My household is not big on planning. Come August, we often as not realize we haven't followed up on projects for the last few weeks of summer vacation. It is therefore the month when we thank our lucky stars we have national parks to fall back on. We rely on these oases of peace and natural beauty--Acadia, Cape Cod National Seashore, White Mountain--to get away from the noise and stress we endure the rest of the year. We assume the parks will always be protected and open to all; we take comfort in the fact that reservations are not, in most cases, required. Not even in August.
But the quiet and peace of America's national parks is increasingly under threat. Where we live, in Massachusetts, the Minuteman National Historic Monument is locked in a long-standing battle between those who want to evoke the pre-industrial soundscape of revolutionary times (this was the site of the first skirmishes between redcoats and patriots), and an abutting airfield, Hanscom, that the powerful state authority, Massport, continually seeks to expand.
Noise is the ogre here. Noise, by contrast to the public's need for places in an increasingly loud and busy world where it can find a relative quiet. The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees in 2008 conferred on Minuteman the dubious distinction of being one of eleven "most endangered" national parks, because of noise pollution. Noise levels, from executive jets and private aircraft, rise to 97 decibels at times in portions of the park. Across the historical areas, and on Thoreau's Walden Pond nearby, airplane sounds chronically overshadow ambient levels.
Massport's "Fly friendly" program limits night-time training exercises but does not hamper the authority's avowed mandate to make Hanscom's business jet facilities "the face of corporate Massachusetts."
Looking farther afield, the noise issue ripples out like sound-wave contour lines. Fifteen percent of visitors to Boston Harbor Islands National Park listed noise among chief negative factors in their park experience, according to a University of Vermont study. The noise comes not only from aircraft landing at Logan International, but from other visitors to the park.
The sounds visitors make increasingly intrude on park soundscapes. It is one of the issues the Park Service's Natural Sounds Program was set up in 2000 to deal with. The Muir Woods National Monument in California is one example of the Service's efforts to combat unwanted sound. The service designated a particularly serene area of the park called Cathedral Grove a "quiet zone," ringed by signs asking visitors to keep voices low and cell phones off.
But in some of the more spectacular Western parks, it's still technology that is the chief enemy of auditory peace. The Grand Canyon in particular is a poster child for the kind of conflict that gives park managers migraines. There, demand for air tours is such that in 2005, 55,000 tourism overflights were recorded above the park annually, generating up to 76 decibels of sound in viewing areas. On busy days, 100 choppers hovered simultaneously. Visitors trying to imagine the way canyons were before the iron horse and package-tours had to block out the whine of Cessnas, the drumming of helicopters, for 79 percent of the time they were in the park.
At the same time, a 1996 study showed that air tourism contributes half a billion dollars annually to the Nevada economy. The Park Service, the Federal Aviation Administration and air tour operators are currently thrashing out an environmental impact statement that will regulate the number and scope of air tours. For now, the FAA has set a limit of 93,971 annual tour overflights.
Air tours are a big factor in Alaska's Denali as well as Volcanoes and Haleakala parks in Hawai'i. In Yellowstone, the noise controversy has centered on snowmobile use. There, consumers hooked on the freedom to penetrate deep into the Wyoming mountains on Skidoos made a deal with park management. Now only a fixed number of private, fee-paying snowmobilers are allowed in daily. The rest must ride on a public transport version known as a "snow coach."
The Yellowstone example points up an interesting facet of the soundscape issue in our national parks: consciousness of the problem is part and parcel of the process that creates it. The more people wish to visit a park and its surrounding region, the more noise they generate; and the more noise is generated, the more people there will be to complain about it. In other words, where noise is concerned, generators and reporters march in lock-step.
In a country with robust population growth and an ever-increasing appetite for leisure, the solution might lie in recognizing the link between the two roles--and severing it. The pastimes that make noise will have to be divided, temporally and/or spatially, from those through which peace is sought. Air touring, snowmobile riding and other noisy activities will have to be limited to certain areas and allotted hours of the day, allowing those thirsty for peace to enjoy, in their own zones, during their own times, the quiet they need to recover from the ruckus of normal life.
George Michelsen Foy, a novelist and journalist, teaches creative writing at NYU. His latest book, Zero Decibels: The Quest for Silence, is published by Scribner.
