What does nature sound like? Sonic approaches to inclusive strategies for environmentalism in the city
Originally presented at Process, Practice and Environmental Crisis, an online symposium and art exhibition on Feb 19, 2021. This is an adapted transcript of the presentation. The event was not recorded.
Abstract: Recording The Colour Green podcast with Julie’s Bicycle (2019) revealed several threads among insights from POC researchers, artists and activists. Firstly, people of colour approached the natural environment through its contributions to people and communities, rather than nature solely being something to be conserved. Secondly, majority of POC in the UK, living in cities, found the green spaces of the countryside inaccessible. Linking these with Steven Vogel’s (2015) research around how notions of absolute ‘nature’ functions as colonial discourse, and Luciana Parisi’s (2004) concept of the nature/culture divide, I argue that conventional discourse around ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ positions the built environment an aggressor to a nature in precarity. Consequently, it untethers POC from the environment and environmentalism at the expense of their lives and wellbeing. As urban agglomerations continue to expand, a practical environmentalism also demands that we not only protect the ‘nature’ that remains, but also seek a sustainable balance between nature and urbanism within cities. Drawing from my own practice working with sound, I extend the idea of sonic urbanism and listening to the city, to listening to nature in the city. Conventional sonic approaches texture our understanding of the city as overwhelming, digital, concrete, in contrast to the pure and calm natural environment. This mirrors my experience recording in green spaces in London, where we desired to record uninterrupted sounds of ‘nature’ and treated green spaces as sites for escape.
Hello everyone, and thank you to PPEC for having me here today. For the past couple of years I’ve been working with Julie’s Bicycle, which some of you might be familiar with — it’s a charity that supports environmental action in the arts and creative industries. With JB my work primarily relates to carrying out research and producing digital media, like podcasts and online content that connects climate action with culture. Elsewhere, I’m broadly interested in the relationship between nature, culture and technology in the context of postcolonial or decolonial thought, which I’ve been exploring through postgrad research, curating for various digital platforms, and in my own sound and music work.
From late 2018 to early 2019, I recorded The Colour Green podcast with Julie’s Bicycle. This was a series of conversations between Baroness Lola Young, and artists and activists of colour in the UK, centred around their relationship with the environment. These conversations revealed many amazing insights about how people of colour in the UK engage with the concept of nature, the environment and the climate crisis, and I highly encourage you to listen to the podcast to find out more. But my main focus today will be around the process of recording and editing the podcast itself, which was recorded outdoors in London, at a green space of the guest’s choice. Over the past few months, I revisited the podcasts as Julie’s Bicycle started gearing up to expand the Colour Green programme, and was able to listen back to these podcasts from a new perspective, approaching the sonic aspect of the podcasts a lot more critically. What I’ve been doing as a result of that is treating the podcasting process as piece of research in itself — looking back at it reflexively and critically — and what I would like to do now is bring you through the thought process behind the recording and editing of the podcast, and what that process can reveal about how we engage with the concept of nature on a sonic level, and the implications that has for a climate justice framework.
To start off, I’d like to play a short clip from a bonus episode where I spoke to Baroness Young about her motivations and experience behind recording the podcast. Here Lola touched on an idea which became very interesting to me, which is the idea of green spaces, especially green spaces in the city, as sites for escape.
The interesting thing about the episode with Lola is it was recorded in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and that actually wasn’t the first location we tried to record at. The first location we tried to record at was Broomfield Park, in Palmers Green, which you can hear her talking about in the clip. We changed locations because we couldn’t find anywhere to record at Broomfield Park where we would be shielded from the wind, only to go to Lincoln’s Inn and find that it was only slightly better, which you’ll really be able to hear in other parts of the recording, because that was just what the weather was like across London that day. And another thing came up at Lincoln’s Inn, which you can hear very clearly, was the sound of traffic and human conversation in the background, which was unavoidable at that location. This reflected the tension between the natural elements and human activity, which was captured in our desire to produce a somewhat authentic representation of our guests’ relationship with their local environment. This tension was present throughout the other episodes in the series. We would pause a lot to wait for airplanes to go by, for machinery to stop. When we recorded with the writer Ama Josephine Budge in Hampstead Heath, we had to pack up and run across the heath to a cafe because it started raining. And then, of course, at the cafe we faced other interruptions from people in our surroundings.
Going into the editing process — as I mentioned before, part of the reason why the podcast was recorded outdoors was to add another layer to our representation of our guests’ relationship with the environment. But what happens when we encounter things like airplanes, traffic, construction noise, other people’s footsteps and voices, things that expose the presence of human activity in the space that we’re in? What happens when nature itself makes it impossible to record because of things like strong wind and rainfall?
I spoke about the tension between the elements and human activity earlier. The idea behind there being a tradeoff, in a way, between the two, really boils down to both of these things being at odds with what we normally consider ‘good’ or ‘clear’ sound. So in the end, although some of these things made the final cut because they couldn’t be cut out without losing some great pieces of the conversation, there were a lot of adjustments made to try to minimise their volume, minimise the impact of the background noise. And also, favouring sounds like birdsong, for example, as a way of sonically signalling the presence of nature.
Of course, this was, in a way, a more ‘commercial’ project, in a sense. It wasn’t sponsored or anything like that, but it’s presented as a podcast and a series of interviews, rather than something like a field recording or artistic intervention, and this normally generates a stricter set of expectations around the quality of the sound recording, and around what you want to hear or not hear. But the process behind this still raises the question, of what constitutes the sound of nature, sound of the natural environment, and what doesn’t? What do you expect to hear in nature and what don’t you want to hear?
This brings us back to the idea of green spaces as a site for escape from the city, and what Lola was saying about crossing from the noise and air pollution of the North Circular Road into Broomfield Park. And many of the podcast speakers also spoke about this, about finding shelter or sanctuary away from the city, or from the stresses of daily life, in green spaces. Which is a very fair point to make, and I think most of us, including myself, can relate to that, because the city has been configured in such a way that it is so overwhelming, that when we think of the city, or machines or technology, it becomes this monster that is completely dissociated from nature.
In relation to sound, to me, I actually got really into this over the course of lockdown, where I was spending a lot of time in my garden, because like most other people I had nowhere else to go. It’s shielded by a lot of trees and vines, and at certain times, it really does feel as though I’m in this lush green space outside of the city. And then suddenly there’ll be a loud siren or a group of people shouting, and I’m reminded that I’m in the middle of Peckham, near the main road. So it got me thinking about the idea that visually, you can shape your environment to look a certain way, but sonically, there will always be elements that are out of your control, that will betray where you are outside of your immediate surroundings. At the same time, however, while the sound of traffic, for example, will signal to me that I’m still in the city, it also doesn’t take away from the fact that I’m also, at the same time, in nature.
In this way, I think sound becomes a great framework for thinking about the boundaries between nature, humans and technology. And in this case of the podcast, for me, reflecting on why certain sounds are acceptable or unacceptable when attempting to portray the natural environment, and moving forward, how this can be brought into a creative use of sound to reconfigure how we perceive the city in more sustainable ways, perhaps in the same way speculative fiction is adopted in literature and on screen.
Now, I want to connect this with climate justice, and explain the focus on the city and urban spaces, because the two ideas that we’re dealing with right now, which are about sound and audio, and about the nature-culture divide, each have very particular and relevant relationships to race and climate justice. First of all, I want to refer to some insights from Judy Ling Wong, who was another guest on the podcast. She spoke about her experiences as a co-founder of the Black Environment Network in the 80s, where a lot of the early conversations and research they engaged in to get a sense of how people of colour — or BAME, which was the main term being used in the UK at the time — related to the environment. Then, the mainstream environmentalist movement was focused on environmental conservation. In contrast, what the network’s research revealed was that most people of colour spoke about nature from the perspective of human engagement or cultivation of the environment. So their priorities lay in things like community gardens and food sovereignty.
So Judy raised a key point about how the mainstream environmental movement, especially at the time, was only concerned with nature, and not people. This left out many marginalised communities, not only people of colour, but generally people who couldn’t afford to, or had other priorities beyond volunteering for nature conservation. This is especially significant when you take into consideration another finding of BEN’s research, which is that the majority of people of colour in the UK lived in cities and found the countryside inaccessible, both in terms of physically being able to access the countryside because of constraints like time and transport, and also in terms of feeling unwelcome in the countryside. And a logical response to that is, you know, dismantling the barriers to accessing nature in the countryside.
But also, cities aren’t going to go away. And most people of colour are still going to be living in the city, whether or not they can access the countryside more easily or not. And so a big part of that is bringing nature to the city, understanding the city as something that can be valuable to our health and wellbeing, to food sovereignty, to community, across the board and not just in parks and nature reserves. So when you talk about nature as something that’s removed from human activity and the built environment, when you talk about nature and cities as separate entities that cannot exist in cohesion, it prevents people of colour from having any meaningful relationship with the environment.
There’s also a discursive dimension to this, where the idea that nature is something that’s pure and untouched by human activity actually functions as a colonising discourse. Steven Vogel has put together a great account of how treating the lands in North America as though they had not been changed by human activity — that indigenous communities had not been living in and with the land for generations — enabled European colonists to treat it as free real estate, and frame their actions as a civilising project. And that they did so not simply by ignoring indigenous peoples’ presence on the land, but by setting up the dichotomy between nature and human, and treating indigenous people as natural or wild in themselves, i.e. not human.
Carrying this forward to the present moment, many indigenous activists also talk about how conservation projects, in places like national parks for example, which legally prohibit any sort of action on the land, actually prevents them from helping cultivate the land — things like cutting back certain types of vegetation to help them grow back better, and so on. We often talk about needing to incorporate traditional or Indigenous ecological knowledge into approaches to climate crisis and to environmental stewardship, so I think it’s really worth thinking about what and how exactly we’re trying to protect when we talk about environmental conservation, because humans and nature don’t exist in isolation of each other.
I also want to briefly touch on the fact that there’s also a particular significance in thinking about these issues through the framework of sound and music, because they have significant roles in the cultural production in communities of colour, in indigenous communities and in communities in the global south, whether that’s in contemporary cultural production or in intangible cultural heritage like oral histories. I’m particularly interested in sound and music technologies and how they interact with posthumanist futurisms, and how they work to unsettle the boundaries between nature, human and machine in discourse and through creative practice, which are boundaries that are already unstable in the lived experience of a lot of people of colour.
There’s a lot to be said about the relationship sound and music have with race and regional or diasporic futurisms, especially because each geographic region or diaspora has a different discursive relationship with nature and technology. And I think that that’s more than we have the time to unpack right now. So I would say, there’s already a lot of scholarship out there about Afrofuturism and music. I’m personally more familiar with Sinofuturism, with East Asian subjectivity in relation to the nature/culture divide and how music plays into that, and I’d be happy to talk about that separately.
When we talk about speculative fiction in sound, one of the first things that really come to mind is sonic fiction, which is a term first used by Kodwo Eshun to discuss Afrofuturism and music. He approaches the idea of sonic fiction in different ways. First of all, using sonic fiction to theorise how many artists use futuristic speculation in the narratives that surround their music. Looking at this will offer insights into different methods the artists themselves use to approach speculative fiction through music.
But Eshun also uses sonic fiction as a method, in the sense that he actually generates his own futuristic narratives around certain artists or musical works, using a combination of musical analysis and self-reflection to create his own subjective interpretation of the work. I think this is pretty powerful and interesting — if you’re someone who’s working with sound, I’m sure you’ll have your own ideas and creative responses to climate crisis and climate justice using sound, or to bring it into your practice working with other formats like video and installation. But if not, Eshun’s idea of sonic fiction as method also enables you to engage with the subject by, for example, creatively imagining the narratives that surround pieces of music through your own subjective exploration, in ways that allow it to function as a speculative approach to sustainability. And if you’re listening to something through your headphones while going on a walk, letting that shape your experience of what you perceive through your other senses, especially visually.
I’m going to leave it at that, as something to think about: what it means to hear nature or hear the city, and how sound can be a really powerful tool for not only interpreting, but also structuring our relationship with our surroundings.
︎︎︎ Check out The Colour Green podcast