One Square Inch of Silence by Gordon Hempton

Author:Gordon Hempton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2009-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

More than 30 years have elapsed, roughly one-third the existence of the National Park System itself, since the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act recognized “natural quiet as a value or resource in its own right to be protected from significant adverse effect.” Notably, it specifically mentions helicopter noise as an adverse effect on natural quiet. Three decades later, some 90,000 air tours, grandfathered in by the 2000 act, still fly over the Grand Canyon each year, until a mandated management plan decides their fate. In January 2006 the U.S. Government Accountability Office produced Report GAO-06–263, which assessed how well the National Parks Air Tour Management Act goals were being met. The report states, “Almost 6 years after its passage, the required air tour management plans have not been completed,” and “the implementation of the act has so far had little effect on the 112 national parks we surveyed.”

One glimmer in all this darkness is a few lines in Section 806 of the National Air Tour Management Act of 2000: “Effective beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act, no commercial air tour operation may be conducted in the airspace over the Rocky Mountain National Park notwithstanding any other provision of this Act or section 40126 of title 49, United States Code.”

I ask Turina if the Park Service has ever suggested that air tours were incompatible with our national parks. If so, there’d be no need to create air tour management plans.

“I’m not aware of that [official] argument, but several superintendents have made that argument. Glacier National Park, in their general management plan, their preferred alternative is to phase out air tours.”

Turina introduces me to Kurt Fristrup, who rises from the chair in his cluttered office and offers the hand that’s not holding a banana. Fristrup is wearing a dark blue dress shirt, khaki pants, white socks, and white sneakers. His demeanor is equally unassuming. I mention the title by his name on the office’s web page, stumbling on the word bioacoustician. “I think we’re still struggling what to call me. I think I prefer ‘scientist,’” he says, explaining that he arrived here about a year and a half ago from the ornithology lab at Cornell University to help improve the Natural Sounds Program’s data-collecting and analysis methods.

“Historically, we used very expensive equipment,” he says. “One monitoring set might cost twenty thousand dollars and have three or four solar panels and three or four lead acid batteries and take two or three people to pack in. And because of limited storage capacity we were recording ten seconds of digital audio every two minutes, enough to capture representative samples of some noise events, but for interpretive representations, it’s terrible. You’re cutting pieces out of things.”

Newer, lighter, less expensive equipment now enables continuous recordings that last for days and have begun to produce 24-hour sound pictures, visual representations rather like EKGs, that can depict at a glance the sonic events at that location. “Instead of doing a full linear scale,

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