jBrad's Stuff You Didn't Know: Silence, Please.

According to Gordon Hempton, the most recent addition to the Endangered Species List may be — silence.

Hempton is an Emmy Award winning nature sound recordist who has produced more than 60 albums of natural soundscapes.  He’s traveled Earth recording everything from the clattering shuffle of freight trains to nocturnal symphonies of chirrups and clicks in forests across the planet. And his experience has convinced him that noise pollution is inundating the world.

He now says there are "...only twelve places left in the U.S. where it’s possible to have fifteen minutes during daylight hours unintruded upon by noise pollution.”

The picture above shows you one of them: a small red-colored stone deep in Olympic National Park, a little more than 3 miles away from the Visitor’s Center on the the Hoh River, marking the quietest place in the United States. It's the centerpiece of his one square inch of silence project; check it out. Quietly.



h/t to Ben Bowlin | May 18, 2011 (Stuff to Change The World), from the “How Stuff Works” Website