When 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.

I'm in love with Earth. I truly am. And so listening is not work, to work toward a better future. It's joy. To not be able to work toward a better future would be work. That would be tough.

Not only does the modern person often think that sight is more important than sound - there's no objective evidence to indicate that. Many people, even audiologists who study the science of human speech and hearing, have assumed for a long time that the human ear evolved to hear the human voice, rather than the voice changing to fit the human ear. And the human ear is actually not a perfect match if we map its sensitivity to the different frequencies in the human range of hearing; it's an unequal curve, it's kind of a wavy line.

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.

You can listen to a birdsong, and from the content of the birdsong, you will be able to determine whether or not the bird grew up in a noise-polluted environment or whether it grew up in a pristine, clean environment. Isn't that incredible?

How are we going to know what sounds are important before we've even heard those sounds? It's an absurd question. The only thing we can say is that we're going to base it on our past experience. In other words, modern listening doesn't inform us of anything new. It simply keeps us in the past.

The Hoh Valley is an incredibly secure area. Any event occurs around us, we will instantly become informed of that event. This can even happen at a distance. When the body recognizes that you have a very large listening area, and you're getting all the information, the body relaxes. You can breathe more gently, the cortisol levels that are created by stress in our bloodstream dissipate, and we actually become healthier. And as a result, if we are actually fortunate enough to live in a place like that, we will live longer.