What is the environmental problem that causes the greatest distress to the largest number of individuals in Australia today? It is almost certainly not one of the "glamour" issues that the major environmental groups focus on, such as the greenhouse effect, genetically modified crops or the preservation of old growth forests.
These kinds of issues may generate some public concern and disquiet about the future, although they do not greatly affect the perceived quality of everyday living for most people. But noise pollution does, particularly in urban areas.
As the Courier-Mail reported last week, Queensland Environmental Protection Agency statistics show that complaints about noise are far greater than the combined total of complaints about air pollution, water pollution and waste disposal. In the last financial year alone, the EPA and local authorities received over 13,000 complaints about noise disturbances.
A national survey conducted in the mid-1980s showed that over 40 per cent of Australians feel that their well being suffers from exposure to unwanted sound, and a more recent study found that almost 1 in 10 people are subject to levels of noise that experts regard as "excessively high".
In the case of some supposed environmental threats, such as pesticide residues or electromagnetic radiation, there is considerable scientific debate about whether there are any serious detrimental effects on humans. But the harmful consequences of many kinds of commonly occurring noise are reasonably clear, particularly in regards to hearing loss and the damage to health from frequent disturbance to sleep.
Of course, there are state and local government laws designed to regulate noise. Last December the Beattie government introduced amendments to the Environmental Protection Act which were intended to strengthen existing legislation by placing limits on the times and intensity of various kinds of domestic and industrial noise.
Nevertheless, the actual benefits of some of these new laws can be questioned. Thus dogs are in breach if they bark for more than three minutes in any thirty minute period between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. Leaving aside the difficulty of proving that the limit has indeed been broken, the permissible barking period still provides more than enough opportunity for noisy hounds to keep neighbours awake throughout the night.
Yet apart from the special case of aircraft noise, noise pollution has not produced the kind of enthusiastic political constituency that has formed around so many other environmental causes. Although an Office of Noise Abatement and Control was established within the United States Environmental Protection Agency not long after the EPA was created in 1970, it was never a great success, and the Reagan administration was able to end its funding in 1982 without much protest.
In Australia, an indication of the general insignificance of noise as a social and political issue can be seen in the cursory treatment it receives in the current 500 page long State of the Environment Report -- only a few short paragraphs in a combined section that also deals with "waste heat". And judging by their literature, green groups such as the Australian Conservation Foundation seem more agitated about the effects of noise pollution on marine mammals than they are about its effects on humans.
But why is noise such an "unsexy" issue for environmentalists?
I think that one of the main reasons lies in its limited potential for mobilising hostility against the status quo. For the majority of individuals, the most vexing cause of disturbance is traffic or domestic noise. Yet with the exception of a few very sensitive souls, at least some of the noises that may be distressing in certain contexts can be positively welcomed at other times, such as on festive occasions.
And while barking dogs, swimming pool motors and throbbing music can be very upsetting, they are not the sort of issue that can be used as the starting point for a critique of capitalism or industrial society. Unlike less comprehensible phenomena such as nuclear radiation or genetic manipulation, such noises cannot easily be portrayed as an insidious threat unleashed by powerful corporations more concerned with profits than public welfare. Nor can they be depicted as presenting a likely hazard to future generations.
Furthermore, it is by no means obvious that life was much quieter in earlier times, when farm animals were kept in towns, horse-driven carts rumbled across cobblestones, and church bells sounded at regular intervals throughout the night to keep the time.
So until environmental groups can work out a way of harnessing public concerns about noise to an agenda for radical social change, those of us who seek a quieter world are going to have to battle away on our own.
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