This is Part Two of an article by Jimmy Tobias that first appeared in the High Country News on March 16, 2020
The afternoon following his dawn float trip, I sat at an outdoor cafe near Grand Teton headquarters with Jim Stanford, sipping coffee and soaking in some scarce sunshine, as he expressed his disdain for the park’s massive cell tower expansion. He admitted that he may come off as antiquated, but he harbors a deep unease about the ever-spreading influence of mobile technologies and their psychological, social and environmental impacts. In fact, he’s angry about it, and at times his big blue eyes narrowed into daggers as we talked.
“We are tethered to this technology 24/7,” he said. “Even while floating a wild and scenic river in a national park, one of the most majestic pieces of river you can float anywhere in the world, people are still tethered to their phones.
“That is the trend. That is where we are going as a society,” he said. “And the Park Service wants to enable that.”
A steady drip of studies and reports in recent years offer some context for Stanford’s concerns. One 2017 study warned that prolonged cellphone use can alter the curvature of our spines. And a 2019 survey by Common Sense Media, an advocacy group that promotes safe technology use for children, found that 45% of parents and 39% of teens feel addicted to their mobile devices. The survey also found that one out of every three teens and one in four parents are having their sleep regularly interrupted by notifications from mobile devices. Indeed, 29% of teens actually sleep with their phones. Another study has concluded that teenagers who spend five or more hours a day using digital technologies are 71% more likely to suffer from at least one risk factor for suicide.
On the environmental front, telecom infrastructure can prove deadly for wildlife. In a 2014 letter, for instance, the Interior Department’s own Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance cited studies showing that as many as 6.8 million birds may die every year in North America due to collisions with cell towers. The letter also referenced the harmful impact of radiation on birds nesting near cell tower sites: “Study results have documented nest and site abandonment, plumage deterioration, locomotion problems, reduced survivorship and death,” it reported.
A slew of prominent Silicon Valley insiders, meanwhile, have come forward to blow the whistle on Big Tech’s inventions. In a book published in 2018, for instance, the internet pioneer Jaron Lanier denounced the pernicious political and psychological influence of major social media platforms, which he describes as “behavior modification empires” that intentionally addict, manipulate and spy on their users, all while spreading political misinformation, stoking economic insecurity, destroying local journalism, and providing our personal data to unseen third-parties. Lanier advises his readers to delete all social media accounts immediately.
Millennials, too, are chafing at the digital bonds of Big Tech and the telecom giants. In her new book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell encourages people to fight “the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy and distraction.” Odell sees non-commercial public spaces like parks and gardens as havens from the “permanent state of frenzy” that constant connection incites.
Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s new book has a name for the economic system that has fueled the rise of smartphones, social media and tech behemoths: “surveillance capitalism,” which she describes as a “new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales.” With their dazzling digital services and profit-seeking snooping, Google, Facebook, Verizon and more draw us ever-deeper into their ecosystem of intrusive corporate surveillance, threatening our right to self-determination, privacy and “sanctuary,” she writes. And the emergence of 5G wireless, wearable devices, and the so-called “internet of things,” she argues, could soon allow these companies to create a world of nonstop behavioral monitoring, conditioning and control — “a world of no escape.”
But right now it’s a world of no escape for some, and not for others.
The telecom industry’s business model means that many low-income rural and tribal communities are completely shut out of adequate cellular and broadband coverage even as more populous places enjoy an abundance of service. In Indian Country, 63% of households on tribal land lack high-speed services, says Kevin Allis, the CEO of the National Congress of American Indians. “And even more painful is the fact that 60% of Bureau of Indian Education schools lack access to adequate digital broadband.”
The FCC estimates that at least 21 million Americans do not have broadband service. The vast majority live in rural communities, which often lack reliable cellular coverage, according to Lindsay Stern, a policy fellow at the advocacy group Public Knowledge. “Major carriers have a bottom line, and if they don’t get a return on investment, they often will not deploy in certain areas — and that is legal. They can decide where they want to deploy,” she says. “But broadband is an essential service of the 21st century, just like phones were an essential service of the 20th century. We need to treat broadband as an essential communications service, because that is the reality.” Currently, the FCC does not do this.
Still, even as policymakers and advocates labor to close the digital divide in rural and tribal communities, the federal government and telecom interests are committing their resources to new infrastructure in high-profile landscapes where very few people live full-time.
Some critics believe that industry and government don’t have their priorities straight — that their approach to broadband development is uneven and unfair. At the same time, some say that we should limit the telecom industry’s expansionary ambitions, especially on protected landscapes. Stanford, for example — a child of suburban New York who followed a friend to Wyoming in his early 20s and soon found a job working in outdoor recreation — says places like Grand Teton are easily degraded.
“So many people think of this area as so wild, they think there is so much wilderness and everything,” he told me. “Well, I walked the Teton Crest in the moonlight, nearly 20 years ago now, and what quickly becomes apparent is you can see the lights encroaching on either side — the lights of civilization — and you realize what a thin, fragile, precious strip Grand Teton National Park really is.”
Undeveloped landscapes “are besieged on all fronts,” he added later. Why “compromise” what remains with towers and cables and the seductive lure of smart devices?
The afternoon after Stanford’s float trip, I visited national park headquarters in Moose, Wyoming, a tiny town with front-row views of the Teton Range. We could see its formidable peaks, which first stabbed the sky almost 10 million years ago, right outside the corner conference room where I met Denise Germann, an agency spokesperson dressed in classic Park Service garb. Rusty Mizelle, a tall reed of a man who coordinated the Grand Teton cell tower plan, soon joined us. Together, in the shadow of the mountains, they explained their agency’s rationale for letting the telecom companies set up shop on protected public lands.
It all started back in 2013, when the Park Service convened a meeting with AT&T, Verizon and other telecom interests that wanted to lay fiber-optic cable and build cell towers in Grand Teton. During the meeting, the telecom companies pulled out a coverage map that showed “a big spot, a big chunk, in northwest Wyoming, where there was nothing.”
“They came to us and said, ‘Well, we’re interested in filling our map,’ ” Mizelle recounted. The Park Service had its own priorities: “One is our day-to-day mission-critical business,” including search and rescue operations, Germann said. “The other is recruitment and retention of employees,” she added. The third “is just visitor experience and visitor expectations. More and more people are looking for this sort of access.”
With new cell towers, it will be easier to manage the park and hire employees, and it will be easier to satisfy the 3 to 4 million people who visit the park each year.
And so the Park Service and Big Telecom teamed up. AT&T and the other telecom companies appointed as their agent a New Jersey-based infrastructure firm called Diamond Communications, which builds cell towers around the nation. Together, the Park Service and Diamond scouted locations and crafted a plan that calls for a slew of 80-foot monopole towers, a sprawling fiber-optic network and more. The Park Service then initiated an environmental and cultural analysis of the project, as required by law. It also consulted with numerous tribal nations, including the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, whose homeland includes all of Grand Teton National Park.
In a recent interview, Joshua Mann, the director of the Eastern Shoshone’s historic preservation office, put the cell tower project and the park itself in proper context.
“We had several bands of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe that hunted there and also camped there,” he tells me. The Eastern Shoshone and others, he says, “were pretty much driven from those lands as soon as the park boundaries were established.” Whatever the controversies swirling around federal lands today, many of these lands have their origin in violent dispossession, a fact that legacy conservation organizations have largely failed to grapple with. As for the specifics of Grand Teton’s telecom plan, Mann says the Eastern Shoshone are not opposed, though the tribe is concerned that new infrastructure could impact cultural resources, including prayer circles and historic campsites located near the project zone. If cell tower construction proceeds, Mann said, the Eastern Shoshone will safeguard their interests.
Mizelle and his team ultimately completed their environmental and cultural analysis of the cell tower project in August 2019 and issued a “finding of no significant impact.” The report concludes that the new cell towers and fiber-optic cables will not negatively affect natural or cultural resources in Grand Teton. Telecom companies are now awaiting a final permit from the Interior Department, expected this year.
During our meeting, Germann pulled out maps of the project and laid them on the conference room table. In pastel colors of blue and green splashed over the park’s topography, the maps showed that new cell coverage will not just inundate developed areas in Grant Teton, but will also spill into significant portions of the park’s backcountry, including remote areas that are managed as federal wilderness. Germann acknowledged that some spillover will happen but insists “the intent of the entire plan is not to have cell coverage in the backcountry.”
Documents produced during the agency’s environmental analysis show, though, that the Park Service could have prevented some cell coverage from spilling into the Grand Teton’s backcountry but decided not to. In an appendix contained in its own environmental analysis, the agency explains that “although the technology exists to limit the spillover of cell phone frequency into backcountry and wilderness areas, the NPS determined the potential increase in overall coverage of cellular service is acceptable in these areas.”
Asked about this discrepancy, Mizelle said any spillover that occurs in the backcountry will likely be unreliable and weak. “We don’t think people will be able to stream Netflix while walking up into Cascade Canyon because of what we are providing,” he said. “And frankly, if people choose to do that, that is human behavior. It is not the radio waves’ fault.”
The Park Service says that all of this — the years of planning, the infrastructure build out, the backcountry spillover — is ultimately about meeting the needs of visitors and employees. It is what people want. Germann herself believes it should proceed, both for personal and professional reasons. She lives in the park and says she has very spotty service at her home. “Sometimes I have to go to the corner of the room to find it, and sometimes I have to go outside to find it,” she said. Germann is a public affairs officer whose job involves keeping visitors aware of road closures and winter storms and other unforeseen events, so the bad cell service impacts her job performance in a real way. “I don’t have the coverage to be as responsive as I could be,” she added, noting that other park employees have similar frustrations.
The Park Service, though, has not provided any official survey or dataset that supports its belief that a substantial number of visitors desire more coverage. Germann acknowledged that the agency’s evidence is still mostly anecdotal.
Jimmy Tobias is a contributing writer at The Guardian and a contributor at The Nation. Since 2017, his accountability reporting has helped spur federal investigations into three different political appointees at the Interior Department.
This coverage was supported by the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Fund for Environmental Journalism and by contributors to the High Country News Research Fund.