As part of this year’s Climate Forward conference, the team wanted to find a new way for attendees to understand how our planet is changing. Producer Evan Roberts talked to scientists and researchers who are capturing natural soundscapes before they change forever.
The Climate Forward team compiled the work of three field recordists to create an audio installation, called the Sounds of Climate Change. This soundscape offers a sonic tour of the Amazon rainforest.
Izabela Dluzyk, a field recordist originally from Poland, grew up memorizing bird calls and listening closely to sparrows. Inspired by a fascination with parrots, she crowd-funded her way to the Tambopata National Reserve in Peru to record the dusk and dawn symphonies of the rainforest.
Blind since birth, Ms. Dluzyk was accompanied into acoustically lush areas of the Amazon by her brother and her Amazonian guide. She captured a thunderous ritual of macaws gathering at eroding clay banks along the Tambopata River, eating the sodium-rich soil that is essential to their health and to raising their chicks.
But years of severe droughts threaten to disrupt that delicate balance and turn the sound-rich canopy into grassland. “Rainforests are so fragile,” Ms. Dluzyk said. “ We need to become fascinated with what we can hear.”
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