" Our culture associates noise with power and progress. Former Interior Secretary James Watt (who sought to close the EPA’s Office of Noise Control in the 1980s) thought that the more noise we made as a country, the more powerful we appeared. Physically, "noise" is wasted power for it represents wasted sound (that delivers little useful information), and wasted energy (because electromechanical generation emits heat). But psychologically, we perceive noise as proportional to power and therefore enviable. The bigger and noisier the Harley, the better. "

― , Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday