for what they take or harm.”
― Julia Corbett, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday