NEW [S]

«Shipping noise has increased dramatically: the din produced by large ships has been doubling decade since the 1960s, resulting in a more than 32-fold rise.»

«[…] the construction of oil and gas platforms, the roar of drilling, and the deafening thunder of seismic surveys.[…] The guns fire every few seconds around the clock for weeks and months at a time, filling the environment around them with a constant barrage of noise so loud it can be heard up to 4000 kilometres away.[…]»

«Because sound travels faster through warmer and more acidic water, global heating is even changing the acoustic quality of the water itself.[...] climate change is 'altering the acoustic fabric of the planet, detuning natural sounds' and breaking the Earth's beat.'»

«This brief window of quiet, part of a larger cessation of human activity that some have dubbed the anthropause, provided a glimpse of what an ocean unburdened by human sound might be like for its inhabitants. But it also offered a powerful reminder that the world is full of other presences, and other beings, and of what might be gained by caring enough to listen to them. For as the work of Shane Gero and others reminds us, listening is not a passive state, instead is a matter of showing concern, an attitude of care.

Similarly, as Amitav Ghosh has observed, it is not coincidental that so much of the Western intellectual tradition is about silencing and rendering mute. The project of ocean-borne imperial expansion and colonial violence out of which it grows is, at its core, a process of denying the worth of other ways of being in the world.»