[PREVIEW] EXTINCTION OF QUIET

When I was about eight years old, I stood in a science museum staring up at a hologram of the Irish elk. One word sat beneath it: Extinct.I asked my stepdad what it meant.He said, “It’s gone forever.”At that age, I honestly thought if something was gone, you could just buy another one in a shop.Then I saw a picture of the dodo with the same label, and something in me shifted.As I grew older, and especially as a wildlife sound recordist, the meaning of extinction sank deeper. I realised it isn’t only about species disappearing—it can also be the disappearance of entire sound worlds.There was a time when Sundays were quiet.Shops closed, traffic slowed, and the world actually rested.Even towns felt like sanctuaries.Birdsong carried, wind moved without competition, and nature had a chance to be heard.Those Sundays are gone.And in a way, that quiet has become another subtle extinction.I often say that two-thirds of my archive is now effectively extinct—not because the animals are all gone, but because the conditions that shaped those recordings no longer exist. More people, more roads, more planes, more machinery, more intrusion into places that were once pristine.You can’t record today the way I could 30, 40, 50 years ago.Those clean dawn choruses, those insect nights without a highway’s hum—they have vanished.This is its own form of extinction.A slow, creeping one.The extinction of quiet.All we have left are the recordings.