ABSTRACT
If Chapters 1 and 2 ended by exploring how Lin's work can help us reperceive the environmental effects of climate change, this chapter will focus on a specific, overlooked aspect of the Confluence Project that performs this function: sound. Sound is a dominant motif of the installations and earthworks at all of the Confluence sites. The Confluence Project has created spaces where many of the sounds of Indigenous peoples and species have occurred, been performed, recorded, or made available to a broader public. Listening to these soundscapes yields a contrapuntal interpretation of shared ecological transformations. The sounds of rural industrialization produced along the Columbia River by railroad tracks and drawbridges, highways, cars, trucks, tourists, and park visitors must be heard contrapuntally as human phenomena that simultaneously produce the eerie silences of toxic plumes, pollution, and the slow quieting of species extinction. This chapter will argue that by calling attention to the soundscapes of the Columbia region, the Confluence Project sites encourage visitors to hear and see the courses of empire upon which the Anthropocene was built.
