Do you feel a little on edge (especially in Summer?). Maybe it’s the NOISE. In our current World (location: North America year 2018) 2 out of 3 citizens live with near-constant sound well in excess of the maximums a person can experience and remain at all calm. No wonder there is so much “Road Rage” and other contemporary anger maladies.
Today I woke up today to: leaf blowers, a chainsaw, constant motorcycles, lawn mowers, screaming party people, hammers…you get the picture. The cacophony was well under way by 6:45 a.m. and it had only ended at midnight the night before. I live in a (formerly quiet) residential neighbourhood.
North America is well behind (most of) Western Europe. In North America many believe that we must tolerate “Extreme Noise” as a by-product of our technologies and expanding economy. Whereas in Western Europe there are a myriad of laws to protect the citizens from excessive racket…
It is worth it both for quality-of-life and (even) financially to adopt enforced anti-Noise by-laws in all but Industrial areas. In the early 1970s, the U.S. E.P.A. set a recommendation that no residential neighbourhoods exceed a noise exposure above 55 decibals every 24 hours (with sharp reductions at night to allow for sleep). What that equals is a quiet suburb with moderate traffic in the daytime. Certainly no freeway traffic or chainsaws which create a decibal range of 100 to 130+ decibals!
The last thorough mappings of how Noise Exposure looked across urban North America were done in the early 1980s: obviously things are far noisier now in 2018. We have loud devices and industrial equipment that were not even invented back in the early 1980s. Some of the results of the “noisy World” we have created include: hearing loss (and damage!), extreme physical and mental Stress levels, sleep disturbances, anger and heart disease, high blood pressure and anti-social behaviours! The cost of treating noise-induced heart troubles and heart attacks alone exceeds 6 billion dollars in North America.
If we enforced the many anti-Noise Laws that often DO exist on paper, we could fund by-law officers with the monies currently spent treating victims of noise through the medical system. That would be money much better spent.
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