More than double the world population now preoccupies urban areas. On a day to day life, we might not notice how our life has been bombarded with stressful noise. This leads to noise pollution which is caused by a wide range of sounds that are beyond the level which human ears can withstand. The honking from the traffic jam, the drilling, and machinery sounds in construction sites, the roaring motorcycles, and motor vehicle sounds seem omnipresent in the modern world. Being said, excessive exposure to noise on a daily basis can have adverse effects on humans even though noise is not deadly or threatening, so we think we can put up with it.
Studies have found that higher chances of getting mental fatigue, stress, and high blood pressure are prevalent in people who live near an airport. Aviation noise can take its toll on people of any age since it can disturb our recreation, sleep, and communication, lead to poor concentration, and at worst, can result in hearing impairment. Generally, the noise does not only disturb people but also hinders the natural life cycle of animals such as birds, insects, frogs and etc. The sound with higher intensity can interfere with their nature to carry out biological activities such as mating, finding food, migrating, and protecting themselves from avoiding predators. Due to the noise, it can mask all the natural sounds which animals have to depend on. For instance, there might be preys that are trying not to lose sight of predators by listening to their sounds. When the human-made noise gets in the way, preys can lose their capability to differentiate between the two sounds. In this way, they are more likely to end up being eaten or caught by predators.
The tips that I recently learned to alleviate the noise around us are to consider wearing ear protectors such as earplugs or to switch to noise-canceling earphones that are designed to filter out the external noise. Even if you happen to be in a noisy environment with lots of activities, earplugs enable the noise to die down so that you can still communicate well with people. We can also opt for cycling or walking rather than joining the busy transit. By doing so, it will be killing two birds with one stone by mitigating an individual carbon footprint as well as noise pollution. The future is promising and uncertain at the same time since we don't know what it has in store for us even within the next five to ten years. If it's lucky, we will be able to see that fossil fuels vehicles will be entirely replaced with electric ones in the near future. That will potentially bring about a huge drop in carbon emissions as well as noise pollution.
P.S The image of this article belongs to the rightful owner:
Link to my previous article: the problem with loudspeakers (one of the contributing factors to noise pollution). Thanks for reading.
https://journaly.com/post/195
Great post. I like the idea of using earphones with noise cancelling, but I guess they're quite expensive and not everybody can afford them. It's better to deal with the root cause rather than trying to mitigate it's effects. Luckily, the future is promising as you wrote, so hopefully our children won't even know the term 'noise pollution'.