This Week in the Mercury
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Books / Green The Quiet Monitor
Posted by Kamala Puligandla on Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 1:49 PM
Tonight at 7:30, Gordon Hempton will be at Powell’s to read and talk about One Square Inch of Silence, the book he co-wrote with John Gordon. The book came out in March of this year and chronicles Hempton’s adventures across the country to “capture the sounds of American landscapes” in the name of ecological sound preservation.
As humans continue to create large and small machines to do more things faster, the world has become a wonderland of whizzes and hums and buzzes and screeches and explosions. This is the idea behind Gordon Hempton’s One Square Inch of Silence project: that natural sounds, like birds and melting ice, are an integral part of nature and that by preserving these natural soundscapes, as he dubs them, we can protect nature from other types of pollution, like, perhaps, the empty beer cans of underage, teenaged campers. Whether or not you believe his theory, the man does create some beautiful "sound portraits" and his burning passion for nature is infectious.
Read last week's review of the book here.
Check out a clip of Hempton in the field, from Sound Tracker, a documentary about his work.
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