Paper short abstract:

This talk reflects upon the normative understandings of sound as pollution and silence as purity in the context of wilderness spaces - in particular in the European High North. It analyses the shifting relationships between nature, culture and sound in the context of planetary environmental change.

Paper long abstract:

Noise pollution, or environmental noise, is often framed as an over-abundance of outdoor acoustic overexposure caused primarily by machines, transport and transportation systems, and is commonly thought to have a harmful impact on human or animal life. For example, noise pollution has been shown to have a detrimental effect on wild animals, by e.g. changing the balance in predator or prey detection/avoidance, or interfering in communication, reproduction or navigation. The binary relationship between sound/industry and silence/nature is reproduced extensively in common understandings of wilderness. In this talk, I analyse the experience of running a collaborative research project in Abisko, Sweden that blends bio-acoustic tools with participatory mapping in order to comprehensively capture stakeholders' perceptions of, knowledge about and attitudes towards dynamic Arctic environments. I demonstrate the ways in which sonic pollution is understood and narrativised so as to both contest and reproduce dominant normative understandings of human relationships to the wild and the roles that wild spaces play in contemporary human social and cultural experience.