LEWIS' Monkeyflower (Mimulus lewisii)

To love the plants is to know them.

To know the plants is to make

them your friend.

To make the plants your friend is

to surround yourself

with teachers

Just as no one wanted to cloud the skies with the smoky haze of
accumulated car exhaust, or wanted streams to run muddy with plastic
bags and human waste, no one wanted the world to become a noisy
place. But noisy it is, all the same.

And, now that noise has become a part of practically every landscape—
even the most isolated and highest mountain ranges have jets roaring
above them—how shall we ever know what the deeper, more subtle
effects of noise on the human psyche really are? Or on Nature as a
whole? For the question has in a way become: where are the untouched
control groups to be found? And where are we to find even a single
researcher who has not been to some extent profoundly conditioned—
even while still in the womb—by a sea of surrounding noise?
My guess is that noise works on the mind something like a slowly
contracting air-tight room. As the noise levels increase, the walls of
the room close in and the pressure builds. Finally, one finds one’s face
pushed up against the wall, until one can no longer hear oneself talk,
or even think. An ur-scream of almost unbearable angst would almost
certainly be the result.

Remarkably, no one designed this environment, or intended this to
happen. It just did. Think of it. Noise, like other forms of pollution, is
entirely a by-product, a side-effect. And yet it has become a dominant
factor of much of urban and even rural life. What kind of philosophy
of design is that?

ON NOISE . . .

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