Paper short abstract:

The history of conservation is frequently presented as primarily a visual one. In this paper I will go beyond this narrative and explore the role played by an attention to the sounds of nature in early calls for the need to preserve the environment in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria.

Paper long abstract:

The visual aesthetics of landscapes – as well as of certain animal and plant species – lie at the heart of the process by which modern nature conservation came to be since the mid-nineteenth century. The appreciation of natural environments has, however, truly always been a multisensorial experience. As early as 1880 the composer and early conservationist Ernst Rudorff put, for instance, the preservation of nature's sounds at the core of his agenda and included man-made noise in his critique of the transformative power of modernity.

To what extent did this multisensorial sensibility, however, translate into an actual desire to preserve certain regions from the intensifying impact of human activities? In this paper I will answer this question by looking specifically at the role of natural sounds and their preservation in eliciting the push towards the protection of certain areas of Germany and Austria in the face of rampant industrialization and growing urbanization.

In particular, I am going to look at mentions of the sounds of nature and their potential disruption in print and archival sources discussing regions that, at some point during the twentieth century, were formally made into protection areas (e.g. the Lüneburg Heath or the Bavarian Forest in Germany and the Hohe Tauern mountain range in Austria). On the basis of this material I will analyse the role played by the appreciation of certain specific "soundscapes" in the decision-making processes by which these areas ended up being designated as nature reserves.