Why noise is more than just a “quality of life” issue

When it comes to public policy, the words we use matter. Too often, excessive noise is referred to as a “quality of life” issue — including by people such as Providence Mayor Brett Smiley who claim to know it’s far more than that: a public health issue, and a socio-environmental and environmental justice issue.

Describing noise as a quality-of-life issue is like calling unemployment a “cash flow” problem — i.e., an inconvenience or source of discomfort only for people without more essential issues to deal with. But in reality, unhealthy noise adversely affects everyone exposed to it, whether they know (or “like”) it or not.

Moreover, the term “quality of life” serves noise denialists’ efforts to portray unhealthy sound levels as an immutable but ancillary condition of urban living (like traffic, potholes, lack of parking, etc), and / or a personal lifestyle choice and entitlement for those who generate most of it. Noise is none of those things.

Because denialists cannot refute more than 50 years of scientific research documenting the adverse health effects of excessive noise, their only recourse is to ignore it — and try to deflect attention from those responsible for producing (and allowing) it — by dismissing it as a trivial concern of elite “others.”

But just like smoking and other forms of toxic air pollution, noise affects everybody — including and especially those who make (and are thus most exposed to) most of it. Its adverse health effects are not subject to personal preferences or long-term acclimation to it. Human physiology trumps individual will.

Thus, public officials such as Mayor Smiley and others who’ve acknowledged noise as a significant public-health issue, yet continue to refer to it as a quality-of-life concern, only serve to normalize and perpetuate the denialist framing of noise as (at worst) an inevitable and communal urban annoyance.

Instead, government officials and community leaders need to educate the public about the effects of excessive noise on everyone — particularly in marginalized communities, which are often more exposed to unhealthy sound levels than more affluent ones — and make clear that reducing noise isn’t a lifestyle choice of a few, but a public health necessity for us all, just as we do with other forms of toxic pollution.