 There is something sublime about early morning bird sound. A few days a year, it's nice to get out well before the dawn, whilst it's still black in the eastern sky, a very dark azure. And enjoy the sound, particularly in the spring. But there's something else that is increasingly ignored as part of our modern life. We worry about climate change, we worry about air pollution. But there's a pollutant very closely related to all of that. And that's noise. And the intrusion of noise into our environment, particularly the edge of urban areas, is something that needs to be looked at in detail, and we need to deal with this growing problem. I'm taking the quickest route possible to the edge of town, and I'm going to a very ancient route called Salt Way. The old Roman salt route, from Duitwich to Stratford-Ponaven, where it crosses the river Avon, and then to Bambry and often to Buckinghamshire, where the Romans used to take their salt to supply their towns there. And it's a very nice route, it's a piece of ancient hedgerow, very rich in birds. Unfortunately they're just developing a lot of new houses. And with all these new houses and the development that Bambry's experienced the last 40 to 50 years, the noise level is going up in the urban areas it's going up, but in the areas around town it's going up too. And that has quite a big impact on how you experience this wonderful spectacle of the dawn chorus in spring. Over the last 10 to 15 years a new field of study has arisen called Eco-Psychology, and this has been popularised by a number of books, most notably by Feodor Rozak. And even I wrote a handout on this as part of some work I did in the late 2000s called The Great Outdoors all about how camping can reconnect you with the outdoors. The heart of this work is the idea that humans have been separated from their environment and that a lot of the problems we have today, stress, anxiety, can be addressed or improved through greater contact with nature. What we see now though is a far greater level of detailed research looking at these ideas and finding that if people are exposed to birdsong and parks and green spaces, they have less anxiety, they have less stress. The recent paper published by Cox et al in Bioscience quite clearly outlines how they can demonstrate quantifiable associations for mental health improvement with the characteristics of nearby nature that people actually experience in their daily lives. And so when we look at the outdoors, what we can say is it has great value over and above landscape or a picturesque scene. It can contribute to the well-being of people in urban areas and we should protect it and look after it and steward it to maximise those opportunities. Recently the Commons Environment Law and Committee were looking at Heathrow and they made various observations about whether or not aircraft noise limits could be reached at Heathrow. The issue of noise was brought home to me in 2010 when the Effielli volcano in Iceland erupted. And I was walking out to the west of Bambri one day and there was something tangibly different, something really different about the landscape and then I realised there was no aircraft noise and it made such a difference. And as Bambri develops and as the M40 becomes more busy and all the feeder roads, the junction 11 become more busy it's having a perceptual effect on the environment around the town. But let's go back more than 20 years. There used to be a body called the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and when the coalition government came in in 2010 it was one of the first bodies to go in the bonfire of the crongos as they called it and after 30 years of service it was abolished. Back in 1994 they produced a report on transport and the environment and they were saying then that transport is causing great damage and they said the construction of new roads and airports to accommodate traffic is destroying irreplaceable landscapes and features of our cultural heritage. And in that report it had two maps and they showed the tranquility in the southeast and how it has changed between 1960 and 1992 and over that 30 year period a large part of the southeast has become less tranquil as the growth of both air traffic and road traffic has eroded the quality of the environment and that is having a great effect on how we can access the countryside and how we can have benefit from interaction with the natural environment. Dawn is getting nearer and nearer now, the sky is getting brighter and as that happens it's about quarter to seven and the cars are getting more numerous on the roads and you can start to hear all the way through you would have heard in the background a hiss, a noise most of that is the M40 and the feeder roads is the M40 but as we start to get towards rush hour you can hear more and more noise and so although there is bird song and appreciable bird song in the background you can hear the growing level of noise start to affect how we can perceive the spectacle of the dawn. Well that's it for today, we've enjoyed the dawn, now it's time to go home and start work unfortunately. But I hope you enjoyed it, I hope you enjoyed bird song and I hope the noise didn't distract too much. If you look online you'll find more about the issues I've raised in this short video and links to all the material I've referenced in it. I hope what you've seen in this video will make you get out the house before dawn of a spring morning and experience the full beauty of the dawn.