Exploring the environmental impacts of war through sound and listening: a study of the Russia-Ukraine war

Research examining the environmental impacts of war has neglected the relevance of sound. Scholarship addressing war and sound, moreover, has paid strikingly little attention to the sounds of more-than-human worlds (animals, rivers, forests). It has also thus overlooked the many studies, particularly within the field of ecology and related disciplines, exploring how sound can reveal crucial information about ecosystems. In putting these different bodies of literature into conversation, this interdisciplinary article – which focuses on the Russia-Ukraine war – has two core objectives. The first is to illustrate in a conflict context the significance of soundscape ecology – and to show how it can provide valuable acoustic insights into some of the many ways that war affects and harms more-than-human worlds. The second and related objective is to demonstrate that attentiveness to sound – which the field of environmental sociology has also neglected – is essential for fostering more relational and inclusive analyses of war that address the marginalisation of more-than-human worlds. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and soundscape recordings from Ukraine, the article ultimately links both of its objectives to environmental justice – thus bringing sound and silence squarely within the purview of environmental sociology.