Preserving Silence in National Parks

A Battle Against Noise Aims to Save Our Natural Soundscapes

  • By Garret Keizer
  • Smithsonian.com, August 06, 2008, Subscribe
 
Colorado River in the Grand Canyon A group of boaters make their way down the peaceful Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

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    The preservation of natural sounds in our national parks is a relatively new and still evolving project. The same can be said of our national parks. What Wallace Stegner called "the best idea we ever had"* did not spring full grown from the American mind. The painter George Catlin first proposed the park idea in 1832, but it was not until 1872 that Yellowstone became the first of our current 391 parks. Only much later did the public recognize the park's ecological value; the setting aside of Yellowstone had more to do with the preservation of visually stunning natural monuments than with any nascent environmentalism. Not until 1934, with the establishment of Everglades, was a national park instituted for the express purpose of protecting wildlife. And not until 1996 was Catlin's vision of a prairie park of "monotonous" landscape, with "desolate fields of silence (yet of beauty)," realized in Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas.

    As one more step in this gradual evolution, the Park Service established a Natural Sounds Program in 2000 with the aim of protecting and promoting the appreciation of park soundscapes. It would be a mistake to think of this aim as having originated "on high." In a 1998 study conducted by the University of Colorado, 76 percent of the Americans surveyed saw the opportunity to experience "natural peace and the sounds of nature" as a "very important" reason for preserving national parks.

    But noise in parks, as in society at large, is on the rise—to the extent that peak-season decibel levels in the busiest areas of certain major parks rival those of New York City streets. Airplanes, cars, park maintenance machinery, campground generators, snowmobiles, and personal watercraft all contribute to the general commotion. The more room we make for our machines, the less room—and quiet—we leave for ourselves.

    *Apparently Stegner was not the first to think so.  In 1912 James Bryce, the British ambassador to the United States, said that "the national park is the best idea American ever had."

    __________________________

    Several times I heard park officials refer to the Natural Sounds office in Fort Collins, Colorado, as "Karen Trevino's shop," a good description of what I found when I stepped through the door. Cases of sound equipment—cables, decibel meters, microphones—were laid out like a dorm room's worth of gear on the hallway carpet, not far from several bicycles that staffers, most of them in their 20s, ride to work. A few members of the team were preparing for several days of intensive work out in the field. As animated as any of them was Karen Trevino.

    "If the mayor of New York City is trying to make what people expect to be a noisy place quieter," she said, referring to the Bloomberg administration's 2007 revision of the city noise code, "what should we be doing in places that people expect to be quiet?" 

    As a step toward answering that question, Trevino and her crew calibrate sound level information and convert it into color-coded visual representations that allow a day's worth of sound levels, and even an entire park's sound profile, to be seen at a glance. (Probably by the beginning of 2009 readers will be able to see some of these profiles at http://www.westernsoundscape.org.) The technicians also make digital sound recordings to develop a "dictionary" by which these visual depictions can be interpreted. Much of their research is focused on creating plans to manage the roughly 185,000 air tours that fly over our parks each year—a major mandate of the National Parks Air Tour Management Act of 2000. The team is currently working on its first proposal, for Mount Rushmore, a 1200 acre unit with 5600 air tour overflights a year. Franklin Roosevelt once called this park "the shrine of democracy."

    "When you think about it," Trevino says, "what's the highest tribute we pay in this country—really, in the world—of reverence and respect? A moment of silence. Now, that said, nature isn't silent. It can be very noisy. And people in parks aren't quiet all the time." Neither are things like cannon in a historical park like Gettysburg—nor should they be, according to Trevino. "Our job from a public policy standpoint is asking what noises are appropriate, and if they're appropriate, are they at acceptable levels?"

    Trevino sees this as a learning process, not only for her young department but also for her. Some of what she's learned has passed to her private life. Recently she asked her babysitter to stop using the terms "indoor voice" and "outdoor voice" with her young children. "Sometimes it's perfectly appropriate to scream when you're indoors and to be very quiet when you're outdoors," she says.

    ____________________________________________________

    Though much remains to be done, the Park Service has already made significant progress in combating noise. A propane-fueled shuttle system in Zion National Park has reduced traffic jams and carbon emissions and also made the canyon quieter. In Muir Woods, library-style "quiet" signs help keep the volume down; social scientists have found (somewhat to their surprise) that the ability to hear natural sounds—15 minutes away from San Francisco and in a park celebrated mostly for the visual magnificence of its trees—ranks high with visitors. In Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, which have a major naval air station to the west and a large military air training space to the east, park officials take military commanders on a five-day "Wilderness Orientation Overflight Pack Trip" to demonstrate the effects of military jet noise on visitor experience in the parks. Before the program started in the mid-1990s, rangers reported as many as 100 prohibited "low flier" incidents involving military jets every year. Now the number of planes flying less than 3000 feet above the ground surface is a fourth to a fifth of that. Complaints are taken seriously, especially when, as has happened more than once, they're radioed in by irate military commanders riding on jet-spooked pack horses on narrow mountain trails. In that context, human cursing is generally regarded as a natural sound.


    The preservation of natural sounds in our national parks is a relatively new and still evolving project. The same can be said of our national parks. What Wallace Stegner called "the best idea we ever had"* did not spring full grown from the American mind. The painter George Catlin first proposed the park idea in 1832, but it was not until 1872 that Yellowstone became the first of our current 391 parks. Only much later did the public recognize the park's ecological value; the setting aside of Yellowstone had more to do with the preservation of visually stunning natural monuments than with any nascent environmentalism. Not until 1934, with the establishment of Everglades, was a national park instituted for the express purpose of protecting wildlife. And not until 1996 was Catlin's vision of a prairie park of "monotonous" landscape, with "desolate fields of silence (yet of beauty)," realized in Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas.

    As one more step in this gradual evolution, the Park Service established a Natural Sounds Program in 2000 with the aim of protecting and promoting the appreciation of park soundscapes. It would be a mistake to think of this aim as having originated "on high." In a 1998 study conducted by the University of Colorado, 76 percent of the Americans surveyed saw the opportunity to experience "natural peace and the sounds of nature" as a "very important" reason for preserving national parks.

    But noise in parks, as in society at large, is on the rise—to the extent that peak-season decibel levels in the busiest areas of certain major parks rival those of New York City streets. Airplanes, cars, park maintenance machinery, campground generators, snowmobiles, and personal watercraft all contribute to the general commotion. The more room we make for our machines, the less room—and quiet—we leave for ourselves.

    *Apparently Stegner was not the first to think so.  In 1912 James Bryce, the British ambassador to the United States, said that "the national park is the best idea American ever had."

    __________________________

    Several times I heard park officials refer to the Natural Sounds office in Fort Collins, Colorado, as "Karen Trevino's shop," a good description of what I found when I stepped through the door. Cases of sound equipment—cables, decibel meters, microphones—were laid out like a dorm room's worth of gear on the hallway carpet, not far from several bicycles that staffers, most of them in their 20s, ride to work. A few members of the team were preparing for several days of intensive work out in the field. As animated as any of them was Karen Trevino.

    "If the mayor of New York City is trying to make what people expect to be a noisy place quieter," she said, referring to the Bloomberg administration's 2007 revision of the city noise code, "what should we be doing in places that people expect to be quiet?" 

    As a step toward answering that question, Trevino and her crew calibrate sound level information and convert it into color-coded visual representations that allow a day's worth of sound levels, and even an entire park's sound profile, to be seen at a glance. (Probably by the beginning of 2009 readers will be able to see some of these profiles at http://www.westernsoundscape.org.) The technicians also make digital sound recordings to develop a "dictionary" by which these visual depictions can be interpreted. Much of their research is focused on creating plans to manage the roughly 185,000 air tours that fly over our parks each year—a major mandate of the National Parks Air Tour Management Act of 2000. The team is currently working on its first proposal, for Mount Rushmore, a 1200 acre unit with 5600 air tour overflights a year. Franklin Roosevelt once called this park "the shrine of democracy."

    "When you think about it," Trevino says, "what's the highest tribute we pay in this country—really, in the world—of reverence and respect? A moment of silence. Now, that said, nature isn't silent. It can be very noisy. And people in parks aren't quiet all the time." Neither are things like cannon in a historical park like Gettysburg—nor should they be, according to Trevino. "Our job from a public policy standpoint is asking what noises are appropriate, and if they're appropriate, are they at acceptable levels?"

    Trevino sees this as a learning process, not only for her young department but also for her. Some of what she's learned has passed to her private life. Recently she asked her babysitter to stop using the terms "indoor voice" and "outdoor voice" with her young children. "Sometimes it's perfectly appropriate to scream when you're indoors and to be very quiet when you're outdoors," she says.

    ____________________________________________________

    Though much remains to be done, the Park Service has already made significant progress in combating noise. A propane-fueled shuttle system in Zion National Park has reduced traffic jams and carbon emissions and also made the canyon quieter. In Muir Woods, library-style "quiet" signs help keep the volume down; social scientists have found (somewhat to their surprise) that the ability to hear natural sounds—15 minutes away from San Francisco and in a park celebrated mostly for the visual magnificence of its trees—ranks high with visitors. In Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, which have a major naval air station to the west and a large military air training space to the east, park officials take military commanders on a five-day "Wilderness Orientation Overflight Pack Trip" to demonstrate the effects of military jet noise on visitor experience in the parks. Before the program started in the mid-1990s, rangers reported as many as 100 prohibited "low flier" incidents involving military jets every year. Now the number of planes flying less than 3000 feet above the ground surface is a fourth to a fifth of that. Complaints are taken seriously, especially when, as has happened more than once, they're radioed in by irate military commanders riding on jet-spooked pack horses on narrow mountain trails. In that context, human cursing is generally regarded as a natural sound.

    Sometimes the initiative to combat noise has come from outside the park system. Rocky Mountain National Park, for example, has the distinction of being the only one in the nation with a federal ban on air tour over-flights, thanks mostly to the League of Women Voters chapter in neighboring Estes Park. Park Planner Larry Gamble took me to see the plaque the League erected in honor of the natural soundscape. It was in the perfect spot, with a small stream gurgling nearby and the wind blowing through the branches of two venerable aspens. Gamble and I walked up a glacial moraine to a place where we heard wood frogs singing below us and a hawk crying as it circled in front of snow-capped Long's Peak. But in the twenty minutes since we'd begun our walk, Gamble and I counted almost a dozen jets, all in audible descent toward the Denver airport. I'd flown in on one of them the day before.

    The most intractable noise problem in our national parks comes from the sky. The reasons for this are both acoustical, in terms of how sound propagates from the air, and political. The skies above the parks are not managed by parks. All commercial air space in the US is governed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which has a reputation for safeguarding both its regulatory prerogatives and what is often referred to in aviation parlance as "the freedom of the skies." Passengers taking advantage of that freedom in the United States numbered around 760 million last year. But much of the controversy about aircraft noise in our parks has centered on air tours.

    A twenty-year dispute over air-tours above the Grand Canyon has involved all three branches of the federal government and, for protraction and difficulty, makes the court case in Bleak House look like a session with Judge Judy. A breakthrough seemed likely when the Grand Canyon Working Group, which includes representatives of the Park Service, the FAA, the air tour industry, environmental organizations, tribal leaders, and other affected parties, eventually managed to agree on two critical points. First, the Park Service's proposal that "the substantial restoration of natural quiet" called for in the 1987 Grand Canyon Overflights Act meant that 50 percent or more of the park should be free of aircraft noise 75 percent or more of the time (with no limits established for the other 50 percent). They also agreed on the computer model of the park's acoustics that would be used to determine if and when those requirements had been met. All that remained was to plug in the data.

    The results were startling. Even when air tour overflights were factored out entirely, the model showed that only 2 percent of the park was quiet 75 percent of the time, due to noise from hundreds of daily commercial flights above 18,000 feet. In other words, air tours could be abolished altogether and the park would still be awash in the noise of aviation. Those findings came in over two years ago. The Park Service has since redefined the standard to apply only to aircraft flying below 18,000 feet. The Working Group has yet to meet this year.

    ____________________________________________________

    Noise can be characterized as a minor issue. The pollution of a soundscape is hardly as momentous as the pollution of the seas. But the failure of an animal to hear a mating call—or a predator—over a noise event is neither insignificant nor undocumented. (One 2007 study shows the deleterious effects of industrial noise on the pairing success of ovenbirds; another from 2006 shows significant modifications in the "antipredator behavior" of California ground squirrels living near wind turbines.) On the human side, the inability of a park visitor to hear 10 percent of an interpretative talk, or the inability to enjoy natural quiet for fifteen minutes out of an hour's hike—as the Grand Canyon plan allows—does not mean that the visitor understood 90 percent of the presentation or that the hiker enjoyed her remaining forty-five minutes on the trail.

    In dismissing the effects of noise, we dismiss the importance of the small creature and the small human moment, an attitude with environmental and cultural costs that are anything but small. Not least of all we're dismissing intimacy: the firsthand knowledge and love of living things that can never come exclusively through the eye, the screen, the windshield—or on the run. This struck home for me in a chat with several members of the League of Women Voters in a noisy coffee house in Estes Park, Colorado. I'd come to learn more about the air tour ban over Rocky Mountain National Park and ended by asking why the park and its natural sounds were so important to them.

    "Many people just drive through the park," said Helen Hondius, straining to be heard above the merciless grinding of a latte machine, "so for them it's just the visual beauty." For Hondius and her friends, however, all of whom walk regularly over the trails, the place needed to be heard as well as seen. "It's like anything else," Lynn Young added, "when you take the time to enjoy it, the park becomes a part of what you are. It can shape you."

    Robert Manning of the University of Vermont has worked with the park system for three decades on issues of "carrying capacity"—the sustainable level of population and activity for an environmental unit—and more recently on issues of noise. He feels that the park system should "offer what individuals are prepared for at any given stage in their life cycle." In short, it should offer what he calls "an opportunity to evolve." He admires people "who've developed their appreciation of nature to the extent that they're willing and anxious to put on their packs and go out and hike, maybe for a day, maybe for a two-week epic adventure, walking lightly on the land, with only the essentials. But—those people probably didn't start there. I bet a lot of them went on a family camping trip when they were kids. Mom and Dad packed them into the car in the classic American pilgrimage and went out for two weeks' vacation and visited fifteen national parks in two weeks and had a wonderful time."

    Seen from Manning's perspective, the social task of the national parks is to provide an experience of nature that is both available to people as they are and suitable to people as they might become. Such a task is robustly democratic and aggressively inclusive, but it is not easily achieved. It obliges us to grow, to evolve as the parks themselves have evolved, and we may best be able to determine how far we have come by how many natural sounds we can hear.

    Garret Keizer is at work on a book about the history and politics of noise. You can contribute a story to his research at: www.noisestories.com.


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    Comments (14)

    Just imagine how all of our Native Peoples feel!!

    Posted by Karen Craig on August 1,2009 | 12:06 AM

    > twenty minutes… almost a dozen jets Alas, it's sad that so much DIA traffic goes - some *quite* noisy, some less so - over Rocky Mountain National Park and/or the Indian Peaks Wilderness (and perhaps other nearby wilderness areas). > If we can have no-fly zones over military reservations, we can have them over national parks. Yes, we can! Folks who care about reducing noise pollution, please contact your congressperson and senators about your noise concerns. Make noise about the noise!

    Posted by Doug Grinbergs on January 24,2009 | 07:53 PM

    Thanks for the great article. I've just been soundscape recording in Yosemite. That park has the misfortune of being at the crossroads of east-west and north-south jetways. If you're away from the roar of the waterfalls, you hear a jet every few minutes. If we can have no-fly zones over military reservations, we can have them over national parks.

    Posted by Dan Dugan on August 25,2008 | 02:01 PM

    I backpacked into the Golden Trout and John Muir Wildernesses and Sequoia National Park last week. I live at 4,000 feet at the foot of the great eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada, not far from Mt. Whitney. When I was camped last week at 11,000 feet in the wilderness, I had trouble sleeping because of the repeated passage of jet planes. I am not sure if they were military planes or civilian. It may just have been commercial flights that are a lot louder when you are high in the mountains. We should build a network of fast trains and use fewer airplanes for travel.

    Posted by Paul Fretheim on August 24,2008 | 04:24 PM

    I do understand that the peace and tranquility aspect of keeping the noise level down in the National Parks, but with that comes a certain loss of personal freedoms. For instance, my family of 4 toured Yellowstone a few years ago on 2 snowmobiles. We were free to tour the entire open parts of the park on Our OWN time and at our OWN pace. Likewise, there were these "shuttles" other commentors have mentioned rushing the shuttle-load of people to a particular place and back, no time for stopping and admiring the peacefulness as we did. The people on individual snowmobiles have the freedom to stop and admire GOD's great creation without being hurried or "herded" by a shuttle bus. The people on snowmobiles would stop and allow a herd of buffalo pass along the road undisturbed by our presence. And wow what video I got of that experience! We stopped and watched Buffalo grazing in a Hot Spring on the side of the road. We really experienced nature up close and personal. Unfortunately, we learned when we were about to leave the area that this "noise policy" was going to eliminate the ability for poeple to rent snowmobiles and personally tour the park "un-shuttled". What a shame. I did not feel the the noise levels of the park was that of New York City. As a matter of fact, I would bet that the noise levels of all the cars that tour Yellowstone during the summer months is double or triple the noise of those of few sparse number of snowmobiles during the winter. It was a vacation that we'll remember forever. So for our children's sake, I hope we don't regulate the parks so heavily that they will not be able to enjoy the very thing that these sound regulations are attempting to "preserve".

    Posted by BarryC on August 22,2008 | 06:10 PM

    Ditto! I attest to the same comments posted by Sandy Johnson,Jackie Gooch,Kevin Colver & Beth little in comment boxes as noted. Just as land take over has limited the areas for wild life;noise pollution will eventually limit the sounds of wild life. We must stop the invasion of traffic into NP areas & find aiternative modes of travel to not affect wild life. Stop all individual motorized vehicles(air,land & water) & add provisions for shuttle transportation. Otherwise, one day all of nature will be affected in NP's. NP's had been established to view nature as pristine. Noise pollution is an invasion! Charles Costa, 22 August,2008

    Posted by Charles Costa on August 22,2008 | 02:14 PM

    Several years ago we rafted down the Colorado River through Marble Canyon and the Grand Canyon. At every bend for seven days, new wonders filled our eyes. It was one side-canyon cathedral after another. But our ears were filled with constant chatter from some of our raft mates, especially a claque of four women. It never stopped. It was loud. It seldom had anything to do with where we were and what we were experiencing. On the fourth day, several of us requested - through our guide - just one hour of floating in silence. All agreed. The moratorium lasted ten minutes. Even after fairly firm reminders from others, it was yatta-da-yatta-da all day long. It wasn't flyovers that ruined the silence. It was pure selfishness from the clueless.

    Posted by Bill Adams on August 21,2008 | 10:13 PM

    I am fortunate to live in Lake George, NY inside the Adirondack Stste Park. It is my understanding that there is in place, a "no fly zone" in the sky over the park. We are not that far away from Albany airport and Stewart Air Force base. Most of the noise from planes I hear, are from the small privately owned and there seem to be about ten of those around. I spend a lot of time in my hammock (I'm retired) listening to the birds, bees, frogs, crickets, etc. through out the day and evening. My house is inside the village and when it gets busy here during the "season", it can get VERY noisy . I used to get in my car and drive up to Top of the World mountain and lay down in a beautiful meadow of wildflowers and watch the butterflies, sea gulls and other birds and just relax. Sadly, that is no longer possible, since numberous houses have been built there to take advantage of the spectectular views of the lake and surrounding mountains. It is harder and harder to find a "peaceful" place to enjoy less noise. I am not physically able to do much hiking although the High Peaks are relatively close by and would afford one the sense of peace that we are looking for. The need for MORE areas such as our over-used national and state parks is great and very obvious since so many of us are seeking them out in an attempt to feel closer to nature and help us "recharge our batteries" Thank you for putting this issue before the public. Hope something can be done soon!

    Posted by Jane Shouse on August 21,2008 | 08:51 PM

    I live in Arizona and I enjoy visiting our National Parks especially in northern Arizona, you ask a question about how to keep the Parks more quiet, for example, have a volunteer or Park Ranger at the most popular lookouts and just tell people to shutup. Especially the ones with bratty kids which seem to be the norm, no I am not a curmudgeon, I just like to be humbled by nature, not by some loud mouthed tourist who spends nano seconds looking at something that is so surreal with their backs towards the reason they made the trip in the first place yapping about the airconditioning in the bus. Happened just a couple of weeks ago at Yavapai lookout, group of Spaniards who are probably still ticked off the Acoma kicked fanny for a few days. Anyway, maybe the next time I'm at a National Park I will be the volunteer and tell people to just be quiet and enjoy.

    Posted by Katherine A. Kerr on August 21,2008 | 06:04 PM

    How could you write this story and not mention the brilliant Gordon Hempton (whom I think deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and the MacArthur Genius Award) for his One Square Inch of Silence Project carried out in the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park? See: http://www.onesquareinch.org/ el es jay, pawa

    Posted by Lisbeth Jardine, M.A. on August 21,2008 | 05:42 PM

    Noise, or lack of human noise, is why I cherish designated Wilderness and have worked for years to preserve more of it in the Monongahela National Forest in WV. The sky is the problem though. I thought flyovers were prohibited, but almost every time I go to one of our Wilderness areas, the drone of an airplane drowns out the natural sounds I am trying to soak up. I applaud the efforts of the Park Service to raise consciousness about noise vs natural sounds. If I were in charge, I would appropriate generous funds for this endeavor.

    Posted by Beth LIttle on August 21,2008 | 11:45 AM

    Three cheers for the work Trevino and others are doing! Congratulations to Zion for quieting the canyon with the propane shuttle buses. There is a peace and beauty to the natural soundscape that we will only appreciate to a greater and greater degree in the future. Listen, and enjoy.

    Posted by Kevin J Colver on August 20,2008 | 04:20 PM

    I love children but I'm not fond of the new style of parenting where kids are allowed to run free and loud in all places. We just returned from a 3 week camping trip where we visited 3 national parks plus wildlife refuges. It's impossible to hear the wildlife let alone photograph it when kids are running the trails whooping it up. There is a place for loud play but a nature trail where others are trying to experience why the area was preserved in the first place should be designated a quiet place. I appreciate the fact these parents are bringing their children to the parks but I would hope they are teaching them a little respect for the place they are visiting and the others around them. I can't tell you how many times something was scared into hiding by loud talking, yelling and stomping and actual rock or stick throwing (on more than one occasion)by kids. I'm talking teenagers too, walking 3 abreast on a trail made for 1. At one point a group of children were so destructive I did say something to the parents and it resulted in the father stepping over the low fence to join his kids in climbing on the tree stump that was housing an incredible assortment of life, in the Olympic National Forest. It saddens me to think these children are the stewards of the future.

    Posted by Jackie Gooch on August 13,2008 | 02:13 PM

    recently we had an experience at the north rim of the grand canyon that relates to the silence issue. we went on a wonderful hike along the rim, with wildflowers and beautiful views. for the first hour or so it was very quiet and peaceful. then the helicopters started to fly over, fortunately just as we were about to leave. there must have been five or six helicopters that flew over within the next half hour of so, totally destroying the peace and beauty. i don't know how long it lasted as we were leaving but personally, i don't think they should be allowed at all. maybe 1 per day for people who just have to see it from above. i don't care if the air tour people go out of business--they need to find a business that is less destructive.

    Posted by sandra johnson on August 11,2008 | 12:00 PM

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