As a writer you have a duty to be a messenger.

The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.

Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.

All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.

The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind's music, medicine and knowledge.

I'm not against entertainment: if someone wants to read nonsense-mongers, let them, but I resent the appearance of parity between two articles on an issue as serious as climate change when one article is actually gibberish masked in pseudoscience and the other is well informed and accurate.

Singing with others is an unmediated, shared experience as each person feels the same music reverberating in their individual bodies. Singing is part of our humanity; it is embodied empathy.