vox--2020-03-25--Deep in the forests of Ecuador, carving out a sanctuary for silence

Part of Issue # 12 of The Highlight , our home for ambitious stories that explain our world .
ZABALO RIVER , Ecuador — By 5:30 am , Gordon Hempton had his high-end recording equipment unpacked and had donned a headlamp that glowed red , like Rudolph ’ s nose .
The buzzes and peeps of Amazonian fauna were still muted , and the first rays of light were finding their way through the 100-foot-tall canopies of the kapok trees and chambira and pambil palms .
After pulling on tall rubber boots and applying the day ’ s first layer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ followed Hempton from their tents and tarps down a muddy path to the mouth of a tributary of the Zabalo River , an inky-black channel roughly the width of a basketball court that cuts some 30 miles eastward across northeast Ecuador .
Though daylight had hardly made a mark , they ’ d missed the beginning of the Dawn Chorus — the symphony of birdsong that takes advantage of the early morning ’ s optimal conditions for sound travel .
Here , in this obscure pocket of Ecuador ’ s northeastern corner , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ faint listening skills , ” expanding their aural horizons to take in more of the soundscape .
Everyone stood still , paying as much attention as possible to the acoustic information pinging their ears .
After hitting the record button on his equipment and listening for a bit , Hempton handed around the headphones .
Almost everything one can hear through them , he assured the campers , is audible to the naked ear if those skills are sufficiently honed .
A snatch of amplified rainforest evokes a chaotic , colorful , two-dimensional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s sense of space .
The howler monkeys suddenly roar like revving motorcycles ; insects buzz like TV static ; the Zabalo babbles as if the ear is just above its surface ; and birdsong cackles , shimmers tambourine-like , and pops like a toddler imitating a machine gun — pyoo-pyoo-pyoo !
After a little while , the patterns and frequencies of the birdcalls give the impression of species waking up in waves and testing their vocal cords .
The closest humans — in the Cofán village of Zabalo — are a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ soundscape , according to Hempton , a prominent Washington state acoustic ecologist and sound recordist , is quiet .
Not the absence of sound , but a soundscape unadulterated by human ruckus .
The million acres of land that has belonged to the roughly 1,200 indigenous Cofán for centuries were certified last Earth Day by Quiet Parks International as the world ’ s first Wilderness Quiet Park — a place measurably free from human noise .
The organization , a nonprofit recently co-founded by 66-year-old Hempton , hopes not only to preserve the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ visitors with an aural experience that will help them realize the need to save quiet .
Noise is nearly everywhere , driven by the conveniences and economics of the modern world .
Unwanted noise is linked to myriad health problems , while nature has been found to reduce stress and hasten recovery .
Hempton believes our mental , even spiritual , well-being is being suffocated by our own din .
Listening on the banks of a tiny tributary of an unremarkable river in the biodiversity capital of the world , the visitors were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their noisy everyday lives .
When it ’ s just them and the forest , Hempton believes , they will truly get to know themselves .
Quiet , he says , is “ the think tank of the soul and the birthplace of creativity.
” Urban areas , with their church bells and construction and ever-barking dogs , have always been noisy places to live .
But 100 years ago , vast swaths of the United States featured only the sounds of chirping birds , thundering waterfalls , croaking frogs , or wind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the proliferation of noise into almost every nook and cranny of the country was the internal combustion engine .
Unlike a laborer swinging a hammer , engines don ’ t tire and stop , and as they became integral to daily life , an ever-thickening web of roads crisscrossed the country , bringing with them the rumbling and revving of cars , trucks , and motorcycles .
And where noise from roads couldn ’ t reach , noise from flight routes could .
In between it all is the earth-rumbling machinery of fossil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ background sound levels in nearly two-thirds of protected areas in the US and caused at least a tenfold increase in more than a fifth of them .
Noise is also a social justice issue : The loudest , most unwanted sounds — like those of industrial areas , highway overpasses , airports , and trains — ring out in the lowest-income neighborhoods , often populated by communities of color .
Humans are evolutionarily wired to respond to the abrupt sounds that indicate danger .
An ambulance siren , a toddler stomping around in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flying over your house aren ’ t signals you ’ re about to get eaten , but they still trigger involuntary fight-or-flight responses , especially when they ’ re loud and unexpected .
These aren ’ t reactions you ’ re necessarily aware of , nor will they necessarily feel bad in the moment .
But frequent fight-or-flight responses strain autonomic nervous and endocrine systems , which can lead to higher blood pressure , elevated heart pace , poor sleep , negative social behavior , and more .
Those , in turn , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attack or stroke to lower test scores in school .
One notable study from the 1970s found that sixth-graders on the side of a New York school facing an elevated train track had reading levels a year behind their counterparts on the quieter side of campus .
And it ’ s not just humans who are thrown out of whack .
In cities , birds are known to change their calls to be heard — or are driven out altogether .
Scientists also found simulated road noise caused a 73 percent drop in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up to mating grounds in Wyoming .
In another experiment in Australia ’ s Great Barrier Reef , damselfish were less quick in their response to predators , and more likely to be prey , when motorboats passed over , stressing them out .
Even plant roots are thought to adjust their growth based on vibrations associated with water moving through the ground — vibrations that are altered by those of passing noise .
In northwest New Mexico , scrub jays , which scatter seeds of the region ’ s pinyon pines , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wells , leaving mice to eat up the seeds and diminish the pinyons , and causing hummingbird numbers to soar when their scrub jay nemeses disappeared .
The domino effects are endless .
Even climate change is implicated in altering our natural soundscapes .
Pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere raises the temperature , say , in a frog ’ s habitat , which affects the frog ’ s sense of when and how to croak during mating season .
A soundscape can also lose , for instance , the babble of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Exposure to nature , however , has the opposite effect of noise on humans .
Not to say the far-off toll of a bell can ’ t be relaxing , nor the growl of a nearby wolf stress-inducing , but mounds of research have shown the cognitive , emotional , and physiological benefits of exposure to nature .
People come away from nature walks happier than people walking a drab hallway .
Hospital patients recover faster when they have a window with a view of greenery .
A prominent study of public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aggression and violence in ones with better views of greenery .
In the 1980s , Japan began embracing “ forest bathing ” as a form of preventive health care and healing , and the government has pumped millions into studying the mental and physical effects of being in nature .
It led officials to establish dozens of official therapy trails in Japan ’ s forests .
It makes a sort of evolutionary sense : Trees , for instance , signal to our ape brains safety from predators .
The sound of a babbling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see answers in how much brain power our surroundings demand of us .
Take attention-restoration theory , which says we have two main forms of attention : directed and involuntary .
Your directed attention is given to things you ’ re actively paying attention to — like this story — and it ’ s easily depleted .
Involuntary attention is driven more by interesting stimuli in the environment — birdsong , say , or the way leaves flutter gently on their branches in a soft breeze .
An environment with just the latter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Marc Berman , a psychology professor at the University of Chicago .
“ And we think that nature is one kind of environment that sort of meets these criteria.
” That replenishment translates to just feeling good .
And the places that are most natural tend to be the freest from human-made noise .
Our brains process visual and auditory information from natural environments more quickly and easily , says Holli-Anne Passmore , a positive psychology researcher at the University of British Columbia .
“ Because we ’ re using less brainpower , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brainpower left to essentially be a more reasonable person.
” Our physiological equilibrium , thrown out of whack by our constant din , resets when there ’ s nothing to stress it out .
Researchers tend to agree that the benefits of nature increase with our level of immersion .
And we don ’ t have to see it to feel it .
Research has shown fatigued office workers feel more motivation to work when they listen to nature sounds rather than their workplace sounds .
ICU patients under mechanical ventilation support who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ significantly lower blood pressure , anxiety , and agitation levels than those who didn ’ t .
The longer the patients listened , the better off they were .
On Earth Day 2005 , Hempton set out from the Hoh visitor center , in the Hoh Rainforest in Washington ’ s Olympic National Park , carrying a little red stone given to him by the then-cultural elder of the Olympic Peninsula ’ s Quileute tribe .
His plan was to meticulously document outside noise intrusions and work with the National Park Service and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pristine .
After a few miles of hiking , he settled on a spot carpeted with springy moss and fallen logs sprouting all manner of Seussian plants and clumps of fungi .
Birds and Douglas squirrels peeped and cawed .
He placed the red stone on a furry log and declared the patch “ One Square Inch of Silence , ” a sacred space for quiet .
If that tiny area was free from unwanted sound waves , he argued , the adjacent square inches , feet , and even acres could be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a small splash as the subject of a 1990s PBS documentary , One Square Inch garnered a steady stream of news coverage and a small cadre of devotees .
Hempton has circled the globe three times recording the sounds of nature , especially soundscapes that are disappearing amid human cacophony .
He is motivated by more than simple conservation .
“ The noise impact on the human soul , ” Hempton says , “ is a sense of hopelessness and pessimism about the future.
” Those feelings , he believes , will eventually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out a salve .
We ’ ll feel driven toward quiet , he believes , the way someone cooped up in an office for too long yearns for a walk in the park .
Humans evolved in a quiet world , after all .
A natural raconteur , Hempton has a backwoodsman ’ s frame and ruddy face , close-cropped hair and beard more salt than pepper , and regularly body-surfs along the rugged coastline of the north Olympic Peninsula .
But his hearing is going — a cruel twist of irony that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with quiet and listening began on a cross-country trip to grad school , when he stopped to spend a night in a Midwest cornfield and was bombarded by not just a rainstorm but also the epic boom of its thunder — “ magnificent , deep , primordial , soul-shaking sounds , ” he ’ d later write .
“ I ’ d never heard thunder like this before.
” He had found his calling — becoming the “ Sound Tracker ” — and promptly dropped out of school and abandoned the idea of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ later , by which point he had a young family , an illness prevented him from working and paying the bills ; what saved him was early-morning birdsong that inspired a grant-funded project to record the Dawn Chorus .
Companies including Microsoft sought his professional audio services and recordings .
Then came One Square Inch in the forests of Washington state , which he defended from noise intrusions by comparing sound recordings to air traffic patterns and asking offending airlines to reroute .
In 2009 , Hempton wrote a book about it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ translated into Chinese , a version of which was picked up by Laila Fan , a field recordist and educational radio producer in Taiwan .
To find the most effective organizations pushing for quiet — as opposed to just tamping down noise — look abroad .
Fan , founder of the Soundscape Association of Taiwan , is the Gordon Hempton of her country .
Until she read One Square Inch of Silence , Fan had never considered taking action on the nature sounds she recorded .
One of her recording sites was Taiping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lush forest resembling Hempton ’ s Hoh Rainforest .
She told its forest ranger it needed a silent trail , but for a couple of years , no one took her seriously .
So , in 2015 , Fan established the Soundscape Association of Taiwan — a conservation and policy organization for natural soundscapes — and wrote a book about her efforts .
On the cover was her own quiet stone .
Three years later , the Taiwanese forest bureau recognized a “ National Silence Trail ” at Taiping Mountain .
Word @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has brought more people to the silence trail , and Fan is now working with Yangmingshan National Park , at the country ’ s northern tip , to make it an “ urban quiet park.
” Quiet is an even more entrenched value 5,200 miles to the northwest .
Over the past two decades , Stockholm , Sweden , has mapped its noise and quiet multiple times and has identified 65 spots across a dozen nature and culture reserves where folks can find relative quiet .
The city has held events and activities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attracting people to the parks to experience it .
Oslo , capital of another Scandinavian country with lots of uninhabited open space , has taken quiet seriously , too .
The Norwegian city is surrounded by forests and claims that about half its residents live within 500 meters of a “ designated silent area.
” The European Union has recognized the city for its robust noise monitoring and public engagement .
Forests seem to be promising places for clawing back a little quiet .
In 2011 , researchers simply asked folks entering the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ north of San Francisco , to speak quietly and silence their phones .
It resulted in a 3-decibel drop — the equivalent of removing 1,200 people from the park .
Wide-scale solutions , however , remain a challenge .
“ I think it is an uphill battle , ” says Sandy Bahr , director of the Sierra Club ’ s Grand Canyon chapter , which has battled noise from air tours over the national park .
“ There isn ’ t a neighborhood in wilderness , ” she says , where residents might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also think it ’ s one of those things where people don ’ t appreciate it as much until it ’ s gone.
” Development percolates in , Bahr says , and people simply say , “ Oh , well , what ’ s one more road ?
” By 2018 , Square Inch of Silence was dead .
For the umpteenth time , Hempton made the trek out to the Hoh and discovered that this time , he couldn ’ t go 10 minutes without hearing a plane flying over .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of loss was brutal , but freeing himself from that project , he says , allowed him to see other opportunities .
Hempton teamed up with Vikram Chauhan , a digital user-experience consultant in Mumbai who had had his own quiet epiphany , to found Quiet Parks International .
In 2010 , Hempton had met Randy Borman , a Cofán leader , at a TED event in Brazil , and Borman invited him to the Oriente , Ecuador ’ s eastern half .
The visit eventually sparked the idea for Zabalo as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ invitation to see whether true quiet evokes the transcendence necessary to inspire folks to rejigger their lives — and society as a whole — to save an intangible and disappearing natural resource .
Quiet Parks ’ 28 advisers , representatives , and committee members come primarily from the worlds of sound research , sustainability , and environmentalism .
The organization certifies places as , well , sufficiently free from noise , and has its eye on about 200 more sites besides Zabalo .
At its heart , its focus is humankind ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also preaches benefits including overall environmental preservation and improving visitors ’ and Indigenous land managers ’ well-being .
The group plans educational programs and research into noise pollution and the geographic spread of quiet .
If finances or lack of interest make a trip to such a remote place impossible , the group will also certify “ Urban Quiet Parks ” ( which , naturally , won ’ t be Zabalo-grade quiet ) and “ Quiet Communities , ” which will be residential neighborhoods committed to putting a firm lid on their noise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a 365-acre community in rural western North Carolina ) .
“ Those experiences are significant enough that , whether or not we choose to take advantage of it , it should be there , ” Hempton says .
“ It should be in our repertoire of choices.
” Quiet trails , quiet marine parks , and even quiet hotels are also in the works .
All of which signals that ecotourism is perhaps the key to this endeavor ’ s success .
Hempton and company are betting people will hear about these respites @ @ @ @ @ @ @ experience them , and then tell their friends .
Tourism has already been a lifeline to Ecuador ’ s embattled Cofán , who ’ ve fought off attempts to extract the oil that lies beneath the land ’ s trees and rivers .
A certification would signal that quiet has economic value , too — that some of the economic motivations that drive us toward a noisier future can also be harnessed to preserve , and spread the gospel of , quiet .
The certification was not “ something that we were searching @ @ @ @ @ @ @ self-deprecating , avuncular man with an encyclopedia ’ s worth of forest trivia .
But “ it ’ s a nice recognition of what we ’ ve been trying to do here.
” Led by Borman , the Cofán have lobbied the Ecuadorian government for land titles and put significant energy into conservation and blazing trails demarcating their land .
“ That is because we ’ re so , so aware , from our past experience , of the speed with which all of this can disappear , ” Borman says .
A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ donations from abroad .
The most effective vehicle for inspiring those donations , he says , is ecotourism .
“ But the quiet park concept to the average American entrepreneur , it ’ s a nice thought but it ’ s entirely aesthetic , ” Borman said one afternoon , lounging in a handwoven hammock in Zabalo village .
“ It ’ s a fine porcelain base , but it ’ s not a car to be able to drive to work in.
” In order to get a reaction , it has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being seen as — it ’ s not exactly the right word , but — a product.
” Noise regulation in the US is piecemeal , often urban-focused , and oriented toward tamping down our racket rather than instilling appreciation for quiet .
In the 1970s , the brand new Environmental Protection Agency addressed the growing din with its Office of Noise Control and Abatement .
But the office simply faded away under Ronald Reagan , who pushed for the current paradigm of regulating noise at the state and local levels .
Small @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ re focused mostly on addressing nuisances : banning gas-powered leaf blowers , cracking down on car stereos , limiting noise from a nearby airport .
One of the most concerted efforts is not far from Seattle , where residents of Whidbey Island and the Olympic Peninsula are pushing back against expanding the take-off and landing practices of a class of extraordinarily loud military jets stationed at a Whidbey naval air station .
Last summer , after years of failing to sway the Navy , Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the noise on health and wildlife during the Navy ’ s environmental assessment .
But few such groups have the national reach needed to effect paradigmatic change .
“ The movement is destined to be a little fragmented because the impacts are fragmented , are localized , ” says Les Blomberg , head of the Vermont-based Noise Pollution Clearinghouse , which raises awareness of the effects of noise and compiles resources for fighting it .
Our lack of meaningful silence may not feel like an existential crisis to most , anyway .
Even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ productivity or creativity , our grouchier mood or higher blood pressure , we don ’ t always suspect a sonic origin .
Noise doesn ’ t kill us like a blow to the head but grinds us down the way a poor diet or sedentary lifestyle does : gradually , imperceptibly , almost abstractly , in a way that doesn ’ t feel urgent .
Maybe a quiet life would be better , we ’ d think , but our noisy one goes on satisfactorily enough .
We ’ ve found Band-Aid solutions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of meditation apps and Spotify nature playlists .
Perhaps the best way to gauge whether Quiet Parks International is onto something is to look at the International Dark-Sky Association , which has been doing virtually the same thing with light pollution for more than 30 years .
Once the project of a couple of astronomers in Tucson , Arizona , the organization now has 24 chapters outside the US .
There are 10 International Dark Sky Sanctuaries — IDA ’ s version of Wilderness Quiet Parks — along with dozens of dark-sky parks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ name a few categories .
The 300-person town of Lake Tekapo , in the heart of New Zealand ’ s South Island , saw an explosion in tourism after the already-popular Aoraki/Mt .
Cook National Park and the Mackenzie Basin received their Dark Sky Reserve designation in 2012 — so much so that guest lodging has to be booked months in advance .
Two more dark-sky parks have since been certified in the country .
“ It ’ s one of New Zealand ’ s biggest attractions now , looking at the stars @ @ @ @ @ @ @ University of Canterbury astronomer and an Aoraki Mackenzie board member .
It was a singular success for the dark sky organization , but it showed the possibilities .
On a drive through northern Ecuador one afternoon , under the cover of ominously dark clouds , Hempton described how those sorts of economic incentives could apply to quiet .
Governments , the press , and tourism organizations have asked about certification , he said , even if their primary concern appears to be tourism and self-image .
Even rerouting flights around quiet places can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lines .
What airline , Hempton asked , wouldn ’ t want the opportunity to say they were the first to change their operations to protect a natural resource ?
The airlines , the FAA — someone — just has to knock down that first domino .
A day and a half after the Dawn Chorus listening session , fresh off a long , silent float back to camp from the headwaters of the Zabalo , Hempton and Borman ’ s son , Josh , were playing gin rummy at a makeshift table @ @ @ @ @ @ @ given way to dusk , which prompted tea and candles .
Hempton teased Josh , who responded with exaggerated throat-clearing as he prepared a bluff .
Josh mentioned that one of the campers from Washington state had lost his new glasses in the river during the float .
“ Well , in Zabalo you can still see without your glasses , ” Hempton replied .
“ And you can still listen with hearing loss.
” Sam Goldman is a writer and freelance journalist based in Berkeley , Calif .
He enjoys covering the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Twitter at @ Sam__Goldman

Part of Issue #12 of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
ZABALO RIVER, Ecuador — By 5:30 am, Gordon Hempton had his high-end recording equipment unpacked and had donned a headlamp that glowed red, like Rudolph’s nose. The buzzes and peeps of Amazonian fauna were still muted, and the first rays of light were finding their way through the 100-foot-tall canopies of the kapok trees and chambira and pambil palms.
After pulling on tall rubber boots and applying the day’s first layer of bug repellent, four groggy campers followed Hempton from their tents and tarps down a muddy path to the mouth of a tributary of the Zabalo River, an inky-black channel roughly the width of a basketball court that cuts some 30 miles eastward across northeast Ecuador. Though daylight had hardly made a mark, they’d missed the beginning of the Dawn Chorus — the symphony of birdsong that takes advantage of the early morning’s optimal conditions for sound travel.
Here, in this obscure pocket of Ecuador’s northeastern corner, they hoped to wake up their “faint listening skills,” expanding their aural horizons to take in more of the soundscape. Everyone stood still, paying as much attention as possible to the acoustic information pinging their ears. After hitting the record button on his equipment and listening for a bit, Hempton handed around the headphones. Almost everything one can hear through them, he assured the campers, is audible to the naked ear if those skills are sufficiently honed.
A snatch of amplified rainforest evokes a chaotic, colorful, two-dimensional wall; the microphones erase the soundscape’s sense of space. The howler monkeys suddenly roar like revving motorcycles; insects buzz like TV static; the Zabalo babbles as if the ear is just above its surface; and birdsong cackles, shimmers tambourine-like, and pops like a toddler imitating a machine gun — pyoo-pyoo-pyoo! After a little while, the patterns and frequencies of the birdcalls give the impression of species waking up in waves and testing their vocal cords. The closest humans — in the Cofán village of Zabalo — are a dozen miles away.
This kind of soundscape, according to Hempton, a prominent Washington state acoustic ecologist and sound recordist, is quiet. Not the absence of sound, but a soundscape unadulterated by human ruckus.
The million acres of land that has belonged to the roughly 1,200 indigenous Cofán for centuries were certified last Earth Day by Quiet Parks International as the world’s first Wilderness Quiet Park — a place measurably free from human noise. The organization, a nonprofit recently co-founded by 66-year-old Hempton, hopes not only to preserve the vestiges of all-natural soundscapes but to provide visitors with an aural experience that will help them realize the need to save quiet.
Noise is nearly everywhere, driven by the conveniences and economics of the modern world. Unwanted noise is linked to myriad health problems, while nature has been found to reduce stress and hasten recovery. Hempton believes our mental, even spiritual, well-being is being suffocated by our own din.
Listening on the banks of a tiny tributary of an unremarkable river in the biodiversity capital of the world, the visitors were removed from every distraction and stress of their noisy everyday lives. When it’s just them and the forest, Hempton believes, they will truly get to know themselves. Quiet, he says, is “the think tank of the soul and the birthplace of creativity.”
Urban areas, with their church bells and construction and ever-barking dogs, have always been noisy places to live. But 100 years ago, vast swaths of the United States featured only the sounds of chirping birds, thundering waterfalls, croaking frogs, or wind whispering through trees.
What kicked off the proliferation of noise into almost every nook and cranny of the country was the internal combustion engine. Unlike a laborer swinging a hammer, engines don’t tire and stop, and as they became integral to daily life, an ever-thickening web of roads crisscrossed the country, bringing with them the rumbling and revving of cars, trucks, and motorcycles. And where noise from roads couldn’t reach, noise from flight routes could. In between it all is the earth-rumbling machinery of fossil fuel extraction.
Our noise has doubled background sound levels in nearly two-thirds of protected areas in the US and caused at least a tenfold increase in more than a fifth of them. Noise is also a social justice issue: The loudest, most unwanted sounds — like those of industrial areas, highway overpasses, airports, and trains — ring out in the lowest-income neighborhoods, often populated by communities of color.
Humans are evolutionarily wired to respond to the abrupt sounds that indicate danger. An ambulance siren, a toddler stomping around in the unit above, or a jet flying over your house aren’t signals you’re about to get eaten, but they still trigger involuntary fight-or-flight responses, especially when they’re loud and unexpected. These aren’t reactions you’re necessarily aware of, nor will they necessarily feel bad in the moment.
But frequent fight-or-flight responses strain autonomic nervous and endocrine systems, which can lead to higher blood pressure, elevated heart pace, poor sleep, negative social behavior, and more. Those, in turn, leave us vulnerable to everything from heart attack or stroke to lower test scores in school. One notable study from the 1970s found that sixth-graders on the side of a New York school facing an elevated train track had reading levels a year behind their counterparts on the quieter side of campus.
And it’s not just humans who are thrown out of whack. In cities, birds are known to change their calls to be heard — or are driven out altogether. Scientists also found simulated road noise caused a 73 percent drop in the number of male sage grouse showing up to mating grounds in Wyoming. In another experiment in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, damselfish were less quick in their response to predators, and more likely to be prey, when motorboats passed over, stressing them out.
Even plant roots are thought to adjust their growth based on vibrations associated with water moving through the ground — vibrations that are altered by those of passing noise. In northwest New Mexico, scrub jays, which scatter seeds of the region’s pinyon pines, have fled the sounds of natural gas wells, leaving mice to eat up the seeds and diminish the pinyons, and causing hummingbird numbers to soar when their scrub jay nemeses disappeared. The domino effects are endless.
Even climate change is implicated in altering our natural soundscapes. Pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere raises the temperature, say, in a frog’s habitat, which affects the frog’s sense of when and how to croak during mating season. A soundscape can also lose, for instance, the babble of a brook when it dries up for good.
Exposure to nature, however, has the opposite effect of noise on humans. Not to say the far-off toll of a bell can’t be relaxing, nor the growl of a nearby wolf stress-inducing, but mounds of research have shown the cognitive, emotional, and physiological benefits of exposure to nature.
People come away from nature walks happier than people walking a drab hallway. Hospital patients recover faster when they have a window with a view of greenery. A prominent study of public housing buildings in Chicago found notably less aggression and violence in ones with better views of greenery. In the 1980s, Japan began embracing “forest bathing” as a form of preventive health care and healing, and the government has pumped millions into studying the mental and physical effects of being in nature. It led officials to establish dozens of official therapy trails in Japan’s forests.
It makes a sort of evolutionary sense: Trees, for instance, signal to our ape brains safety from predators. The sound of a babbling brook indicates water. But researchers also see answers in how much brain power our surroundings demand of us. Take attention-restoration theory, which says we have two main forms of attention: directed and involuntary. Your directed attention is given to things you’re actively paying attention to — like this story — and it’s easily depleted. Involuntary attention is driven more by interesting stimuli in the environment — birdsong, say, or the way leaves flutter gently on their branches in a soft breeze.
An environment with just the latter can help restore the former, says Marc Berman, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. “And we think that nature is one kind of environment that sort of meets these criteria.” That replenishment translates to just feeling good. And the places that are most natural tend to be the freest from human-made noise.
Our brains process visual and auditory information from natural environments more quickly and easily, says Holli-Anne Passmore, a positive psychology researcher at the University of British Columbia. “Because we’re using less brainpower, you’ve got all this other brainpower left to essentially be a more reasonable person.”
Our physiological equilibrium, thrown out of whack by our constant din, resets when there’s nothing to stress it out. Researchers tend to agree that the benefits of nature increase with our level of immersion.
And we don’t have to see it to feel it. Research has shown fatigued office workers feel more motivation to work when they listen to nature sounds rather than their workplace sounds. ICU patients under mechanical ventilation support who listened to nature sounds through headphones had significantly lower blood pressure, anxiety, and agitation levels than those who didn’t. The longer the patients listened, the better off they were.
On Earth Day 2005, Hempton set out from the Hoh visitor center, in the Hoh Rainforest in Washington’s Olympic National Park, carrying a little red stone given to him by the then-cultural elder of the Olympic Peninsula’s Quileute tribe. His plan was to meticulously document outside noise intrusions and work with the National Park Service and airlines to keep this forest sanctuary acoustically pristine.
After a few miles of hiking, he settled on a spot carpeted with springy moss and fallen logs sprouting all manner of Seussian plants and clumps of fungi. Birds and Douglas squirrels peeped and cawed. He placed the red stone on a furry log and declared the patch “One Square Inch of Silence,” a sacred space for quiet. If that tiny area was free from unwanted sound waves, he argued, the adjacent square inches, feet, and even acres could be, too. Though Hempton had made a small splash as the subject of a 1990s PBS documentary, One Square Inch garnered a steady stream of news coverage and a small cadre of devotees.
Hempton has circled the globe three times recording the sounds of nature, especially soundscapes that are disappearing amid human cacophony. He is motivated by more than simple conservation.
“The noise impact on the human soul,” Hempton says, “is a sense of hopelessness and pessimism about the future.” Those feelings, he believes, will eventually become untenable, leading people to seek out a salve. We’ll feel driven toward quiet, he believes, the way someone cooped up in an office for too long yearns for a walk in the park. Humans evolved in a quiet world, after all.
A natural raconteur, Hempton has a backwoodsman’s frame and ruddy face, close-cropped hair and beard more salt than pepper, and regularly body-surfs along the rugged coastline of the north Olympic Peninsula. But his hearing is going — a cruel twist of irony that only moderately fazes him.
His obsession with quiet and listening began on a cross-country trip to grad school, when he stopped to spend a night in a Midwest cornfield and was bombarded by not just a rainstorm but also the epic boom of its thunder — “magnificent, deep, primordial, soul-shaking sounds,” he’d later write. “I’d never heard thunder like this before.” He had found his calling — becoming the “Sound Tracker” — and promptly dropped out of school and abandoned the idea of becoming a plant pathologist.
A decade later, by which point he had a young family, an illness prevented him from working and paying the bills; what saved him was early-morning birdsong that inspired a grant-funded project to record the Dawn Chorus. Companies including Microsoft sought his professional audio services and recordings.
Then came One Square Inch in the forests of Washington state, which he defended from noise intrusions by comparing sound recordings to air traffic patterns and asking offending airlines to reroute. In 2009, Hempton wrote a book about it. A few years later, it was translated into Chinese, a version of which was picked up by Laila Fan, a field recordist and educational radio producer in Taiwan.
To find the most effective organizations pushing for quiet — as opposed to just tamping down noise — look abroad. Fan, founder of the Soundscape Association of Taiwan, is the Gordon Hempton of her country. Until she read One Square Inch of Silence, Fan had never considered taking action on the nature sounds she recorded.
One of her recording sites was Taiping Mountain, naturally quiet and blanketed in a lush forest resembling Hempton’s Hoh Rainforest. She told its forest ranger it needed a silent trail, but for a couple of years, no one took her seriously. So, in 2015, Fan established the Soundscape Association of Taiwan — a conservation and policy organization for natural soundscapes — and wrote a book about her efforts. On the cover was her own quiet stone.
Three years later, the Taiwanese forest bureau recognized a “National Silence Trail” at Taiping Mountain. Word of mouth and word of social media has brought more people to the silence trail, and Fan is now working with Yangmingshan National Park, at the country’s northern tip, to make it an “urban quiet park.”
Quiet is an even more entrenched value 5,200 miles to the northwest. Over the past two decades, Stockholm, Sweden, has mapped its noise and quiet multiple times and has identified 65 spots across a dozen nature and culture reserves where folks can find relative quiet. The city has held events and activities and printed brochures in the hope of attracting people to the parks to experience it.
Oslo, capital of another Scandinavian country with lots of uninhabited open space, has taken quiet seriously, too. The Norwegian city is surrounded by forests and claims that about half its residents live within 500 meters of a “designated silent area.” The European Union has recognized the city for its robust noise monitoring and public engagement.
Forests seem to be promising places for clawing back a little quiet. In 2011, researchers simply asked folks entering the redwoods of Muir Woods National Monument, north of San Francisco, to speak quietly and silence their phones. It resulted in a 3-decibel drop — the equivalent of removing 1,200 people from the park.
Wide-scale solutions, however, remain a challenge. “I think it is an uphill battle,” says Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon chapter, which has battled noise from air tours over the national park. “There isn’t a neighborhood in wilderness,” she says, where residents might go NIMBY on noise. “I also think it’s one of those things where people don’t appreciate it as much until it’s gone.” Development percolates in, Bahr says, and people simply say, “Oh, well, what’s one more road?”
By 2018, Square Inch of Silence was dead. For the umpteenth time, Hempton made the trek out to the Hoh and discovered that this time, he couldn’t go 10 minutes without hearing a plane flying over. He threw in the towel. The sense of loss was brutal, but freeing himself from that project, he says, allowed him to see other opportunities. Hempton teamed up with Vikram Chauhan, a digital user-experience consultant in Mumbai who had had his own quiet epiphany, to found Quiet Parks International.
In 2010, Hempton had met Randy Borman, a Cofán leader, at a TED event in Brazil, and Borman invited him to the Oriente, Ecuador’s eastern half. The visit eventually sparked the idea for Zabalo as the first wilderness quiet park, and an invitation to see whether true quiet evokes the transcendence necessary to inspire folks to rejigger their lives — and society as a whole — to save an intangible and disappearing natural resource.
Quiet Parks’ 28 advisers, representatives, and committee members come primarily from the worlds of sound research, sustainability, and environmentalism. The organization certifies places as, well, sufficiently free from noise, and has its eye on about 200 more sites besides Zabalo. At its heart, its focus is humankind’s need for silence, but the organization also preaches benefits including overall environmental preservation and improving visitors’ and Indigenous land managers’ well-being.
The group plans educational programs and research into noise pollution and the geographic spread of quiet. If finances or lack of interest make a trip to such a remote place impossible, the group will also certify “Urban Quiet Parks” (which, naturally, won’t be Zabalo-grade quiet) and “Quiet Communities,” which will be residential neighborhoods committed to putting a firm lid on their noise footprints (the first of which is a 365-acre community in rural western North Carolina).
“Those experiences are significant enough that, whether or not we choose to take advantage of it, it should be there,” Hempton says. “It should be in our repertoire of choices.” Quiet trails, quiet marine parks, and even quiet hotels are also in the works.
All of which signals that ecotourism is perhaps the key to this endeavor’s success. Hempton and company are betting people will hear about these respites from our soul-sucking din and pay to experience them, and then tell their friends. Tourism has already been a lifeline to Ecuador’s embattled Cofán, who’ve fought off attempts to extract the oil that lies beneath the land’s trees and rivers. A certification would signal that quiet has economic value, too — that some of the economic motivations that drive us toward a noisier future can also be harnessed to preserve, and spread the gospel of, quiet.
The certification was not “something that we were searching for,” says Borman, a self-deprecating, avuncular man with an encyclopedia’s worth of forest trivia. But “it’s a nice recognition of what we’ve been trying to do here.”
Led by Borman, the Cofán have lobbied the Ecuadorian government for land titles and put significant energy into conservation and blazing trails demarcating their land. “That is because we’re so, so aware, from our past experience, of the speed with which all of this can disappear,” Borman says. A critical part of funding that work is donations from abroad. The most effective vehicle for inspiring those donations, he says, is ecotourism.
“But the quiet park concept to the average American entrepreneur, it’s a nice thought but it’s entirely aesthetic,” Borman said one afternoon, lounging in a handwoven hammock in Zabalo village. “It’s a fine porcelain base, but it’s not a car to be able to drive to work in.” In order to get a reaction, it has to “move from that aesthetic to being seen as — it’s not exactly the right word, but — a product.”
Noise regulation in the US is piecemeal, often urban-focused, and oriented toward tamping down our racket rather than instilling appreciation for quiet. In the 1970s, the brand new Environmental Protection Agency addressed the growing din with its Office of Noise Control and Abatement. But the office simply faded away under Ronald Reagan, who pushed for the current paradigm of regulating noise at the state and local levels.
Small, ragtag citizen groups abound, though they’re focused mostly on addressing nuisances: banning gas-powered leaf blowers, cracking down on car stereos, limiting noise from a nearby airport. One of the most concerted efforts is not far from Seattle, where residents of Whidbey Island and the Olympic Peninsula are pushing back against expanding the take-off and landing practices of a class of extraordinarily loud military jets stationed at a Whidbey naval air station. Last summer, after years of failing to sway the Navy, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued the Navy for allegedly ignoring the effect of the noise on health and wildlife during the Navy’s environmental assessment.
But few such groups have the national reach needed to effect paradigmatic change. “The movement is destined to be a little fragmented because the impacts are fragmented, are localized,” says Les Blomberg, head of the Vermont-based Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, which raises awareness of the effects of noise and compiles resources for fighting it.
Our lack of meaningful silence may not feel like an existential crisis to most, anyway. Even when we are aware of our flagging productivity or creativity, our grouchier mood or higher blood pressure, we don’t always suspect a sonic origin.
Noise doesn’t kill us like a blow to the head but grinds us down the way a poor diet or sedentary lifestyle does: gradually, imperceptibly, almost abstractly, in a way that doesn’t feel urgent. Maybe a quiet life would be better, we’d think, but our noisy one goes on satisfactorily enough. We’ve found Band-Aid solutions, anyway: Just see the proliferation of meditation apps and Spotify nature playlists.
Perhaps the best way to gauge whether Quiet Parks International is onto something is to look at the International Dark-Sky Association, which has been doing virtually the same thing with light pollution for more than 30 years. Once the project of a couple of astronomers in Tucson, Arizona, the organization now has 24 chapters outside the US. There are 10 International Dark Sky Sanctuaries — IDA’s version of Wilderness Quiet Parks — along with dozens of dark-sky parks and two dozen dark-sky communities, to name a few categories.
The 300-person town of Lake Tekapo, in the heart of New Zealand’s South Island, saw an explosion in tourism after the already-popular Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park and the Mackenzie Basin received their Dark Sky Reserve designation in 2012 — so much so that guest lodging has to be booked months in advance. Two more dark-sky parks have since been certified in the country. “It’s one of New Zealand’s biggest attractions now, looking at the stars,” says John Hearnshaw, a University of Canterbury astronomer and an Aoraki Mackenzie board member. It was a singular success for the dark sky organization, but it showed the possibilities.
On a drive through northern Ecuador one afternoon, under the cover of ominously dark clouds, Hempton described how those sorts of economic incentives could apply to quiet. Governments, the press, and tourism organizations have asked about certification, he said, even if their primary concern appears to be tourism and self-image.
Even rerouting flights around quiet places can be spun to appeal to corporate bottom lines. What airline, Hempton asked, wouldn’t want the opportunity to say they were the first to change their operations to protect a natural resource? The airlines, the FAA — someone — just has to knock down that first domino.
A day and a half after the Dawn Chorus listening session, fresh off a long, silent float back to camp from the headwaters of the Zabalo, Hempton and Borman’s son, Josh, were playing gin rummy at a makeshift table under a tarp roof. Rain had given way to dusk, which prompted tea and candles. Hempton teased Josh, who responded with exaggerated throat-clearing as he prepared a bluff.
Josh mentioned that one of the campers from Washington state had lost his new glasses in the river during the float. “Well, in Zabalo you can still see without your glasses,” Hempton replied. “And you can still listen with hearing loss.”
Sam Goldman is a writer and freelance journalist based in Berkeley, Calif. He enjoys covering the quirky and unheard-of. Follow him on Twitter at @Sam__Goldman


vox--2020-03-25--The danger of mythologizing America’s “heartland”

Part of Issue # 12 of The Highlight , our home for ambitious stories that explain our world .
The Midwest , in many people ’ s minds , is normal .
Probably no one , if pressed , could give a meaningful definition of the “ normal ” that the Midwest supposedly embodies , but there ’ s evidence of a stubborn belief in it everywhere .
When politicians like Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar want to seem safe , trustworthy , wholesome , and pragmatic , they often do so by playing up their connections to the region @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( one of those studies only useful for documenting preexisting prejudices , but that ’ s the point ) ranked Indiana our country ’ s most “ normal ” state .
Social scientists have chosen the Midwest as an object of fascination precisely because they thought it offered , as Helen and Robert Lynd — sociologists who studied small-town American life — once wrote , a “ common denominator ” of America .
Some vestige of this belief may account for the power granted to Iowa by our primary process .
Most of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : Think about how differently we would read the myth of Superman if his ship crashed in rural Connecticut , or how Fargo loses its irony ( and everything else ) if reimagined in Fargo , Arkansas .
It must be Kansas that Dorothy returns to , not Schenectady or Dallas .
Anytime a region this large , this diverse , and this hard to define becomes a symbol for a concept that has the combined vagueness and life-regulating power of “ normalcy , ” it should tell us that we ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its worst form , the association between Midwesternness and normalcy can become a proxy for whiteness , straightness , and/or maleness .
There are people in the world who think that our outer-borough , rich-guy , New Yorker president better represents the Midwest than does Ilhan Omar , a Somali immigrant elected in 2018 to the House of Representatives from Minnesota , where she has lived for more than 20 years .
This kind of thinking legitimizes prejudice while obscuring the region ’ s actual demographics , which are all over the place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s appeal is powerful .
Normalcy can give safety , warmth , the smugness of a person whose plate is full .
It can make us feel invulnerable , passed over by history and its dangers , too broad for the grave , durable enough to survive biblical conflagration or climate change or , say , an ill-handled and sudden pandemic .
Because it attracts us , normal-ness becomes a fetish , a performance , or a product .
The Midwest , because of its perceived averageness , has long been forced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ process .
For all its appeal , normalcy is also alienating .
I meet many Midwesterners who seem honestly to believe that their experiences are too banal for description , and , especially in my teaching , I meet young people who are so angry at themselves for their normal-ness that they can neither enjoy their lives nor change them .
Among people who are less political — that is , among people who lean toward the right and don ’ t know it — you often hear a kind of general regret @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , having blown a chance .
The Midwest seems to offer us the chance to become normal , but what this means in practice is a paranoid sense that you ’ ve missed something irrevocable .
But precisely because it is a myth , the perceived normalcy of the Midwest does tell us a lot about ourselves .
Myths always do .
Early-20th-century American historians , intellectuals , writers , and politicians consciously constructed our image of the Midwest as the place where America averaged itself out .
The region ’ s myth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time .
For a long time , I assumed — as do many people I ’ ve asked — that people say “ Middle West , ” or “ Midwest ” because they ’ re talking about the part of the country that had once been “ the West , ” but was less so as the country ’ s borders moved farther in that direction .
It turns out that this isn ’ t true .
Instead , it emerged in the early 20th century as a way of describing a region @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as both dynamic and reassuringly old-fashioned .
The name wasn ’ t about geography or history but the image of the place : halfway between city and country , rural past and industrialized future .
It ’ s not “ middle ” in that it ’ s the middle of the country ( just look at a map ) .
It ’ s “ middle ” in the way a middle-aged person is considered to be “ middle ” : It ’ s even-tempered , mature .
It ’ s America , aged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1910s and ’ 20s were the period when historian Frederick Jackson Turner enjoyed great scholarly and popular success .
You may or may not recognize the name , but his influence on both historians and general readers has been vast .
He first presented his influential “ Frontier Thesis ” in his 1893 essay “ The Significance of the Frontier in American History.
” He argued that as the American frontier successively moved west — via war with and removal of Native Americans , the Louisiana Purchase , the Gold Rush , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stages of civilization continually played themselves out .
First there were Native Americans and white frontiersmen disrupted by traders , who make room for pastoralists , who are followed by farmers and eventually farm towns , which yield to manufacturers , and , finally , cities .
This thesis appealed to historians because , among other things , it offered a simple answer to the question “ What is distinctive about the United States ?
” In an era defined by nationalism , this question seemed to need answering .
The moving panorama @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a visual image of what made the US special among nations .
As Turner developed his ideas , he came to see the Middle West as the part of America tasked with “ adapting democracy to the vast economic organization of the present.
” It was where raw pioneer vigor and complex social organization lay together on a feather mattress , and what they produced was not simply people or a way of life but the American character itself .
Contemporary historians dispute virtually every aspect of Turner ’ s argument , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ created hard to pass up .
Sociologists and social critics , historians , novelists — none of them could resist a concept that seemed to offer the Midwest ( an abbreviation that caught on in midcentury ) as a place where you could get direct access to what was “ truly ” American .
And given how often Americans have tended to see ourselves , to position ourselves , as the latest or final stage of human history — the world ’ s “ last best hope , ” as an Illinois president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Midwest an almost religious significance .
Here , humanity has finally arrived .
There is something deeply unsettling in the idea that one has already arrived .
It provokes disappointment on the one hand — is this all ?
— and anxiety on the other , a sense that one is not yet fit somehow .
It leads to a strange kind of self-contempt and self-alienation .
When I was a teenager growing up in Michigan , I felt that if the place I lived in was normality incarnate , then normality itself @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If history seemed like something that happened to other people , located elsewhere , so did the future .
I had no expectations for it ; it hadn ’ t even occurred to me to have expectations for it .
Why rush your way into more of the same ?
Sometimes I walked over to the 76 gas station , where two friends of mine worked the night shift .
There they conducted a kind of ongoing dirtbag salon : free drinks from the soda fountain , Dead Milkmen on the tape player @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vaguely knew who had graduated high school early stopped to buy milk .
We walked to his house , and he spoke a truth about his life that was so obvious and so personal that I ’ d never acknowledged it was also the truth of mine : I had to get out of here .
It was so lonely .
The Midwest in books and movies has given us some of our classic images of loneliness , a sense of impermanence on the landscape , of a fragile hold on the place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ man in Sherwood Anderson ’ s Winesburg , Ohio , who writes his thoughts on scraps of paper and then throws them on the ground .
Or Evan S. Connell ’ s Mrs. Bridge , calling from her garage to no one .
Of Toni Morrison ’ s Sula , whose singularity isolates her even as it makes her a kind of hero .
Sociologists and social critics , historians , novelists — none could resist the concept of the Midwest as a place where you could get direct access to what was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this loneliness is to grapple with the particularity of Midwestern lives and Midwestern history .
The region was never normal .
The mythmaking of writers like Turner smooths out a long history of Midwestern struggles over worker power and human rights , land speculation and Indian removal .
It also papers over a long history of resistance to these sorts of depredations .
From the 1870s to the 1920s , the Midwest was swept by the Granger , Populist , and Progressive movements in turn , and all of these movements struggled to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans ” in their fight against a wealthy elite , and the short-term gains that could come from defining “ ordinary Americans ” in racially exclusive ways .
These movements were largely white ; indeed , one goal of the Grangers was to reunite Northern and Southern farmers through a common cause .
Some Populists , on the other hand , initially attacked Jim Crow and envisioned a coalition of low-income people of all races .
This multiracial solidarity was a promising development .
Nearly 130 years later , it ... remains promising @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Midwestern history offers us visions more radical and more particular than these .
In the early 19th century , Native American leaders and intellectuals from the modern-day Midwest , such as Tenskwatawa , Tecumseh , and later Black Hawk , helped create the idea of pan-Indian resistance to colonization — including the idea of “ Native American ” as a unified identity .
Religious groups and social experimenters built communal would-be utopias all throughout the region in the 1830s and 1840s , some of which you can still visit ( Amana , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
One historian credits Brooklyn , Illinois , with the distinction of being the first all-black town in America — a town founded on the idea , surely as radical in the 19th century as communism , that black Americans could be free .
The Midwest is also dotted with formerly radical and utopian communities , towns , villages , and colleges founded for the sole purpose of resisting the spread of slavery .
If we see the auto industry as Midwestern , we should see the labor power that grew in that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Black Lives , created in 2014 as a response to the national visibility of racist police brutality , is partly a Midwestern creation — it began with the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson , Missouri , grew at a Cleveland conference , and shut down a Minnesota airport terminal .
The resistance white supremacist Richard Spencer met in Michigan was one of the reasons he scaled back his public appearances .
Today , Immigration and Customs Enforcement struggles to find a Midwestern city that will let it build a detention camp @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
For Frederick Jackson Turner , the Midwest was the place where the nation on the leading edge of history found equilibrium .
But it ’ s actually a site of ongoing , ever-changing political struggle .
As Midwesterners think about how to live decently together in a warmer , more crowded place , it is this history , not the myth of their own banality , to which they need to turn .
This history also helps us see the particularity of the place — which is to say , it makes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ At the same time , the squareness of the place , the repetition with slight variation , reminds us that each part of it , each person in it , is itself by the slenderest of chances .
You feel , wandering the Midwest , like your town could have been any of these towns , like you could have been any of these people .
This feeling , like our history , points more than one way .
It can make you ingrown , like a toenail : Why can ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supposed to ?
But it can also cause you to think of those other selves : that poorer self , that queerer self , that darker self , that privileged self .
It can tell you that you must try to care for all those selves as though they were you — as though you were made from the same soil and headed back to it .
In this night-black , dirt-black dark , who even knows for sure who they are , who I am ?
Or who we might yet be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an English lecturer at the University of Michigan .
His book Midwest Futures will be published in April .

Part of Issue #12 of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
The Midwest, in many people’s minds, is normal.
Probably no one, if pressed, could give a meaningful definition of the “normal” that the Midwest supposedly embodies, but there’s evidence of a stubborn belief in it everywhere.
When politicians like Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar want to seem safe, trustworthy, wholesome, and pragmatic, they often do so by playing up their connections to the region. A study a few years ago (one of those studies only useful for documenting preexisting prejudices, but that’s the point) ranked Indiana our country’s most “normal” state. Social scientists have chosen the Midwest as an object of fascination precisely because they thought it offered, as Helen and Robert Lynd — sociologists who studied small-town American life — once wrote, a “common denominator” of America.
Some vestige of this belief may account for the power granted to Iowa by our primary process. Most of all, pop culture normalizes the region: Think about how differently we would read the myth of Superman if his ship crashed in rural Connecticut, or how Fargo loses its irony (and everything else) if reimagined in Fargo, Arkansas. It must be Kansas that Dorothy returns to, not Schenectady or Dallas.
Anytime a region this large, this diverse, and this hard to define becomes a symbol for a concept that has the combined vagueness and life-regulating power of “normalcy,” it should tell us that we’re in the presence of myth. In its worst form, the association between Midwesternness and normalcy can become a proxy for whiteness, straightness, and/or maleness. There are people in the world who think that our outer-borough, rich-guy, New Yorker president better represents the Midwest than does Ilhan Omar, a Somali immigrant elected in 2018 to the House of Representatives from Minnesota, where she has lived for more than 20 years. This kind of thinking legitimizes prejudice while obscuring the region’s actual demographics, which are all over the place.
All that said, the idea’s appeal is powerful. Normalcy can give safety, warmth, the smugness of a person whose plate is full. It can make us feel invulnerable, passed over by history and its dangers, too broad for the grave, durable enough to survive biblical conflagration or climate change or, say, an ill-handled and sudden pandemic. Because it attracts us, normal-ness becomes a fetish, a performance, or a product. The Midwest, because of its perceived averageness, has long been forced to play a symbolic role in this process.
For all its appeal, normalcy is also alienating. I meet many Midwesterners who seem honestly to believe that their experiences are too banal for description, and, especially in my teaching, I meet young people who are so angry at themselves for their normal-ness that they can neither enjoy their lives nor change them. Among people who are less political — that is, among people who lean toward the right and don’t know it — you often hear a kind of general regret, a sense of having missed something, having blown a chance. The Midwest seems to offer us the chance to become normal, but what this means in practice is a paranoid sense that you’ve missed something irrevocable.
But precisely because it is a myth, the perceived normalcy of the Midwest does tell us a lot about ourselves. Myths always do. Early-20th-century American historians, intellectuals, writers, and politicians consciously constructed our image of the Midwest as the place where America averaged itself out.
The region’s myth and its name emerged around the same time. For a long time, I assumed — as do many people I’ve asked — that people say “Middle West,” or “Midwest” because they’re talking about the part of the country that had once been “the West,” but was less so as the country’s borders moved farther in that direction. It turns out that this isn’t true. Instead, it emerged in the early 20th century as a way of describing a region that was widely seen, illogically, as both dynamic and reassuringly old-fashioned. The name wasn’t about geography or history but the image of the place: halfway between city and country, rural past and industrialized future. It’s not “middle” in that it’s the middle of the country (just look at a map). It’s “middle” in the way a middle-aged person is considered to be “middle”: It’s even-tempered, mature. It’s America, aged just right.
Not accidentally, the 1910s and ’20s were the period when historian Frederick Jackson Turner enjoyed great scholarly and popular success. You may or may not recognize the name, but his influence on both historians and general readers has been vast. He first presented his influential “Frontier Thesis” in his 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” He argued that as the American frontier successively moved west — via war with and removal of Native Americans, the Louisiana Purchase, the Gold Rush, and the Homestead Act — the same five stages of civilization continually played themselves out.
First there were Native Americans and white frontiersmen disrupted by traders, who make room for pastoralists, who are followed by farmers and eventually farm towns, which yield to manufacturers, and, finally, cities. This thesis appealed to historians because, among other things, it offered a simple answer to the question “What is distinctive about the United States?” In an era defined by nationalism, this question seemed to need answering. The moving panorama of Turner’s five stages offered a visual image of what made the US special among nations. As Turner developed his ideas, he came to see the Middle West as the part of America tasked with “adapting democracy to the vast economic organization of the present.” It was where raw pioneer vigor and complex social organization lay together on a feather mattress, and what they produced was not simply people or a way of life but the American character itself.
Contemporary historians dispute virtually every aspect of Turner’s argument, but its sheer convenience made the narrative he created hard to pass up. Sociologists and social critics, historians, novelists — none of them could resist a concept that seemed to offer the Midwest (an abbreviation that caught on in midcentury) as a place where you could get direct access to what was “truly” American. And given how often Americans have tended to see ourselves, to position ourselves, as the latest or final stage of human history — the world’s “last best hope,” as an Illinois president once put it — it gives the Midwest an almost religious significance. Here, humanity has finally arrived.
There is something deeply unsettling in the idea that one has already arrived. It provokes disappointment on the one hand — is this all? — and anxiety on the other, a sense that one is not yet fit somehow. It leads to a strange kind of self-contempt and self-alienation.
When I was a teenager growing up in Michigan, I felt that if the place I lived in was normality incarnate, then normality itself was the wrong fit for me. If history seemed like something that happened to other people, located elsewhere, so did the future. I had no expectations for it; it hadn’t even occurred to me to have expectations for it. Why rush your way into more of the same?
Sometimes I walked over to the 76 gas station, where two friends of mine worked the night shift. There they conducted a kind of ongoing dirtbag salon: free drinks from the soda fountain, Dead Milkmen on the tape player. One evening, a guy I vaguely knew who had graduated high school early stopped to buy milk. We walked to his house, and he spoke a truth about his life that was so obvious and so personal that I’d never acknowledged it was also the truth of mine: I had to get out of here. It was so lonely.
The Midwest in books and movies has given us some of our classic images of loneliness, a sense of impermanence on the landscape, of a fragile hold on the place you call home. Think of the man in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, who writes his thoughts on scraps of paper and then throws them on the ground. Or Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, calling from her garage to no one. Of Toni Morrison’s Sula, whose singularity isolates her even as it makes her a kind of hero.
Sociologists and social critics, historians, novelists — none could resist the concept of the Midwest as a place where you could get direct access to what was “truly” American
The alternative to this loneliness is to grapple with the particularity of Midwestern lives and Midwestern history. The region was never normal. The mythmaking of writers like Turner smooths out a long history of Midwestern struggles over worker power and human rights, land speculation and Indian removal. It also papers over a long history of resistance to these sorts of depredations.
From the 1870s to the 1920s, the Midwest was swept by the Granger, Populist, and Progressive movements in turn, and all of these movements struggled to reconcile the imperative to represent “ordinary Americans” in their fight against a wealthy elite, and the short-term gains that could come from defining “ordinary Americans” in racially exclusive ways. These movements were largely white; indeed, one goal of the Grangers was to reunite Northern and Southern farmers through a common cause. Some Populists, on the other hand, initially attacked Jim Crow and envisioned a coalition of low-income people of all races. This multiracial solidarity was a promising development. Nearly 130 years later, it ... remains promising, as beautiful and elusive things do.
Midwestern history offers us visions more radical and more particular than these. In the early 19th century, Native American leaders and intellectuals from the modern-day Midwest, such as Tenskwatawa, Tecumseh, and later Black Hawk, helped create the idea of pan-Indian resistance to colonization — including the idea of “Native American” as a unified identity. Religious groups and social experimenters built communal would-be utopias all throughout the region in the 1830s and 1840s, some of which you can still visit (Amana, Iowa; New Harmony, Indiana). One historian credits Brooklyn, Illinois, with the distinction of being the first all-black town in America — a town founded on the idea, surely as radical in the 19th century as communism, that black Americans could be free.
The Midwest is also dotted with formerly radical and utopian communities, towns, villages, and colleges founded for the sole purpose of resisting the spread of slavery. If we see the auto industry as Midwestern, we should see the labor power that grew in that crucible as Midwestern too. The Movement for Black Lives, created in 2014 as a response to the national visibility of racist police brutality, is partly a Midwestern creation — it began with the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, grew at a Cleveland conference, and shut down a Minnesota airport terminal. The resistance white supremacist Richard Spencer met in Michigan was one of the reasons he scaled back his public appearances. Today, Immigration and Customs Enforcement struggles to find a Midwestern city that will let it build a detention camp because of Midwestern anti-racist and anti-fascist activism.
For Frederick Jackson Turner, the Midwest was the place where the nation on the leading edge of history found equilibrium. But it’s actually a site of ongoing, ever-changing political struggle. As Midwesterners think about how to live decently together in a warmer, more crowded place, it is this history, not the myth of their own banality, to which they need to turn. This history also helps us see the particularity of the place — which is to say, it makes it easier to see with love. At the same time, the squareness of the place, the repetition with slight variation, reminds us that each part of it, each person in it, is itself by the slenderest of chances. You feel, wandering the Midwest, like your town could have been any of these towns, like you could have been any of these people.
This feeling, like our history, points more than one way. It can make you ingrown, like a toenail: Why can’t I get the break I’m supposed to? But it can also cause you to think of those other selves: that poorer self, that queerer self, that darker self, that privileged self. It can tell you that you must try to care for all those selves as though they were you — as though you were made from the same soil and headed back to it. In this night-black, dirt-black dark, who even knows for sure who they are, who I am? Or who we might yet be?
Phil Christman is a writer and an English lecturer at the University of Michigan. His book Midwest Futures will be published in April.


vox--2020-03-25--I’m American, and I’m multilingual. Why does it feel so scary to speak in another language  in publi

I’m American, and I’m multilingual. Why does it feel so scary to speak in another language  in public?

I ’ m American , and I ’ m multilingual .
Why does it feel so scary to speak in @ @ @ @ @ Share All sharing options for : I ’ m American , and I ’ m @ @ @ @ @ feel so scary to speak in another language in public ?
Humor , political cartoons @ @ @ @ @ The Highlight , Vox ’ s home for features and longform journalism .
Terry Blas @ @ @ @ @ behind the autobiographical comics “ Ghetto Swirl , ” “ You Say Latino ” and @ @ @ @ @ Terry ’ s work has appeared in the comics Steven Universe , The Amazing World @ @ @ @ @ , and Rick and Morty .
His first graphic novel , Dead Weight : Murder @ @ @ @ @ a murder mystery set at a weight-loss camp .
His second graphic novel , Hotel @ @ @ @ @ sci-fi/fantasy/adventure inspired by his childhood memories of Mexico .

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vox--2020-03-25--Trump was asked an important question about the coronavirus. He responded by attacking the media.

Even as American coronavirus cases continue to spike to the point where hospitals are nearing the point of being overwhelmed , President Donald Trump continues to push for some sort of economic reopening by Easter .
But his reasons for thinking this is a good idea remain overtly political instead of based on the public good .
During the White House coronavirus news conference on March 24 , CBS reporter Paula Reid asked Trump to respond to the fact that experts “ on both sides of the aisle have said that reopening the country by Easter is not a good @ @ @ @ @ @ @ broadly agree that Trump ’ s Easter timeline is premature , given that the coronavirus outbreak is nowhere near under control in America and relaxing social distancing at this stage could make things even worse .
Trump , however , is undeterred .
Instead of addressing the substance of Reid ’ s question , he went on the attack against her and suggested experts who think his timeline is a bad idea are motivated by politics .
“ I think there are certain people that would like it to not open so quickly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that would like it to do financially poorly , because they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls , ” Trump said .
As Reid tried to ask a followup , Trump bulldozed her by saying , “ I think it ’ s very clear that there are people in your profession that write fake news .
You do.
” He added , absurdly , that “ you ’ re lucky that you have this group here right now for this problem , or you wouldn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” and then moved on without ever really responding to her question .
Reid ’ s question referenced a tweet Trump posted shortly before the press conference in which he bashed the “ LameStream Media ” for purportedly being the “ dominant force ” in trying to persuade him “ to keep our Country closed as long as possible ” because it might be “ detrimental to my election success.
” But as Reid alluded to , that assertion is at odds with the reality that not a single public health expert @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus task force , has endorsed his push to relax social distancing guidelines in time for churches to be packed on Easter .
“ The real people want to get back to work ASAP , ” Trump tweeted , even though polling released on March 25 indicates 74 percent of registered voters either somewhat or strongly support the imposition of even more stringent distancing measures than the ones currently prevailing in most states .
It appears Trump ’ s false claim that public opinion is behind his reckless push to prematurely relax social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lies that ’ s impervious to correction .
Just before he walked away from the podium on Wednesday , he repeated it , telling reporters that “ our country wants to get back to work.
” In reality , Americans would like his government to get the pandemic under control first .
Trump , however , seems to realize that the timeline necessary to do that puts his reelection hopes in jeopardy — even if he doesn ’ t want to admit as much .
The news moves fast .
To stay updated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and read more of Vox ’ s policy and politics coverage .

Even as American coronavirus cases continue to spike to the point where hospitals are nearing the point of being overwhelmed, President Donald Trump continues to push for some sort of economic reopening by Easter. But his reasons for thinking this is a good idea remain overtly political instead of based on the public good.
During the White House coronavirus news conference on March 24, CBS reporter Paula Reid asked Trump to respond to the fact that experts “on both sides of the aisle have said that reopening the country by Easter is not a good idea.” Indeed, public health experts broadly agree that Trump’s Easter timeline is premature, given that the coronavirus outbreak is nowhere near under control in America and relaxing social distancing at this stage could make things even worse.
Trump, however, is undeterred. Instead of addressing the substance of Reid’s question, he went on the attack against her and suggested experts who think his timeline is a bad idea are motivated by politics.
“I think there are certain people that would like it to not open so quickly, I think there are certain people that would like it to do financially poorly, because they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls,” Trump said.
As Reid tried to ask a followup, Trump bulldozed her by saying, “I think it’s very clear that there are people in your profession that write fake news. You do.” He added, absurdly, that “you’re lucky that you have this group here right now for this problem, or you wouldn’t even have a country left,” and then moved on without ever really responding to her question.
Watch:
"I think it's very clear that there are people in profession that write fake news. You do" -- asked about public health experts saying his push to reopen the country by Easter is a bad idea, Trump goes on the attack against a reporter pic.twitter.com/R04DBCuQxT — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 25, 2020
Reid’s question referenced a tweet Trump posted shortly before the press conference in which he bashed the “LameStream Media” for purportedly being the “dominant force” in trying to persuade him “to keep our Country closed as long as possible” because it might be “detrimental to my election success.” But as Reid alluded to, that assertion is at odds with the reality that not a single public health expert, including ones on his White House coronavirus task force, has endorsed his push to relax social distancing guidelines in time for churches to be packed on Easter.
“The real people want to get back to work ASAP,” Trump tweeted, even though polling released on March 25 indicates 74 percent of registered voters either somewhat or strongly support the imposition of even more stringent distancing measures than the ones currently prevailing in most states.
The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2020
It appears Trump’s false claim that public opinion is behind his reckless push to prematurely relax social distancing measures may become one of his lies that’s impervious to correction. Just before he walked away from the podium on Wednesday, he repeated it, telling reporters that “our country wants to get back to work.”
"Our country wants to get back to work," Trump says. In fact, polling released today indicates 74 of voters support even more stringent social distancing measures. pic.twitter.com/33DbwNRZKP — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 25, 2020
In reality, Americans would like his government to get the pandemic under control first. Trump, however, seems to realize that the timeline necessary to do that puts his reelection hopes in jeopardy — even if he doesn’t want to admit as much.
The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.


vox--2020-03-25--Liberty University’s choice to stay open during coronavirus, explained

On Sunday , Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. announced that unlike virtually all other colleges and universities in the United States , Liberty would soon be reopening and permitting thousands of students and faculty to return to campus — even as the coronavirus continues to rage and the city where the school resides discouraged the move .
“ I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here , who want to be here , who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends , to continue their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ ve already paid for and to not interrupt their college life , ” Falwell , Jr. said in an interview with a Richmond-area newspaper on Sunday .
To be sure , the abrupt closures enacted by thousands of other colleges and universities resulted in major problems for many , with international students and students in need of housing left scrambling as dorms closed and cafeterias shut .
But Liberty faculty have already been on campus during this time , asked to teach to empty rooms while the university — and Falwell @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the university ’ s coronavirus strategy to news outlets and to members of the university community .
While the university says that students will be taking all classes online , Falwell told ABC Tuesday that “ about one to two thousand ” students have returned to campus dorms and cafeterias — major gathering places where coronavirus could easily spread .
In short , the university will be both open and , according to Falwell Jr. , closed , “ more like an apartment complex than a university ” during this time .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confused and upset .
I reached out to Liberty University for comment and will update if and when I hear back .
As President Trump starts to voice a desire to return to some semblance of economic normalcy by Easter , the president of one of the largest Christian universities in the world ( and a major supporter of Trump ) is using his campus as a testing ground to prove that the pandemic is no real concern .
In a March 23 press release , Falwell Jr. said , “ Our thinking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them back as soon as we can ’ ” — despite a surge of coronavirus cases in the state of Virginia .
“ Ultimately , it ’ s a failure of leadership and communication , ” a Liberty University professor who wanted to remain anonymous told me .
“ Strange to me how so many are overreacting ” Liberty University is one of the world ’ s largest Christian universities , with roughly 15,000 students on campus but more than 95,000 students taking classes online .
Founded in 1971 by Falwell Jr. ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as Lynchburg Baptist College , the school has become a massive institution of higher learning with hundreds of graduate programs and colleges under its aegis .
But under the leadership of Falwell Jr. , who has served as the school ’ s president since 2007 , it ’ s also become a platform for advancing “ political evangelism.
” As I wrote last year : It ’ s important to remember that despite being often described as a Christian leader , Jerry Falwell Jr. never became a pastor — a fact he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while leading one of the largest Christian universities in the world .
According to the agreement made with his father , upon the Rev .
Jerry Falwell ’ s death in 2007 , Falwell Jr. took the helm of Liberty University while his brother , Jonathan , took over the church their father helped to found in 1956 , Thomas Road Baptist Church .
Falwell is also not shy about his fundraising efforts for the university , or his role within the world of what I ’ d call “ political evangelicalism ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with bare-knuckle politics in order to get evangelical priorities into law and evangelical politicians ( or politicians willing to accede to evangelical interests ) into office .
Falwell is also a longtime supporter of Donald Trump ( because of the president ’ s purported “ business acumen ” ) .
Because of that alliance during the 2016 presidential campaign , Falwell Jr. said that he was offered the role of secretary of education .
And it ’ s that fervent support for Trump that some believe may have influenced Falwell Jr. ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told Fox and Friends was both largely an overreaction by mainstream media and potentially a “ Christmas present ” from North Korea .
In an interview with Fox News radio host Todd Starnes , Falwell Jr. said , “ Shame on the media for trying to fan [ coronavirus ] up and destroy the American economy .
They ’ re willing to destroy the economy just to hurt Trump.
” On campus , Falwell Jr. and other leaders downplayed the pandemic during convocation on March 13 ( convocation is a mandatory assembly for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ referring to coronavirus as a “ flu ” and saying that Liberty would be remaining open while eschewing large gatherings .
“ I don ’ t see us doing the same thing other schools have done , ” Falwell Jr. said , referring to colleges and universities that had already closed in the wake of coronavirus .
“ You guys paid to be here , you wanted to be on campus , I wanted to give you what you pay for , ” he continued , while saying that students should be cautious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elderly .
While his recent rhetoric toward national outlets has been less dismissive of the virus — mirroring Trump ’ s shift on the issue — the messaging at Liberty has been incredibly mixed .
But as one faculty member I spoke to told me , students are in fact getting a clear message from the university : “ [ Coronavirus is ] not that serious or not as serious as the quote-unquote ‘ media ’ makes it out to be.
” “ I think faculty members are really just worn out by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the situation has been doubly challenging as they have been expected to continue teaching on campus even while students aren ’ t present in the classroom .
Marybeth Davis Baggett , a professor of English at Liberty , described the confusing situation in an op-ed for Religious News Service : In response , Falwell Jr. tweeted the page linking to Liberty ’ s coronavirus response while referring to her as “ the Baggett lady.
” And the guidance professors and faculty are receiving from the university seemingly changes by the hour , even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ himself .
For example , in interviews with CNN and ABC News , Falwell Jr. said that all faculty were working from home due to the pandemic , but I reviewed emails sent to faculty that clearly stated they needed to request permission and provide a rationale for why they should work from home rather in their on-campus offices .
My source told me that either Falwell Jr. is lying , or he hasn ’ t communicated the new guidance to faculty but has been more than willing to do so to media @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wondering if we are supposed to go in or now we can stay home.
” One faculty member said that this lack of clarity was par for the course at Liberty .
“ To be honest , that ’ s kind of how things go at Liberty .
It doesn ’ t work that well when there ’ s not a crisis , [ and ] it goes especially wrong when there is a crisis , we ’ re finding out .
Liberty does things on the fly .
”

On Sunday, Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. announced that unlike virtually all other colleges and universities in the United States, Liberty would soon be reopening and permitting thousands of students and faculty to return to campus — even as the coronavirus continues to rage and the city where the school resides discouraged the move.
“I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they’ve already paid for and to not interrupt their college life,” Falwell, Jr. said in an interview with a Richmond-area newspaper on Sunday.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is asking Liberty University to reconsider the decision to invite students back to campus. “I would suggest that President Falwell look to the actions of the leaders of Virginia’s flagship universities.” — Richard Chumney (@RichChumney) March 25, 2020
To be sure, the abrupt closures enacted by thousands of other colleges and universities resulted in major problems for many, with international students and students in need of housing left scrambling as dorms closed and cafeterias shut.
But Liberty faculty have already been on campus during this time, asked to teach to empty rooms while the university — and Falwell Jr. — give wildly differing stories about the university’s coronavirus strategy to news outlets and to members of the university community. While the university says that students will be taking all classes online, Falwell told ABC Tuesday that “about one to two thousand” students have returned to campus dorms and cafeterias — major gathering places where coronavirus could easily spread. In short, the university will be both open and, according to Falwell Jr., closed, “more like an apartment complex than a university” during this time. That incoherent strategy has left many at Liberty confused and upset. I reached out to Liberty University for comment and will update if and when I hear back.
As President Trump starts to voice a desire to return to some semblance of economic normalcy by Easter, the president of one of the largest Christian universities in the world (and a major supporter of Trump) is using his campus as a testing ground to prove that the pandemic is no real concern. In a March 23 press release, Falwell Jr. said, “Our thinking was, ‘Let’s get them back as soon as we can’” — despite a surge of coronavirus cases in the state of Virginia.
“Ultimately, it’s a failure of leadership and communication,” a Liberty University professor who wanted to remain anonymous told me.
“Strange to me how so many are overreacting”
Liberty University is one of the world’s largest Christian universities, with roughly 15,000 students on campus but more than 95,000 students taking classes online. Founded in 1971 by Falwell Jr.’s father, Rev. Jerry Falwell, as Lynchburg Baptist College, the school has become a massive institution of higher learning with hundreds of graduate programs and colleges under its aegis.
But under the leadership of Falwell Jr., who has served as the school’s president since 2007, it’s also become a platform for advancing “political evangelism.” As I wrote last year:
It’s important to remember that despite being often described as a Christian leader, Jerry Falwell Jr. never became a pastor — a fact he’s not shy about sharing even while leading one of the largest Christian universities in the world. According to the agreement made with his father, upon the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s death in 2007, Falwell Jr. took the helm of Liberty University while his brother, Jonathan, took over the church their father helped to found in 1956, Thomas Road Baptist Church. Falwell is also not shy about his fundraising efforts for the university, or his role within the world of what I’d call “political evangelicalism” — the effort to combine evangelical Christianity with bare-knuckle politics in order to get evangelical priorities into law and evangelical politicians (or politicians willing to accede to evangelical interests) into office.
Falwell is also a longtime supporter of Donald Trump (because of the president’s purported “business acumen”). Because of that alliance during the 2016 presidential campaign, Falwell Jr. said that he was offered the role of secretary of education.
And it’s that fervent support for Trump that some believe may have influenced Falwell Jr.’s decision-making regarding coronavirus, a pandemic he told Fox and Friends was both largely an overreaction by mainstream media and potentially a “Christmas present” from North Korea. In an interview with Fox News radio host Todd Starnes, Falwell Jr. said, “Shame on the media for trying to fan [coronavirus] up and destroy the American economy. They’re willing to destroy the economy just to hurt Trump.”
On Fox & Friends, Jerry Falwell Jr claims people are "overreacting" to coronavirus, the national response is "their next attempt to get Trump," and the virus itself is a North Korean bioweapon. pic.twitter.com/2JPuNBW7C3 — Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020
On campus, Falwell Jr. and other leaders downplayed the pandemic during convocation on March 13 (convocation is a mandatory assembly for students held twice a week), referring to coronavirus as a “flu” and saying that Liberty would be remaining open while eschewing large gatherings. “I don’t see us doing the same thing other schools have done,” Falwell Jr. said, referring to colleges and universities that had already closed in the wake of coronavirus.
“You guys paid to be here, you wanted to be on campus, I wanted to give you what you pay for,” he continued, while saying that students should be cautious about those with respiratory illnesses and the elderly. While his recent rhetoric toward national outlets has been less dismissive of the virus — mirroring Trump’s shift on the issue — the messaging at Liberty has been incredibly mixed.
But as one faculty member I spoke to told me, students are in fact getting a clear message from the university: “[Coronavirus is] not that serious or not as serious as the quote-unquote ‘media’ makes it out to be.”
“I think faculty members are really just worn out by all this”
And for faculty, the situation has been doubly challenging as they have been expected to continue teaching on campus even while students aren’t present in the classroom. Marybeth Davis Baggett, a professor of English at Liberty, described the confusing situation in an op-ed for Religious News Service:
Faculty and staff are also required to report, despite the fact that telecommuting options are readily available. As a Liberty faculty member, I have been told that my colleagues and I must conduct our classes from our offices, even though that instruction is now being delivered virtually. We are also expected to hold office hours and welcome students for face-to-face interaction.
In response, Falwell Jr. tweeted the page linking to Liberty’s coronavirus response while referring to her as “the Baggett lady.”
All the facts here were provided to @newsadvance reporter Richard Chumney more than 24 hours ago at his request. He thanked us but conveniently still has not published after claiming he was busy! Bet the “Baggett” lady is embarrassed now! https://t.co/nlmhyVCCO0 — Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) March 23, 2020
And the guidance professors and faculty are receiving from the university seemingly changes by the hour, even based on media appearances by Falwell Jr. himself.
For example, in interviews with CNN and ABC News, Falwell Jr. said that all faculty were working from home due to the pandemic, but I reviewed emails sent to faculty that clearly stated they needed to request permission and provide a rationale for why they should work from home rather in their on-campus offices. My source told me that either Falwell Jr. is lying, or he hasn’t communicated the new guidance to faculty but has been more than willing to do so to media outlets. “Now my colleagues are wondering if we are supposed to go in or now we can stay home.”
One faculty member said that this lack of clarity was par for the course at Liberty. “To be honest, that’s kind of how things go at Liberty. It doesn’t work that well when there’s not a crisis, [and] it goes especially wrong when there is a crisis, we’re finding out. Liberty does things on the fly.”