Stop the noise!

When noise pollution is not making us sick and anxious, it is literally killing us. How do we turn it off?

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Environment, Politics, Science, Pollution, News, Katharine Mieszkowski, Environment & Science

June 25, 2008 | Henry Bean can't stand the sound of burglar alarms. He hates back-up beepers on trucks and bristles when garbage rigs grind up their fetid loads in the middle of the night, the noise reverberating off Manhattan's buildings. But Bean harbors special resentment for the oblivious car owners whose vehicles blare false alarms. "It bothers me that their cars can shout in my ear, not stop shouting, and I can't do anything about it," he says. "My pride can't handle it. I can't exist if I don't fight back in some way, however pathetically or ineffectually."

For years, Bean enacted small-scale revenge, breaking in to stop the alarms or letting air out of tires. One night in the early '90s, an alarm sounded for more than four hours outside his apartment at 97th Street and West End. By the time Bean broke into the car, the vehicle was covered with eggs, beer and tomatoes. "People inflicted their fury, but nobody did what I did, which is break the window, pop the hood and disconnect the battery cable," he says.

For his crime against private property, Bean was arrested. After a night in jail, and spending thousands on his legal defense, Bean was somewhat chastened, but not reformed. Just the other day, a car alarm started making a ruckus, and he confesses he confronted the blaring vehicle and "did some stuff to it," but won't be more specific than that.

Bean, who is in his early 60s, is a screenwriter, director, novelist and actor. He may be best known for his 2001 film "The Believer," about a 22-year-old Jew (Ryan Gosling) who becomes a Nazi skinhead, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. His real-life role as noise vigilante inspired "Noise," released in May, in which an upscale Manhattan lawyer (Tim Robbins) throws away his job, his marriage and his apartment in a quixotic quest to fight car alarms. In vain pursuit of a little quiet, the lawyer becomes "The Rectifier," waging a one-man war on the discordant urban soundscape, throttling offending cars. One scene shot at 97th and West End replicates Bean's own crime and trip to jail.

Despite a host of good reviews, in the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, "Noise" hasn't found a huge audience. But if the film won't set any box office records, it does spotlight a pervasive form of pollution that seems to escape our concern -- at our peril. Recent studies reveal that noise can be harmful to human health, just like water or air pollution, damaging not only hearing and sleep but raising our blood pressure to dangerous levels. According to the World Health Organization, noise pollution is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths a year.

In the city that never sleeps, noise is the No. 1 quality-of-life complaint. New York City's 311 hot line logged 350,000 complaints about racket in 2006, according to Arline Bronzaft, a psychologist who studies noise. In the '70s, Bronzaft did landmark research on how the noise of elevated train tracks hampered children's learning in nearby schools. Now a member of New York's Council on the Environment, she recently helped rewrite the city's noise code.

In July 2007, a new noise code went into effect, updating the old one for the first time in 30 years, and regulating construction noise, air-conditioner noise, garbage truck grinding and even music from bars and restaurants. Hey, taxi drivers! Horn honking is not permitted, except in situations of "imminent danger." Is the new code quieting things down out there? It's hard to say, but the complaining about noise has only gotten louder. In the 11 months following the new code's introduction, the city registered a 6 percent increase in noise complaints.

Modern cities can be so noisy that ornithologists have found birds warbling at the top of their lungs to be heard. Nightingales in Berlin have been documented singing up to 14 decibels louder than their counterparts in woody environs, in an attempt to make their songs audible above all the background noise. Yet the cacophony of modern life is hardly confined to metropolises like New York or Cairo, Egypt, where you literally have to shout on the street to make yourself heard.

In "Noise," Bean's protagonist and his family escape to the country for the weekend. Their getaway is besieged by a neighbor's farting leaf blower. Getting away from it all just isn't that easy.

"For 50 years, if people didn't like noise, and they had money, the solution has been: Move to the suburbs. Now we've made our suburbs noisy. They're no longer quiet refuges," says Les Blomberg, executive director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse in Montpelier, Vt. "We got our half-acre lots, and now we have our weed whacker, our leaf blower, our hedge trimmer, our riding lawn mower, and then we hop in our car and drive on four- and six-lane highways past thousands of other suburbs to our place of work, noise-polluting every place we pass."

But you don't have to be an anti-noise crusader to suffer physical effects from noise, even if you're sleeping right through it. Scientists at Imperial College London monitored the blood pressure of 140 sleeping volunteers who lived near London's Heathrow airport. They discovered that subjects' blood pressure rose when a plane few overhead even when the subjects remained asleep. A study of 5,000 45-to-70-year-olds living near airports for at least five years found that they were at greater risk of suffering from hypertension, aka high blood pressure, than their counterparts in quieter realms. People with high blood pressure have an increased risk of developing heart disease, stroke, kidney disease and dementia. In 2007, WHO estimated that long-term exposure to traffic noise may account for 3 percent of deaths from ischemic heart disease among Europeans.

Next page: Can we ever tune out the din?