By Thibault Worth

Alison Taggart-Barone/National Park Service

Frank Dean, General Superintendent of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, speaks in front of one of the new wind turbines at Crissy Field.

The Crissy Field Center, an environmental education center operated by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the Park Service and the Presidio Trust, erected three out of an eventual five wind turbines Wednesday. The event highlighted the expanding mission of the National Park Service to use more renewable energy in powering park facilities.

While the Center’s turbines will be used for mostly educational purposes, the ceremony took place on the same day that the National Park Service reached an interconnection agreement with Southern California Edison to bring 20 dormant renewable energy projects in California online.

Many of these projects have remained offline for up to two and a half years due to stalled negotiations with the electric utility.

“This is great news. It’s a win-win all around. It will mean lower costs for taxpayers and clean energy benefits to the environment,” Senator Barbara Boxer wrote in a letter to Southern California Edison.

Alison Taggart-Barone/National Park Service

Students from Galileo Academy of Science and Technology assist in raising a wind turbine.

The National Park Service has solar and geothermal energy projects in Death Valley National Park, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, Channel Islands National Park, Mojave National Preserve and Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks.

At Crissy Field Center, the focus is on education, but the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute are conducting a 5-year study looking into the turbines’ overall effectiveness at generating usable power. They’ll also be viewable to the public.

“Crissy Field is one of our more popular destinations in the park. And it’s a great chance to learn about energy independence and different types of technology as we bring them online here,” explained Frank Dean, General Superintendent of Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Students at the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology will monitor data collected from the turbines to evaluate their efficiency in their environmental science class.

This was posted originally by our content partners at California Watch, one day after a new report cited several Golden State cities as having with the nation’s worst air quality.

By Agustin Armendariz

Air pollution in national parks is at a three-year high, and two California parks have recorded the worst readings, according to a report by the National Parks Conservation Association.

Craig Miller

A winter day offers a break from the bad air at Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, located next to each other, exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency standard for ozone pollution 68 days so far this year, the most of any of the national parks that monitor air quality. Joshua Tree National Park came in second, with 49 days above the EPA standard.

These readings are not only high among national parks, but also for the state as a whole. According to data maintained by the California Air Resources Board for 2010, the number of days exceeding the ozone standard at Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks was equal to that of readings in Arvin, just outside of Bakersfield. Last year, both stations recorded 66 days above the ozone standard.

While high by today’s standards, the rates are lower than they were in the late 1980s, when some areas of the state logged 100 or more days with ozone above acceptable levels, according to Air Resources Board data.

“Breathing ozone, a primary component of smog, can trigger a variety of health problems, including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation and congestion,” according to the EPA.

The Air Resources Division of the National Park Service says it has air monitoring systems set up in almost 70 national parks around the country and works with other monitoring networks to gauge the air quality of the nation’s parks.

According to the park service, Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks “experience some of the worst air pollution of any national parks in the U.S.,” since they are “downwind of many air pollution sources, including agriculture, industry, major highways, and urban pollutants from as far away as the San Francisco Bay Area.”

Although far out in the eastern desert, Joshua Tree “is affected by air pollution generated in the Los Angeles air basin that moves inland with the predominant westerly winds,” according to the park service.

National Park Service

Map shows national parks where ozone levels have spiked

The National Parks Conservation Association report called attention to two legislative measures moving through Congress that would weaken the EPA’s air quality regulations.

“National park visitors should not have to worry about having an asthma attack while hiking in American treasures like the Grand Canyon and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks,” Mark Wenzler, the association’s vice president for climate and air quality programs, stated in the report.

It was interesting to hear a report from NPR’s Richard Harris on a “new” branch of science called “soundscape ecology.” Harris interviewed Purdue landscape ecologist Bryan Pijanowski, who is part of a group of scientists advancing a “research agenda” to fully integrate the discipline into the study of ecosystems.

Bernie Krause, recording a soundscape in the Sycamore Creek area of Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park.

“We’re trying to understand how sounds can be used as measures of ecosystem health,” Pijanowski told Harris. Pijanowski is hardly the first to make this connection. An article co-authored by him and seven colleagues for the the March issue of the journal BioScience cites references back to 1969 (and gives a nod to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which appeared in 1962).

One of Pijanowski’s collaborators, Bernie Krause, has spent nearly 30 years collecting soundscape recordings from around the world, with this concept in mind. He’s credited with parsing soundscapes into three components; biophony (sounds generated by animals), geophony (wind, moving water and the like), and anthrophony, the sounds introduced by human activity. Krause has long contended that biophony is a kind of barometer of ecosystem change. The 3,500 hours of recordings squirreled away at his Sonoma County-based Wild Sanctuary is among the most extensive of its kind. I’ve followed his work since documenting some of his work in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park about ten years ago. That work provided a foundation for case studies used in the paper by Pijanowski et al, what the authors call “tomorrow’s acoustic fossils.”

And yet the authors themselves acknowledge that soundscape ecology is a “relatively unexplored field.” As the BioScience article points out, the National Park Service took an early leadership role, recognizing soundscapes as a park resource to be managed and protected (the subject of a 2009 radio segment, for which I interviewed Krause, among others). Also among the co-authors is Stuart Gage of Michigan State University, who was part of that baseline recording work at Sequoia. Those recordings are among the data harnessed by the authors for case studies presented in the article, along with links to the audio itself.

At a time when terms like “assisted migration” and “species triage” have gained currency in the ecological lexicon, a serious exploration — and broader recognition — of what sounds can tell us about rapidly changing ecosystems seems promising and perhaps overdue.

Sand dune near Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley. Photo: Craig Miller

The quietest place I’ve ever been was in a national park and I don’t think I’ll ever forget what it was like.

Okay, “quiet” is a somewhat subjective thing. When I lived on the upper (way upper) west side of Manhattan in the 1980s, any interval without hearing a car alarm seemed like blessed relief. Quiet can be measured, of course, with sound pressure meters. Anything below about 40 decibels is pretty darn quiet for most people’s purposes (a state that I doubt was ever attained in my apartment on West 119th St.).

The National Park Service (NPS) says the quietest place it has yet measured is a spot in Great Sand Dunes National Park, where Vicki McCusker, who helps oversee the natural sounds program for the Park Service, says it was “bottoming out” their meters.

I’ve never been there but it’s hard to imagine greater quietude than an afternoon I spent in Death Valley. Coincidentally this was also on a sand dune, near Stovepipe Wells. It was also Christmas Day, which kept the tourist traffic to a minimum. It was at a point in my life when I was in desperate need of some deep introspection, so I parked my car along Highway 190 and trekked into the dunes, found an accommodating slope and sat down. Occasionally a fly (or something) would buzz by. Other than that, the loudest thing was the buzzing in my own head, which I can only hope would’ve been inaudible to anyone with me.

Looking across the dunes in Death Valley. Photo: Craig Miller

It’s interesting how, when things get really quiet, our bodies try to make up for it with ringing ears and internal chaos. The noted bioacoustician Bernie Krause talks about the time he and his wife, Kat were hosting guests from New York, who literally had to leave the Krause’s semi-secluded Glen Ellen “sanctuary” because the night-time quiet was creeping them out.

I asked Krause what he could draw from that. “Well, it tells me that we’re more insane than I ever thought in the first place,” he mused. “I mean, we’re definitely verging on pathological.  Because it’s exactly those kinds of sounds–the urban acoustic envelope in which we enfold ourselves–that kind of urban noise that’s driving up the numbers of prescriptions for Prozac.”

Surveys of national park visitors would seem to bear that out.  In the early 1990s, NPS surveyed 15,000 visitors in 39 parks, about noise issues (NPS manages 391 “units” nationwide, 58 of which are designated as “parks”). More than nine out of ten visitors surveyed cited “enjoyment of natural quiet” as a reason for visiting. This survey provided some juice for the ongoing natural sounds program in the parks.

An open question is: where does it go from here? Much of the current effort in the parks appears to be geared toward developing “air tour management plans,” a response to concerns that first arose over the increasingly crowded skies above the Grand Canyon. McCusker told me that while aircraft overflights are the most pervasive noise issue across the parks, the most common complaint is probably over loud motorcycles (note to “straight-pipe” Harley owners).

Krause, who conducted a year-long project documenting soundscapes in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, hopes the research will also be used to develop new rules governing on-the-ground noise pollution. “If the parks can set aside places where people can go and hear the natural world as it is, at any season of the year, then that will be a really big benefit for visitors coming to the parks,” he says. “Otherwise, you’re seeing the parks with the wrong soundtrack. It’s like watching Star Wars without a soundtrack.”

Leave a comment with your own “quietest place.”

In 2003, Bernie Krause & I co-produced a short film for the National Park Service, which takes you on a 4-and-a-half-minute journey from the “urban sound envelope” to a restful spot in Sequoia National park.

Tune in to PBS this week for the premiere of Ken Burns’ new series: The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. Also Quest television explores the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, an urban national park. This program is now available for viewing at the Quest site (see previous link).