Latest Gordon Hempton Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I'm in love with Earth. I truly am. And so listening is not work, to work toward a better future. It's joy. To not be able to work toward a better future would be work. That would be tough.

  Gordon Hempton

  Joy, Listening, Earth

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I'm very thankful, hearing impairment or not, that I've brought listening into my life. I will never say that I'm a good listener, however. Thinking that I was a good listener was one thing that kept me from being a good listener. It's a very dangerous thought. I just want to be better.

  Gordon Hempton

  Thinking, Listening, Dangerous

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If you're going to listen, you have to be willing to be changed by what you've heard. My life has gone through so many changes. I'm sixty-two years old right now, and I'm as busy changing now as I was when I was a teenager, or in my twenties. Every day is different. Every day brings new information.

  Gordon Hempton

  Teenager, Different, Busy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I would say that to listen is to become aware. To become truly informed. You will discover whatever you do.

  Gordon Hempton

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• You can listen to a birdsong, and from the content of the birdsong, you will be able to determine whether or not the bird grew up in a noise-polluted environment or whether it grew up in a pristine, clean environment. Isn't that incredible?

  Gordon Hempton

  Bird, Environment, Incredibles

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The birds are already evolving, changing the way that they sing as a result of noise pollution. And we have yet to do that. We're still not communicating. We're not changing our words. We are not testing, not providing this new lexicon for noise-polluted areas.

  Gordon Hempton

  Bird, Pollution, Evolve

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The most important thing for our species is, before it speaks, to listen to its environment. That has a higher priority in any species' survival. We need to be listening to our environment - in other words, restoring the quiet - not just to our natural areas, but also to towns like Portland, Maine.

  Gordon Hempton

  Priorities, Listening, Survival

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The most sensitive frequencies are at the resonant frequencies of the auditory canal. In other words, the ear has shaped itself to naturally amplify certain bandwidth. And that corresponds to sounds in that bandwidth that were most important to our evolving ancestors to hear, in order to survive. And it doesn't match the human voice. It matches birdsong.

  Gordon Hempton

  Important, Sensitive, Evolve

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I believe that our distant nomadic ancestors came forward and survived because they could hear distant, faint birdsong as an acoustic navigational beacon, if you will, and by moving toward the birdsong, they were able to find places with shelter, food, and water, and a prosperous growing region. Indeed, birdsong is the number one indicator of habitats prosperous to humans.

  Gordon Hempton

  Believe, Moving, Water

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I used to hate the urban environment and the urban din. But I realize now that it's really not that much different than living next to a waterfall for wildlife. Most wildlife - unless they're specifically adapted - avoid being around a waterfall or whitewater streams and rivers because it jams their sense of surveillance. They are more vulnerable, and their message loses intelligibility. Now, the ouzel is able to overcome that in various ways. Back to the urban environment, we're talking and delivering messages as if we weren't next to a waterfall, and that's a problem.

  Gordon Hempton

  Hate, Overcoming, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Not only does the modern person often think that sight is more important than sound - there's no objective evidence to indicate that. Many people, even audiologists who study the science of human speech and hearing, have assumed for a long time that the human ear evolved to hear the human voice, rather than the voice changing to fit the human ear. And the human ear is actually not a perfect match if we map its sensitivity to the different frequencies in the human range of hearing; it's an unequal curve, it's kind of a wavy line.

  Gordon Hempton

  Thinking, Long, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• We think the problem is out there, when the problem is really in here - who we are and how we experience the world around us. The acoustic ecologist listens, as the primary sense, to the world around us, and I believe that they have a significant contribution to make to all environmental groups who think that they're solving environmental problems, when we're actually all on a spiritual pilgrimage.

  Gordon Hempton

  Spiritual, Believe, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The earth has continued to change, from rapid climatic changes that have caused the glaciers and the ice sheets to basically bulldoze the landscape and cause species compression in the tropics and cause mass species extinction - you know, all these huge changes. In terms of evolution, every species is doomed to eventual extinction. The natural world is constantly changing. So, to deal with "environmental problems," in quotes, totally misses the issue. That is not the way we want to define our problem if we're going to find our solution.

  Gordon Hempton

  Missing, Environmental, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Many environmentalists have failed to recognize that the preservation of quiet areas, places off-limits to noise pollution, should probably be a number-one environmental concern, not something we're going to get to later. And I say that because in that quiet is a whole experience that people can have that reaches to their soul. I like to think of quiet places in nature as the think tank of the soul. It's in these very basic levels that we'll be able to see what the real problem is.

  Gordon Hempton

  Real, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When you listen to nature, it may still be difficult to live a life, but it's inspiring.

  Gordon Hempton

  Difficult

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Often how you define the problem will determine whether or not you're able to find a real solution.

  Gordon Hempton

  Real, Problem, Determine

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• You don't really need to engage your visual sense, because the natural wiring of the human psyche is to monitor the environment through sound, not through sight. But we're convinced through modern conditions that we have to look at everything, and that creates stress in our life, because we're trying to solve problems in ways that are much more time consuming, not efficient, and not fun.

  Gordon Hempton

  Fun, Stress, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I've never really understood how people cannot value the future, or think that the world is going down a fast slippery slope of degradation. No, I don't think so; this is just what it's going to take to wake us up, and allow us to do what our ancestors did. You know, our ancestors brought us here by tooth and claw. A lot of people perished, a lot of pre-humans perished. Life has never been easy. Why should it be easy for us?

  Gordon Hempton

  Thinking, People, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When we listen, it's not linear, it's 360, and it's in a time-space continuum, so you don't have to create a list of priorities, because it's all important. You can deal with everything at any given time. Not only that, but it happens very simply, without effort.

  Gordon Hempton

  Effort, Priorities, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If you're listening to a symphony, you're getting all the information, including the audience around you, the delay from the sides of the concert hall, the whole thing. If one of those musicians is sharply out of tune or starts to play a different piece of music than all the others in the orchestra, you immediately notice. When you analyze systems by listening, you can just listen, and you can tell whether the system is healthy or unhealthy. What I've created for you is a perfect model of how we should be listening to our stock market, rather than trying to see it graphically.

  Gordon Hempton

  Perfect, Healthy, Listening

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The normal way of gathering information is through sound: when you hear information that you want to gather, you look in its direction, you see what it is, if you choose you can get closer, you can see it, you can touch, and then, finally, the most committed form of data gathering is to taste it and eat it. But for the urbanite, we're cut off from our primary sense, and I want to stress that - our primary sense of gathering information about the place that we're living in - and instead, we're in a war zone.

  Gordon Hempton

  War, Stress, Cutting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• What visual information does is it creates priorities. You cannot know with certainty what lies behind something else. There are very few transparent materials in the natural world or the built environment. And so we deal with things superficially, and we deal with what's in front of us, not what's behind our head that we can't see, or to the left or the right. Visualists are often linear and timeline-oriented, whereas the natural condition and the natural way of problem-solving throughout evolution is to be multitasking.

  Gordon Hempton

  Lying, Priorities, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Acoustic ecology is the study of information systems: the shared acoustic environment and how species send and receive messages in this shared acoustic environment. What these messages mean - meaning, what are the consequences and the changes of behavior in any species. And it has as much to do with us individually and biologically as it does with the shaping of cultures and beliefs.

  Gordon Hempton

  Mean, Culture, Belief

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• How are we going to know what sounds are important before we've even heard those sounds? It's an absurd question. The only thing we can say is that we're going to base it on our past experience. In other words, modern listening doesn't inform us of anything new. It simply keeps us in the past.

  Gordon Hempton

  Past, Listening, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The Hoh Valley is an incredibly secure area. Any event occurs around us, we will instantly become informed of that event. This can even happen at a distance. When the body recognizes that you have a very large listening area, and you're getting all the information, the body relaxes. You can breathe more gently, the cortisol levels that are created by stress in our bloodstream dissipate, and we actually become healthier. And as a result, if we are actually fortunate enough to live in a place like that, we will live longer.

  Gordon Hempton

  Distance, Stress, Listening

  Source: www.guernicamag.com