Updating the U.S. environmental noise management strategy

Although the U.S., historically, provided considerable leadership for the world in developing environmental noise policies, this impetus has been lost and the U.S. environmental noise management strategy is sorely in need of modernization. Environmental noise continues to increase, leading to an ever-growing variety of negative effects on the population, including degradation of the quality of life (e.g., annoyance, sleep disturbance, etc.), physiological health effects and economic impacts. These problems can only be expected to increase in the future. Although there are legitimate issues being debated concerning the proper role of the federal government in efforts to control unwanted, deleterious environmental noise exposure, most would agree that significant improvements need to immediately be made in the U.S. environmental noise management strategy. This paper briefly examines some of the major issues that need to be addressed in developing a new noise management approach and provides some suggestions for how this might be accomplished.