The Sound of a Silent Planet

 The Sound of a Silent Planet

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Isn’t this a decidedly anthropocentric statement? Wouldn’t the crash of the tree be heard by the deer, the squirrel, the bird? The sound of the falling tree, the indigenous people would say, would be heard by every being - the plants, the animals, the Earth itself. Humans are just one of the potential hearers. Who hears the death cries of the hummingbirds, the bees, other creatures, being devastated by man’s poisons?  Man must attune to their death knell, for again, what the indigenous people, the ones most in touch with nature, tell us is that what man does to nature, he does to himself. If we destroy a species, for example, by the use of herbicides to produce a perfect lawn - really a monoculture bereft of nutrient for bees - we destroy part of ourselves. It may be easy for man to hear the crash of a tree falling, but man must pay attention to other voices as well. The death knell of the bee or the hummingbird foretell the last gasp of our own species. In the 1960’s Art Garfunkel wrote “The Sound of Silence” as a statement of the modern world’s inability to hear - really hear - another human, and therefore not love. The indigenous people expand his view to include man’s inability thus far to hear nature’s warnings. Will the sound of silence mean a dead planet? We must hear nature - really hear - and correct our destructive ways.