The sound of silence in the age of man

We are surrounded by sound. Whether inside or outside, at home or in a park, at work or at the beach, in the middle of the city or in the middle of a forest. We hear voices and background conversations, footsteps, cars, and other means of transportation, machines humming and purring, sirens blasting, phones ringing, birds singing, dogs barking, the wind blowing, the rain falling. Despite all this, this chapter will focus more on silence than on sound. It departs from the idea that, many times, we only hear what we want to hear. Many times, we have simply stopped listening: Either intentionally or because the sounds are no longer there. The beginning of the twenty-first century has been marked by a growing apprehension regarding humans and their changing role in the world. In this chapter, I intend to establish a link between the environmental crisis and the loss of important voices for the planet’s ecology. For this purpose, I will analyse the 2015 documentary Racing Extinction, and the recording of sounds from nature, as a means to discuss man’s impact on earth and the Anthropocene as a silencing process.