Listening Technologies Now Circumvent The Human Senses

A primary forest in a sea of secondary forests likely has a more thriving ecological community than one hemmed in by plantations. Logging provides livelihood for local communities, work and income rooted in the regenerative power of soil and trees. Oil palm plantations and mines also provide income, but they do so at a greater cost to the fertility and diversity of the land. We are not creatures disembodied from needs for food, energy, and shelter. Wood can be renewable. Fossil fuels, steel, plastic, and concrete generally are not. To lock up many forests in protected areas free of human use, then, is to exile ourselves from the community of life, forcing us deeper into unsustainable relationship with synthetic materials or forest products shipped in from elsewhere, imposing the costs of our consumption on people and forests out of range of our senses. The question should not be whether we cut trees, but where and how we should do so. We certainly need extensive areas set aside, free from the saw. But a thriving future also requires that we participate in the forest community as all other animal species do, as consumers. This is a matter of ecological and economic realism. Our lifeblood is drawn from the Earth.

Shades Of Grey

In the future, sound recordings might also serve to strengthen monitoring by governments, local communities, companies, and organizations that try to monitor and certify the ecological soundness of wood and other products. Soundscape recordings could, through the intermediaries of technology and statistics, elevate the voice of the living Earth community. The thunderous diversity of rain forest sound would then meet silent piles of human paperwork. Out of this incongruous union, a more vibrant future for all might grow. Donors, policy makers, and grant makers hear the unearthed sound and are moved to act. The wood in our houses, paper, and furniture are often rooted in Southeast Asia. The palm oil in cosmetics, processed food, biodiesel, and farm animal feed is grown on former rain forest land. But we have broken all direct sensory connection to these forests that sustain us. Sound can bring us partway back to embodied sensory understanding. We might then make wiser choices about how and whether to use the products of forests far over the horizon rather than the materials and energies close at hand. Eddie leans forward. People really get that sound is linked to biodiversity.

Something So Right

I’ve had more substantive conversations about forest monitoring with this sound data than with anything else. They experience the forest. The thing that blows their minds is how noisy it is, constantly. He pauses, eyes flicking upward as he searches for words. Almost all tropical regions are home to people whose ancestors have lived within the forest for centuries or millennia. Many of these cultures are now besieged. Forest conservation is therefore a matter of human rights. In the Western tradition, forests are often seen as places of darkness, home to brigands and exiles. Wolves of all kinds. The edges of civilization. The forest is umbral, full of confusion. Dante lost the right road in a dark and savage forest.

Remain Solid

Children become disoriented in the forests of the Brothers Grimm. Ever since the Neolithic agricultural revolution, we have cleared trees to make way for pasture, crops, and towns. Even when Western cultures desire to manage land for wood or forest conservation, they usually do so as enterprises that exclude people from the land. In the United States, for example, national forests and national parks were established by expelling from within their boundaries every single human inhabitant, save for those who retained private inholdings or employees in park compound housing. Governments declare forests terra nullius, empty land, opening a frontier to colonization of land that is home to people whose cultures have lived there for centuries or millennia. Indigenous leader Célia Xakriabá of Brazil says, I can hear the song of the birds now, but it’s also a song of misery, of sadness, because most of them, they are alone. They have lost their partners. The nonprofit organization Global Witness recorded 212 murdered defenders of the land in 2019, violence disproportionately directed at indigenous peoples, an underestimate because many deaths happen out of the media’s gaze. Conflicts over tropical forest lands in Colombia, the Philippines, and Brazil topped the list. If we don’t stand before the world and say, ‘This is happening,’ we will be exterminated, said Ermes Pete, an indigenous leader from Colombia, during a protest against rising violence and the murders in 2020 of more than 200 civic leaders. Not only are the voices of indigenous peoples in tropical forests often not being heard, they are, in many places, being actively suppressed. To speak and to listen, then, are acts of resistance that can inform action. But not all forms of listening are equally open to the voices of the oppressed. Our modes of listening must remedy injustices and not reinforce them. The soils and biodiversity of these forests are, in part, a product of thousands of years of care by indigenous peoples. Because many listening technologies now circumvent the need for the human senses, they carry with them the danger that such lived human experience in the forest will become irrelevant within the processes of science and policy making. Technologies and the methods of science do not necessarily lead to injustice, but they distance us from subjective, embodied knowledge, sliding without friction into the oppressors’ dehumanizing tool kits. It does not have to be so. The indigenous communities in Kalimantan appealing for help from the United Nations decried the recent removal of environmental and social impact assessments as prerequisites for business permits. These changes to the law will allow timber and oil palm corporations to further displace indigenous communities from their lands and despoil the forest. Environmental and social impact assessments need, in many cases, the methods and insights of science. Eddie Game’s plan to get sound recorders to local communities in Papua New Guinea, for example, now funded through a partnership with the United States Agency for International Development, aims not to usurp control but to give local people access to information they can use as they see fit to manage their land.