When I sit to write this, I am hindered by the vibration of a neighbor’s television. Skittish, my heartrate quickens, my eyes dart around the page and I am increasingly agitated. Focus is lost and my mind consistently latches onto the annoying sound of the early morning news at full volume. Reluctantly, I put my headphones in and turn on white noise. I have spent most of my apartment-dwelling life getting stressed to tears over the sounds produced by my neighbors’ lack of awareness. I’ve been through it all — the neighbor that paces with shoes on at 3am, the one who sings along to Seal drunkenly on a Friday night, the children of the family of four who gallop through the space upstairs like the 1812 Calvary. And yes, I always talked to them about it. But it was affecting me, not them. So why should they stop?

It is this sensitivity to noise that stopped me in my tracks when I learned of the devastating effects of manmade noise on ocean life. Read To Save the Oceans, We Need to Quiet Down here.