News & Advice

Why Quiet Is So Important in Travel

Silence has become the ultimate luxury.
Grasslands National Park Canada
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Last summer I spent a week in the Faroe Islands, a remote Danish archipelago wedged between Iceland and Norway. Some towns have as little as 14 year-round inhabitants, and mass tourism still hasn’t arrived there. At the end of a day hike, sitting on the edge of a high, craggy cliff with my partner, I watched violent, steel-blue waves strike an emerald shoreline. I marveled at how we had this moment all to ourselves—then I heard it. The grating, mosquito-like hum of a drone.

The world is getting louder, and it’s increasingly harder to escape the noise, even in nature. The cacophony of cars on highways and the sonic boom of air traffic has been joined by drones and ever-multiplying personal devices to create a perpetual blanket of disruptive man-made noise. Silent spas, hushed cafés, and quiet beaches have offered an antidote, but they often come with a steep price tag, making silence the ultimate luxury.

The Faroe Islands are relatively quiet—until a drone comes into range.

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Mounting concerns about noise pollution, including its detrimental impact on human health and wildlife, are now being discussed on par with air and light pollution. “There are very few quiet places left,” says acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton. “The sound of a jet can travel 20 miles in every direction—that’s an area of a thousand square miles—and more than 80 percent of the United States’ land surface is within a half mile of a road.”

To highlight the urgency of noise pollution and protect the world’s remaining quiet places, Hempton founded Quiet Parks International. The non-profit is committed to the preservation of silence (or at least, the absence of human-caused sound) and aims to establish a network of quiet wilderness and urban parks around the world, as well as quiet hotels. With its set of testing methods and standards, QPI designates certain places around the world as quiet reserves. To qualify as a wilderness quiet park, the area has to have a noise-free interval (the time between man-made noise events) of 15 minutes or longer. The Zabalo River, deep within the lush Amazon jungle in Ecuador, has a healthy balance of bioacoustics activity and an average noise-free interval of several hours. QPI declared it the world’s first designated quiet park in 2019. Their alliance with the Zabalo River’s indigenous Cofan Nation helps them defend their lands as well, by creating ecotourism revenue in the area for people who wish to responsibly experience true quiet.

The impact of noise

The World Health Organization’s latest Environmental Noise Guidelines for Europe analyzed the impact of noise pollution—including the sound of road traffic, aircraft, wind turbines, and leisure noise—on human health and found that long-term exposure increases the risk for cardiovascular disease, tinnitus, and cognitive impairment, and decreases life expectancy. “Research shows that spending time in quiet spaces is good for your cognitive ability and your mood, and it decreases your blood pressure and heart rate,” says Rachel Buxton, a biologist and researcher at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Hempton has dedicated his life to studying, recording, and protecting silence and natural sounds in ecosystems across the globe. In some of the quietest places in North America, noise levels get down to 20-24 decibels (a jet engine produces 150 decibels at takeoff, for comparison). These places include the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington’s Olympic National Park, where the staccato of rain falls onto the arms of giant spruce trees, the yawning moonscape of Haleakala National Park in Hawaii, or Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan, Canada, where sound is limited to the whisper of the wind as it carves through golden prairies. But even in some of these spaces, Hempton has seen noise levels increase dramatically over the past decade. “The Hoh Rainforest was the quietest, least noise-polluted place in the entire lower 48 states, but in the last 10 years air traffic has grown by 30 percent,” says Hempton.

Hawaii's Haleakala National Park is among the quietest places in North America.

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Man-made noise has also had a negative impact on wildlife. Hearing natural sounds in the environment can mean life or death for many species. At the very least, if human-caused noise impedes their necessary survival tactics, they will desert their habitat, resulting in biodiversity loss. A study by Boise State University simulated the sound of traffic noise in a wilderness ecosystem and found a significant decline in the area’s bird species, despite an abundance of food, shelter, and other necessities. “Even sounds from people's voices can influence animal behavior,” says Buxton.

Organizations like the Natural Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division and Parks Canada are taking steps to reduce noise in national parks. These measures include limiting drone usage, monitoring mechanical sounds, introducing quieter technologies for park maintenance, and restricting motor traffic and aircraft flying routes. “Quiet is always a priority,” says Laura Colson, a representative from Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada. “We regulate quiet spaces, set quiet times in campgrounds, and limit generator use.”

How travelers can help

Travelers can also play a role in preserving silence when visiting a quiet place, whether it’s a national park close to home or one of QPI’s upcoming urban quiet parks in Taiwan or Sweden. “Something as simple as appreciating wild areas quietly can have some pretty serious reduction in your own sound output,” says Buxton. A study conducted at Muir Woods National Monument in California showed a substantial drop in sound levels when visitors heeded “quiet zone” signs in the park’s Cathedral Grove. Reducing our contribution to traffic noise in national parks also helps, such as taking a shuttle instead of your own car.

Some national parks, like Canada's Jasper National Park, take special precautions to limit man-made noise.

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Silence can also have a profound effect on us as human beings. Many of us seek out the outdoors because it’s one of the few places that gets quiet enough to reconnect with ourselves on a deeper level. “There’s a reason that the common denominator between all spiritual and religious practices is silence,” says Hempton.

It’s rare to come across silence these days, which might be why we overlook the need to protect it. But listen to even a minute of Hempton’s natural soundscape recordings—such as Global Sunrise, which documents a never-ending wave of birdsong at dawn around the world—and you’ll hear the earth’s music in it. It’s the sound of the harmony between all living things, something that should move us to action. “I'm not preserving the natural soundscape with my recordings,” says Hempton. “I'm simply inviting you to help save it.”