This is Part Three of an article by Jimmy Tobias that first appeared in the High Country News on March 16, 2020
The morning after my meeting with Park Service spokesperson Denise Germann, Jim Stanford and I struggled to find a parking spot near Jenny Lake, one of Grand Teton’s most popular tourist attractions. Even on a Friday in September, during the so-called “off season,” the parking areas were glutted with vehicles. The campgrounds around the lake were also packed. Commercial jets loaded with incoming tourists occasionally descended overhead on their way to Jackson Hole airport — the only major airport in the country that sits inside a national park, as Stanford ruefully reminded me on multiple occasions. On this particular morning, Grand Teton felt a little bit like Disney World — full lots, big crowds, minimal vacancies and a $35 entrance fee.
On this particular morning, Grand Teton felt a little bit like Disney World — full lots, big crowds, minimal vacancies and a $35 entrance fee.
Eventually, we decided to ditch Jenny Lake and head north to quieter country. Farther up the road, we turned into a pull-off that looks out on the Teton Range. It was a lesson in contrasts: To our right was the less developed portion of the park — few trails, few campgrounds, few visitors, just the rugged northern half of the Teton front, where one can find solitude, open land and the occasional grizzly bear. Much of it is de facto wilderness. Back to our left, on the other hand, the Jenny Lake complex was exceptionally busy. Stanford, citing a favorite nature writer, called the latter area “a sacrifice zone.”
Together, these two areas of Grand Teton reflect the Park Service’s dual mission. In each national park, the agency is required to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such a manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
The mission requires the park to both conserve and entertain, to provide protection and access — two mandates that often clash.
For Stanford, the ultimate question is whether all of Grand Teton will become a “sacrifice zone,” its only purpose to cater to visitors, or whether some portion of the park will remain as wild as possible. This question is at the heart of his cell tower angst. “It is one thing to have (cell coverage) concentrated in these sacrifice zones and these developed areas,” he told me, “but it is another to have it just beamed everywhere.”
There are some, though, who want to make our parks more commercial, more developed, more like Disney World, and they have the ear of President Donald Trump’s Interior Department.
In 2019, news broke that the Interior Department is mulling a proposal to supercharge the Park Service’s drift toward commercialization. The proposal, which was crafted by an Interior Department advisory committee whose members include corporate concessionaires like Delaware North, Aramark and the National Parks Hospitality Association, calls for more private management of Park Service campgrounds nationwide. The plan’s proponents want the agency to raise camping fees, end some discounts for senior citizens, increase WiFi connectivity, and even allow food trucks and Amazon deliveries at certain park campgrounds. They want more contracts, more profits, more industrial tourism. Conservation groups have denounced the plan as an effort to effectively privatize national park facilities.
At the same time, the Trump administration is working closely with telecom interests to facilitate cell tower construction on federal land. In 2017, Trump’s FCC convened a working group that included representatives from telecom companies, infrastructure developers and key federal agencies, including the Interior Department. This working group published a report in January 2018 that calls on federal agencies to speed up permitting for telecom infrastructure on public land and exempt some broadband projects from environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act, among many other proposals.
Consistent with the Telecommunications Act, the group wrote, “applications to place communications facilities should be approved unless they are determined, on the basis of all relevant evidence, to be in direct and complete conflict with an agency’s mission.” In sum: The group recommended that federal land managers should green-light a lot more telecom projects, and do so lickety-split.
Jonathan Adelstein, a telecom industry advocate, served as the working group’s co-chair. He is the leader of the Wireless Infrastructure Association, which represents companies like Diamond Communications and spent more than $1.5 million lobbying in Washington, D.C., over the last two years.
“We made our report and it is up to the FCC, and White House and other agencies to implement (our recommendations). I feel there is a good faith effort to do so,” he says, citing Grand Teton’s telecom plan as an example of the government’s eagerness to build more wireless infrastructure on federal land.
In response to those who oppose more cell towers at national parks, Adelstein offers this retort: “Why should a handful of naysayers have the right to dictate for everyone when they can connect to wireless broadband or connect to emergency services?”
Critics of cell tower development in parks, for their part, see the influence of corporations and concessionaires on federal policy as the ultimate source of the problem.
“The commercial interests are winning, the lobbying groups are winning, so these are the kinds of things that are happening all the time now,” said Joan Anzelmo, a retired Park Service official. She lives near Grand Teton National Park and rejects its cell tower plan. She believes the agency’s environmental review of the cell tower project was inadequate. “I was disappointed that Grand Teton did an environmental analysis and not an environmental impact statement,” she said. ‘This is a major project with lots of physical impacts” on the park, but under the Trump administration there is an overwhelming pressure to “say yes to everything.”
Jeff Ruch, a staffer at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an advocacy group that has criticized cell tower development in parks, agrees. “It’s almost as if the Park Service has become a subsidiary of AT&T,” he told me. His organization believes that the agency, in its haste to fulfill the desires of broadband providers, has violated federal laws and policies that govern telecom infrastructure on public land. Last year, PEER asked the Interior Department’s Inspector General to investigate the matter. The office launched a probe and, in July 2019, issued a report. It wasn’t pretty. Investigators found that the Park Service did not maintain an accurate inventory of cell towers on parklands. The agency had also failed in some cases to collect the correct amount of fees for telecom right-of-way permits, while in other cases, it couldn’t provide evidence that it adequately conducted environment reviews for telecom projects.
“The root of the problem is a Park Service embrace of cellular coverage without any critical analysis, outsourcing its resource protection role to the telecom industry,” said PEER’s executive director, Tim Whitehouse, in a statement last year. “In short, the (Inspector General) found that the Park Service is illegally subsidizing the telecom industry to the detriment of the parks.”
BACK IN TETON LAST SEPTEMBER, I sat with Stanford as he described one of his favorite places on the planet. With the ancient, weathered face of the mountain range in front of us, he pulled out a map, and pointed to an area near the park’s northern boundary where the landscape dips into a burned-out basin before rising again to meet the Yellowstone plateau. This particular hunk of land, he said, is some of the “wildest country left” on earth.
Stanford describes Teton as the sort of place that “stirs up things deep inside of you, and you have to rely on that, and it is fundamentally human.” It is a “tonic for our souls.”
And yet, according to coverage maps, much of this untrammeled landscape will be blanketed with new cell and broadband service should the agency’s telecom plan come to fruition. “I see the tentacles of these technologies spreading,” Stanford told me, “and that is why I have been kind of rebelling against it.”
“There is so little left,” he said. “There is so little truly wild country left.”
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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.
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