□ For more than two decades, we at The Mother have maintained our famed list of Natural Tranquility Reserves — rare places on Earth where one might sit for hours and hear no sounds but those of wilderness.

Our thirty million worldwide subscribers have led in vigilantly protecting these reserves. All it takes is a single thoughtless act, by air traffic planners for instance, to convert a precious sanctuary into yet another noisy, noisome place, ruined by the raucous clamor of humanity.

Unfortunately, even so-called “conservation-oriented” officials still seem obsessed by archaic, TwenCen views of preservation. They think it’s enough to save a few patches of forest here and there from development, from chemical leaks or acid rain. Even when they succeed, however, they celebrate by opening hiking trails and encouraging ever higher quotas of sightseers, who predictably leave litter, trample root systems, cause erosion, and worst of all jabber at the top of their lungs in gushing excitement over “being one with nature.”

It’s surprising the few animals left can find each other amid the bedlam, to breed.

Excluding Greenland and Antarctica, seventy-nine Tranquility Reserves were reported in our last roundup. We’re now sad to report that two failed this year’s test. At this rate, soon there will be no terrestrial silence zones left at all.

And our Oceania correspondents report matters growing worse there, as well. Too many landlubbers seem to be heading off the standard shipping lanes — vacationers who seek out nature’s serenity, but in so doing bring to silent places the plague of their own voices.

(And then there is that catastrophe the Sea State, perhaps better left unmentioned here, lest we despair entirely!)