Wilderness is not distant. We are continually immersed in it. It is there for us to imagine, to savor, and to protect.

It imagines that nature is something separate from humanity rather than something we exist within. “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home,”

As we push animals away, we get used to their absence. As the problem of sensory pollution grows, our willingness to address it subsides.

“seeing the world through the perceptions of the animals you’re trying to protect.”[*10]

As those species go extinct, so too do their Umwelten. With every creature that vanishes, we lose a way of making sense of the world.

We are closer than ever to understanding what it is like to be another animal, but we have made it harder than ever for other animals to be.

“We’re conducting an experiment on marine animals by exposing them to these high levels of noise, and it’s not an experiment we’d allow to be conducted on ourselves.”

They found that human activity has doubled the background noise levels in 63 percent of protected spaces, and increased them tenfold in 21 percent.

if the world switches to them from traditional yellow-orange sodium lights, the amount of global light pollution would increase by two or three times.