You don't really need to engage your visual sense, because the natural wiring of the human psyche is to monitor the environment through sound, not through sight. But we're convinced through modern conditions that we have to look at everything, and that creates stress in our life, because we're trying to solve problems in ways that are much more time consuming, not efficient, and not fun.
Gordon Hempton"Acoustic ecologist" is basically a fancy name for someone who tries to become a better listener. Not just listening to those thoughts, ideas, and productions of human intention, but listening to places - whether it's an urban environment, residential, industrial, or even the farthest corner of the world, in one of our last great quiet places where we can listen to the pure sounds of nature without any human-caused noise intrusions.
Gordon HemptonWhen we listen, it's not linear, it's 360, and it's in a time-space continuum, so you don't have to create a list of priorities, because it's all important. You can deal with everything at any given time. Not only that, but it happens very simply, without effort.
Gordon HemptonHealthy areas that are richest in information are those areas in the wild where we can get all the information that's available to us within our human hearing range. The most valuable information throughout human evolution has been faint sounds. We tend to think in our modern world that if it's loud, if it grabs our attention, it's important. We get a lot of that in advertising. But in nature, it's the faintest sound that's important; it has determined, in the past of our ancestors, perhaps, if they will live or die. Faint sounds are the earliest clues of newly arriving information.
Gordon HemptonI used to hate the urban environment and the urban din. But I realize now that it's really not that much different than living next to a waterfall for wildlife. Most wildlife - unless they're specifically adapted - avoid being around a waterfall or whitewater streams and rivers because it jams their sense of surveillance. They are more vulnerable, and their message loses intelligibility. Now, the ouzel is able to overcome that in various ways. Back to the urban environment, we're talking and delivering messages as if we weren't next to a waterfall, and that's a problem.
Gordon HemptonWe're all born listeners. And as a result of our modern lives, and living in a world that has less meaning than the natural world that we evolved to hear, we learn to think of listening not as taking in all the information with equal value, which is the definition of true listening. In our modern world, we tend to think of listening as focusing our attention on what is important and filtering out everything else.
Gordon Hempton