The American Environmental Movement’s Lost Victory: The Fight against Sonic Booms Available to Purchase

Political contestation over sound can take many forms, with profound consequences for the aural environment. One example is found in the battles over the sonic booms associated with the US government’s supersonic transport (SST) program in the 1960s and early 1970s—a program that had it been realized, would have filled the everyday soundscape with thunderous sonic blasts. This article analyzes the individuals and groups who mobilized against sonic booms and the SST and the activists’ unlikely success over the SST in 1971. Today, this victory stands as an important, if largely forgotten, victory of the early environmental movement.