It was another long summer of smoke-filled eyes in the West. An early snow storm in the Northern Rockies ushers in a season of peace and solitude. Wildfires frighten tourists, excite the media and reacquaint homeowners who built in the forest to Mother Nature’s laws. Hey, I get it, fires are deadly and sexy – good ratings. But after decades of kicking the environmental can down the road, at the first sign of smoke most politicians want someone else to blame for their pathetic past performances.
Three of the last four summers (2015, 2017, 2018), Glacier National Park erupted in a fury of smoke and flames. Tourists scampered away to Yellowstone, “inholder” homes were evacuated, some incinerated. But that’s not why I picked up the pen today. Let’s talk about quiet, yes quiet. Where has our quiet gone?
This summer one could not avoid the heightened noise levels associated with firefighting in Glacier’s wilderness backcountry. Most fires are managed as war zones (cash cows), and business is booming. Helicopters, low-flying bombers spewing toxic fire retardant, the din of heavy equipment, all drown out the possibility of solitude. Day after day natural silence is shattered by the sounds of war. War and lying is the business model that just keeps on giving.
Indoors, where there’s less smoke, there’s no escaping the incessant chatter of media-dweebs wearing those yellow shirts that somehow magically transform cub field reporters into super-journalists. Our world has devolved into a collage of visual snippets, no other senses need apply, only “refrigerator shots,” please. How do we not hear the sounds of war banging and clanging around us – paradise lost?
Are America’s halcyon days gone forever, even in Glacier National Park? Even when nothing’s burning in the Park, low-flying, helicopter-tour overflights shatter the silence with the unmistakable sounds of the Vietnam War. Kill solitude and you’ve killed the whole wilderness experience. Noisy overflights are a persistent and growing blight degrading many of our national parks. Thankfully, there is a grassroots coalition of park lovers and organizations called Quiet! Glacier. Led by Mary T. McClelland, a tenacious activist raised in West Glacier, Quiet! Glacier applies constant pressure on every governmental agency responsible for permitting commercial overflight tours to denigrate Glacier’s natural soundscape.
In 1932, Waterton National Park (Alberta, Canada) merged with Glacier National Park (Montana, U.S.). Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, World Heritage Site and Bioreserve — the world’s first — is our Nation’s only such designation. As far back as 1987, when Congress passed the National Parks Overflight Act (PL 100-91), Glacier has been considered a priority candidate for noise-pollution cleanup. In a 1994 National Park Service’s (NPS) report to Glacier again sat atop the (NPS) priority list for resolution of the overflights/noise problem. So, after numerous additional studies and extensive public participation, why isn’t there immediate administrative action?
The National Parks Air Tour Management Act of 2000 (NPATMA) required that the FAA and NPS jointly establish and advisory group to help resolve escalating conflicts caused by commercial overflight tour operations over national park airspace. The National Parks Overflights Advisory Group (NPOAG) was established in 2010. Glacier NP has an existing Air Tour Management Plan (2003) that recognized, analyzed, and proposed several action alternatives to phase out commercial overflight tours, consistent with the Park’s General Management Plan and Decision (1999). Glacier is 95% defacto wilderness and is generally managed to protect wilderness values. To be perfectly clear, t’s the FAA acting in bad faith here.
Currently, Congress recognizes Glacier’s outstanding wilderness characteristics. Both houses of Congress are currently considering the bioregional legislation: The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA), HR-2135; S 936. NREPA includes legislative Wilderness Act protection for all of Glacier’s wilderness backcountry.
Why the incredible delay? In 2004, it was the Federal Aviation Assn. (FAA) that threw a monkey wrench into Glacier’s best efforts to complete its overflight phase-out plan. FAA is apparently, still, going on 15 years now, “consulting with their solicitors,” but has failed in all that time to cooperate with Glacier Park officials to enact any of the park’s alternatives. The overflight phase-out plan remains stuck in bureaucratic limbo. The FAA is the bad actor here, obstructing at every turn, in opposition to the letter and spirit of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The purpose of this MOU is to establish “a framework for cooperation and participation between the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) and the National Park Service (“NPS”) to implement the National Parks Air Tour Management Act of 2000, Public Law No.106-181.” The so-called “cooperative” effort referred to throughout the memorandum is more than a little ironic.
Under “interim direction,” noisy chopper overflights have largely ignored advisories to areas sensitive to noise, altitudes, and wildlife security — and have for the last 20 years. For example, air tours routinely fly over wilderness and through the major raptor migration route over the Continental Divide. For scofflaw federal agencies like the FAA, war becomes perpetual war, perpetual funding, gridlock. Bureaucracy adapts, evolving into ideocracy.
In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule of Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
– Hannah Arendt
“Millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been spent to prevent Glacier from achieving one of its primary stewardship responsibilities,” said Mary T. McClelland, speaking on behalf of Quiet! Glacier’s 32-member grassroots coalition. “We will continue this fight until the FAA steps up to honor the NPATMA law they helped write and respect the NPS directive to protect the natural sounds -Quiet- in a Wilderness National Park.”
In the meantime, bureaucracy business is good. Noisy chopper overflights continue under “interim direction” and the FAA and its NPOAG continues to string the public along with yet another public comment period to rehash, yet again, the same issues that created passage of the National Parks Overflight Act in 1987. Several other federal statutes give the NPS all the regulatory authority it needs to protect natural quiet in national parks. That’s an impressive 31 years of bureaucratic “delay with full pay.”
“Glacier determined over a decade and a half ago in their GMP that helicopter air tours impair park resources (natural sounds) and conflict with people and wildlife seeking solitude,” McClelland added. “We implore federal agencies to come together and finalize the plan in honor of the ‘peace and quiet’ people seek when visiting a National Park like Glacier.” Clearly, this is what Congress intended over 30 years ago, for today and for future generations.
As cold Fall rains turn to snow, tourists return home, migratory birds wing it South, and grizzlies seek out a comfortable spot to den for another long Glacier winter. Wolverine, bald eagles, wolves, elk and other ungulates never leave this incredibly challenging, rugged landscape. Glacier returns to a wilderness wonderland of ice and snow, and awesome silence. We must try to do our part to preserve and restore the natural soundscape in Glacier National Park. Make America great again; don’t quit growling like a grizzly or howling like a wolf until some sonofabitch “in power” does something to Defend the Wild.
Here’s a little something you can do right now. See: https://www.change.org/p/glacier-national-park-needs-our-help-to-restore-the-natural-soundscape-please-sign-quiet-glacier-petition
Also at: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/18/quiet-please-the-latest-threat-to-the-big-wild/
Piece of Mindful 
“Speech is silver; silence is golden”
“Disciplyne of silence is goed.”
“Silence is maad in heuen”. [made in Heaven, Wyclif Bible]
“Silence was never written down” (Italian proverb)
Simon and Garfunkel even had a song about it.
Noise health effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAog1WUWLg
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When we still lived in Bozeman, the Forest Service brought all the various trail users together, and using a facilitator named Dierdre, tried to iron out a consensus. So it appeared. The BWags, who favored quiet trails and no motorized vehicles, soon learned that they had been duped. All of the other groups, bikers, horseback, ATVs and Dierdre were cornering them. The problem was that they signed on to the process. They did not have to agree with the other users, however, and so did not sign on to any agreement. However, the process was set up so that if agreement was not reached, the local supervisor of the Forest Service, who had an ATV or snowmobile in his driveway (I was told) would make the final decisions.
And he did. He gave the motorbacks everything they wanted. Miles of quiet trails were lost in the process, and I only slowly realized (and am still furious) that the BWags had walked into a trap. Not at them – we were all naive. But I do hope they learned.
[BWags] is Bozeman Women’s Activities Group, a hiking group my wife belonged to. One man described them as the “burlap underwear set” and that joke became so popular that they actually made a set to pass around. I was told that I was not allowed to hike with them, nor were any men, although dogs were allowed. I used to tease my wife that in all her years hiking with them, they had never seen a wild animal (because they all chattered so much). Can you imagine 10-20 women on a trial? That is not quiet!
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BWAGs should have held out a bit longer. Now, “collaborators” (government agents) are paid to compromise, thanks to the National Forest Foundation (government funded).
Announcement of upcoming funding deadlines
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Funding Opportunities. Please Distribute
Announcement of Grant Opportunities
The National Forest Foundation is pleased to announce three funding opportunities that are currently open for proposed work benefiting National Forests and Grasslands.
(1) Matching Awards Program
(2) Oregon & Washington Community Capacity & Land Stewardship Program
(3) White River National Forest Ski Conservation Fund
See below for an overview of each program and links to access more information.
Matching Awards Program
Focus: On-the-ground conservation and restoration projects that improve forest health and outdoor experiences on National Forests and Grasslands
Geographic Scope: National, must benefit US National Forests and Grasslands
Funding Source: Federal funds via the US Forest Service
Eligible Applicants: 501(c)(3) nonprofits, universities, and federally recognized Native American tribes
Match Requirements: 1:1 nonfederal cash match
Deadlines: January 23, 2019 and June 13, 2019
Informational Webinar: January 9, 2019
Learn More about MAP & Register for Webinar
Oregon & Washington Community Capacity and Land Stewardship Program
Focus: Increasing the capacity of organizations to plan and implement landscape-scale restoration
Geographic Scope: Benefiting National Forests and Grasslands in Oregon & Washington
Funding Source: Federal funds from the US Forest Service Pacific Northwest Region
Eligible Applicants: 501(c)(3) nonprofits, collaborative groups, and federally recognized Native American tribes
Match Requirements: None
Deadline: December 5, 2018
Informational Webinar: November 7, 2018
Learn More about CCLS & Register for Webinar
White River National Forest Ski Conservation Fund
Focus: On-the-ground conservation and restoration projects that improve forest health and outdoor experiences
Geographic Scope: Benefiting Colorado’s White River National Forest
Funding Source: Nonfederal funds donated by guests of participating resorts and federal funds via the US Forest Service
Eligible Applicants: 501(c)(3) nonprofits, universities, state and local government entities, and federally recognized Native American tribes
Match Requirements: 50% nonfederal cash or in-kind match
Deadline: December 12, 2018
Learn More about SCF & Download RFP
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Money money money … my daughter is a “grant writer,” an occupation that I don’t think existed twenty years ago. Basically, government and NGOs hang out money, and private and not-so-private (she works for a community college) groups dream up ways to make themselves eligible. In this manner, everyone falls in line behind that carrot on the string. It is voluntary self-coercion.
Montana Wilderness Asssociation was not always the industry front group it is now, or so I imagine anyway. I had just joined and a gal named Tammy and I drove from Billings to Great Falls trying to get some Pew Charitable Trust money. We were turned down, but the upshot was that we were required, and we knew this and resisted, to conform the PCT’s policies if we wanted their money. Later I would learn that PCT got a foot in the door, and now the entire paid staff is a bunch of whores.
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A foot in the door of the whore. Sounds like a classic Systematic Shakedown,where they shake a basket for CASH, in pews for their own.
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Wiki says “trusts and foundations number in excess of 88,000 and disperse in excess of $40 billion every year.” Tried to find national employment numbers for “grant writer” but failed. Needless to say, it (tax evasion) is big business.
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Is it just me, or does anyone else think that this ridiculous billion dollar prize lottery is a project?:
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/mega-millions-powerball-lotteries-now-1-billion-combined-165814961–abc-news-topstories.html
“The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made their living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons.”
― George Orwell, 1984
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“The Lottery is a tax on the stupid” (Miles Hunt, The Wonderstuff)
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They say someone just won the big jack-pot for 1.6 million in Simpsonville ,S.Carolina The ticket was sold to some idiot named “HOMER”. He traded the ticket for a bottle of Duff Beer,and when they told him what he lost ,He said….”DOE” !
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I heard $1.6 Billion. If you are not going to pay out, do it big.
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J.B. it’s not called the “WONDER-STUFF” anymore. it is now called the”WONDER-DUFF”.
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1.6 BILLION.
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Sorry, I hit Million instead of billion by mistake…”DOE” ?
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Homer Simpson, Never would have made that mistake.
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My wife and I play Scrabble alot .. for like 23 years now. The Scrabble dictionary is updated every year. Some time in the not-too-distant past, “doh” became a word.
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“doh”, you gotta be kidding me, Homers’s on the map ? So your’e telling me that the “LOTTERY” isn’t real. You mean to tell me after all this time,they’ve been slipping the Lotto-players a “MICKEY.”..I mean the “DUFF” ?
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