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While the federal government has gone to great lengths over the decades
to protect the scenic vistas of the nation's more than 300 national
parks, it has only recently begun to seriously consider the impact of
sounds on the overall park experience.
Instead, at many of the nation's most famous parks, visitors are
more likely to be treated to the whirl of a helicopter, the roar of a
motorcycle or the hum of a large air-conditioning unit.
While
the federal government has gone to great lengths over the decades to
protect the scenic vistas of the nation's more than 300 national parks,
it has only recently begun to seriously consider the impact of sounds
on the overall park experience.
The National Park Service
has been quietly working for eight years to study whether human-caused
noise from traffic, park buildings and recreational equipment, such as
Jet Skis or all-terrain vehicles, diminishes the enjoyment of the tens
of thousands of visitors to the nation's most prized parks each year.
The Park Service is also studying the effects of noise on the abundance
of wildlife at the parks.
The result of all this work will
slowly begin rolling out over the next few years, altering in
fundamental ways how the National Park Service manages parks across the
country. The goal is to have sound management plans that account for
noise pollution at each park.
It is all part of the Park
Service's primary mission outlined under the Organic Act, which
requires the agency to preserve not only the scenic vistas and wildlife
for future generations, but also the "natural soundscapes" of the parks.
"We're
looking at noise in a different way than any federal agency has ever
done," said Kurt Fristrup, a senior acoustic specialist with the Park
Service's Natural Sounds Program Office in Fort Collins, Colo. "In
every other place, we ask, 'How much noise can we put out there before
it becomes an annoyance?' whereas in the parks we're asking, 'What
constitutes the highest-quality environment for people?'"
The
Park Service has known for years that the sounds in a park are very
important to visitors. NPS surveyed 15,000 visitors at 39 parks
nationwide and found that nearly as many said they were visiting the
park to enjoy the "natural quiet" as to stare in awe at the visual
beauty of the place, according to a 1994 report to Congress.
What
visitors most like to hear are the sounds of water and wind and the
songs of birds, according to surveys conducted for NPS by Peter Newman,
an associate professor of protected areas management at Colorado State
University. "On the other hand, people say human noises like yelling,
and even kids playing loudly, detract from the overall park
experience," he said.
The natural soundscape is at the
heart of the national park experience, said Patty Limerick, faculty
director for the Center of the American West at the University of
Colorado, Boulder.
"We are a visually oriented people, and
we have spent a lot more time thinking about and planning and designing
how the parks are going to look," she said. "I think it kind of snuck
up on people to realize that what we hear can be just as gratifying as
what we are seeing."
A growing body of research shows that
loud noises at parks affect wildlife, too. Studies have shown that
frequent noises prevent animals from warning each other about
predators, disrupt breeding cycles and might even discourage some bird
species from singing during the day, when parks are the noisiest and
most crowded.
Problems regulating air traffic
To address the issue,
NPS is engaged in a number of efforts, including working with the
Federal Aviation Administration on plans to limit air traffic over
national parks.
Congress in 1987 passed the National Parks
Overflights Act, which requires NPS and FAA to restore "the natural
quiet and experience" of Grand Canyon National Park by restricting
aircraft, particularly small planes and helicopters guiding tourists
over the canyon.
More than two decades later, that mandate
has not been met. The two agencies plan to release a draft
environmental impact statement late next year on the impacts of
restricting overflights at the national park, but it could be years
before any plan is finalized.
Similar plans will be
unveiled in the next two years at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota and
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, said Fristrup, the NPS acoustics expert.
Federal
efforts to protect the "natural soundscapes" of the parks from aircraft
noise ramped up in April 2000 when Congress passed the National Parks
Air Tour Management Act, which requires that NPS and FAA develop "air
tour management plans" for all parks that have commercial air tour
operations.
But once again, after eight years, that effort has failed to produce a single air tour management plan.
NPS
officials concede that the two federal agencies have butted heads over
how best to regulate aircraft noise in national parks.
"The partnership has not been successful so far," Fristrup said. "It's pretty sad we haven't gotten a single thing done."
Some
park advocates and environmentalists claim FAA is to blame. They say
the aviation administration wants too much control over how much noise
should be allowed in parks from passing aircraft.
The FAA's communications office did not respond to e-mail messages and telephone calls from Land Letter seeking comment.
Meanwhile,
the National Parks Conservation Association has encouraged Congress to
approve a resolution making it explicit that NPS has the sole authority
to determine the significance of the effects of noise on national parks.
"The
Park Service doesn't want to tell the FAA how to safely manage flights;
it doesn't have the expertise to do that," said Bryan Faehner, the
legislative representative for the National Parks Conservation
Association. "At the same time, the FAA shouldn't be telling the Park
Service how to manage national parks. That's out of their league."
The push to preserve soundscapes
In October 2000, NPS
formed the Natural Sounds Program Office mostly to help park managers
develop air tour management plans at the more than 100 parks where
commercial air tours are permitted.
Two months later, NPS
issued Director's Order No. 47, stressing the importance of the Park
Service's mission "to preserve and/or restore the natural resources of
the parks, including the natural soundscapes associated with units of
the national park system."
Part of that order directs NPS staff to develop plans for each
national park to preserve its peace and quiet. This could be done,
according to the order, by developing policies for dealing with noise
in each park's general management plan -- the document that outlines
how each specific park is managed.
Two parks -- Zion
National Park in Utah and Mojave National Preserve in California --
have developed noise action plans based on language in their general
management plans, said Frank Turina, a planner with NPS's Natural
Sounds Program.
In addition, Turina said, one park in the
Southwest and a cultural park in the Northeast are near completion of
such plans. He declined to name the parks because the plans have not
been made public.
The goal is for all National Park
Service lands to have noise management action plans, he said, though
that will likely take many years to complete.
Doing so
will help the Park Service avoid difficulties it has experienced
regulating snowmobiles, an activity that had been allowed for years.
There had never been rules limiting snowmobiles because they had never
been considered a problem until a decade or so ago, and by that time
people had gotten used to unrestricted use at national parks like
Yosemite, Turina said. When NPS adopted rules limiting the use of
snowmobiles in Yosemite, it created a lot of controversy.
"We
need to be out in front and have a plan in place so that when we do
have some new activity that's starting to happen in a park, park
managers can refer back to their soundscape management plan," Turina
said.
However, any stipulations set by NPS limiting the
use of all-terrain vehicles, requiring motorcycles to meet maximum
sound limits or establishing "quiet zones" within parks where loud
noises are strictly forbidden will be met with resistance from
off-highway vehicle groups that are concerned that the federal
government might restrict their use and enjoyment of the parks.
One
such group is the Off-Road Business Association, a national trade group
that represents the interests of off-road-related businesses.
"We
strongly support reasonable sound levels for off-road vehicles," said
Bill Dart, the trade group's director of land use. "But we would hate
to see a regulation adopted that would restrict the use of a federally
allowed vehicle in a national park. It greatly concerns us."
A continuing threat
Some national parks allow visitors to get away from the ruckus of modern-day life a lot better than others.
The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees in June put together
a list of the five best national parks "where visitors can still find
genuine peace, quiet and natural sounds." These include Great Basin
National Park in Nevada, North Cascades National Park in Washington and
Muir Woods National Monument in California.
Yet some of the most famous and best-loved parks are threatened by noise pollution.
The
National Park Service Retirees also listed the five national parks most
threatened by noise, and they include such famous sites as Mount
Rushmore National Park in South Dakota, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park
and Everglades National Park in Florida. The other two are Mojave
National Preserve and Minute Man National Historical Park in
Massachusetts.
"People are realizing that parks offer
places they can go that are very, very far and few between anything
else where they can appreciate natural quiet or natural sounds," said
Bill Wade, executive council chair of the Coalition of National Park
Service Retirees. "Natural sound and natural quiet are a resource worth
protecting in national parks."
He conceded that there are
some parks like the Everglades that will always be noisy "because
they're so close to cities and roadways and things like that." But
others, such as Mount Rushmore, could be much quieter by simply
restricting commercial over-flights and requiring motorcycles and other
vehicles to meet certain noise limits.
"One of the things
that makes national parks so special is that contrast in terms of
getting away from things people face in everyday life," Wade said. "And
if we don't emphasize the importance of that, we're going to lose that
for good."
Impacts to wildlife
While the sounds of the wild are
integral to the national park experience for visitors, reducing noise
pollution is vital to the survival of wildlife, studies show.
A
study last year by researchers at the University of Alberta found that
noise from compressor engines at oil and natural gas drilling sites in
northern Canada created a "significant reduction" in ovenbird pairings.
"We hypothesize that noise interferes with a male's song, such that
females may not hear the male's song at greater distances, and/or
females may perceive males to be of lower quality because of distortion
of song characteristics," says the study.
Along those same
lines, a 2006 study led by researchers at the University of California,
Davis, found that sparrows and other birds in noisy urban areas change
the pitch of their songs, interfering with their ability to mate.
Also,
a 2006 study led by researchers at the University of California found
that noise from wind turbines in remote locations in North California
interfered with the ability of ground squirrels to warn each other
about approaching predators.
Studies demonstrating the
effects of noise on wildlife are very important factors in determining
how best to manage national parks, Fristrup said.
"Federal
management policies make it clear that when there's a conflict between
enjoyment of the park and preservation, the Park Service is to give
deference to resource preservation," Fristrup said. "The prominent
concern is how it impacts natural resources."
The search for solutions
Preserving natural sounds at
parks while not infringing on visitors' ability to enjoy recreational
activities is "very, very complex," because what might be loud to one
person is perfectly fine to someone else, said Paul Bell, an
environmental and social psychologist at Colorado State University.
"There's
always that conflict," Bell said, who is conducting lab experiments for
NPS in an effort to help the agency set appropriate noise standards.
Newman,
the protected areas management expert at Colorado State University, has
done some groundbreaking work on how to resolve that conflict.
Newman
conducted a study at Muir Woods National Monument that identified two
effective management tools NPS could use to control noise.
He
tested establishing "quiet days" at the park, as well as creating
various zones within Muir Woods posted as quiet areas. Even without any
visible enforcement, park visitors respected the call for silence,
which significantly reduced noise in the quiet sections of the park, he
said.
The study was so successful that the Muir Woods
National Monument in May dedicated Cathedral Grove as a permanent place
of peace and quiet -- the first such dedication in a national park.
"The
best solutions are more about changing behavior, not limiting the
number of people at the park," Newman said. "You want to limit the
noise that people create."
Scott Streater is a freelance journalist based in Colorado Springs, Colo.
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