Beyond noise mitigation: managing soundscapes as common-pool resources

Abstract

Noise has been regulated as a negative externality of human industry and transportation networks that affect human health and quality of life. The United States enacted the Noise Control Act in 1972 to regulate noise impacts; however, the funding and enactment of this law ceased in 1981. Noise continues to grow and is impacting once quiet locations, such as U.S. National Parks. Following the government control approach to managing resources, the National Park Service (NPS) has supported and created many policies to protect park acoustic environments, or soundscapes. We conducted a survey of NPS managers to determine how noise impacts park soundscapes. The survey showed that a variety of human produced sounds have serious impacts on the quality of visitor experiences and potentially impacts wildlife communication. Using a common pool resource (CPR) model, we describe the multiple soundscape users, difficulty of exclusion and subtractability and degradation of soundscapes. Soundscapes offer a flow of benefits to many people: natural sounds, ecosystem function, cultural and historical heritage, silence or natural quiet, ability to communicate with one another, creating a sense of place, and wellbeing. Rather than viewing noise as only a negative externality to be regulated, we pose the normative argument that the right to a quality soundscape is a right belonging to all. The national parks hold in trust the resources, including soundscapes for this and future generations. We posit that a new institutional approach is needed to manage soundscapes where the norms of all soundscape users are recognized and respected.

Sonic environmental aesthetics and landscape research

“…For example, Benfield, Bell, Troup and Soderstrom (2010) used recordings of different anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic sounds to understand how they affect people's aesthetic ratings of static scenes from five US national parks, concluding that anthropogenic 'noise' , including air and ground traffic but also human voices, 'decreased participant ratings of serenity' , which chimes with the results of similar experiments (for example Kariel, 1990;Mace, Bell, & Loomis, 1999;Mace, Bell, Loomis, & Haas, 2003;Pilcher, Newman, & Manning, 2009;Tarrant, Haas, & Manfredo, 1995). Such results form the basis of prevailing discussions within applied landscape research over how to best manage unwanted sounds, particularly in national parks and wilderness areas (see for example Dumyahn & Pijanowski, 2011;Lynch, Joyce, & Fristrup, 2011;Mace, Bell, & Loomis, 2004;Miller, 2008;Pepper, Nascarella, & Kendall, 2003). Noise abatement policies are now common across all levels of governance, from supranational institutions to cities, and tools such as noise exposure maps are one prevalent means of gathering data on where anti-noise interventions should take place (Wissmann, 2014).…”

“…If we are to take the conservation of soundscapes seriously (Dumyahn & Pijanowski, 2011), then we need to be cautious of managing landscapes with human pleasure as the ultimate goal. Just as landscape theorists have challenged the notion that what brings visual aesthetic pleasure correlates with healthily functioning landscapes (Gobster, 1999), we must also ask whether sonic aesthetic pleasure-as currently conceived within the literature-aligns with landscape conservation and sustainability objectives.…”

The Soundscapes of Lakes across an Urbanization Gradient

“…In undeveloped or protected natural areas, where lack of access may preclude other forms of landscape alteration, noise pollution remains a primary environmental threat [4], [5]. As with many common-pool environmental resources, efforts to mange environmental noise pollution are challenged by the need to balance competing demands of multiple users, difficulty or cost in excluding particular users, and lack of clear management frameworks or standards [6].…”

“…A final consideration of our study is to advance the science of soundscape ecology and management by identifying acoustic metrics which have human and ecological relevance. These metrics would then be available to developers, urban planners, and communities for the purposes of self management of environmental noise or the setting of acoustic targets [6].…”

Urban Soundscapes: Characterization of a Pedestrian Tourist Route in Sorrento (Italy)

“…The auditory dimension is increasingly gaining attention in cultural heritage studies [10,11] thanks to the framework provided by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention on the Intangible Cultural Heritage [12], and the soundscape approach has also been considered in a number of studies connected to the tourism management of natural areas [13][14][15][16]. However, there are relatively few studies considering the soundscape within the urban realm, rather than in natural areas, from the tourists' perspective.…”