Listening opens us to the wonders of communication and creativity. Listening also teaches us that we live in an age of diminishment.

Aesthetics—the appreciation and consideration of the perceptions of the senses—should therefore be central guides amid the convulsions of change and injustice that we live within. Yet we are increasingly disconnected from sensory, storied relationship to life’s community.

This rupture is part of the sensory crisis. We become estranged from both the beauty and brokenness of much of the living world. This destroys the necessary sensory foundation for human ethics. The crises in which we live, then, are not just “environmental,” of the environs, but perceptual. When the most powerful species on Earth ceases to listen to the voices of others, calamity ensues.

The vitality of the world depends, in part, on whether we turn our ears back to the living Earth. To listen, then, is a delight, a window into life’s creativity, and a political and moral act.

David George Haskell, ‘Sounds Wild and Broken’

Photo by David Marcu