Light Pollution of Bountiful Temple in National Geographic

This afternoon I was in Urgent Care, which as it turns out is anything but urgent. It wasn't for me, but for my wife who injured her ankle on one of our staircases at home. She was carrying the baby when she fell, and fortunately there were no serious injuries. While passing the many hours of waiting, I happened upon the November 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine. The feature article is entitled "Our Vanishing Night" and discusses light pollution throughout the country. I really enjoyed the article and highly recommend it. I was shocked when I got to page 120-121 to see a full two-page image of the Bountiful Utah Temple.

Long-time followers of this blog - both of you - will recall that I did a post on light pollution a year ago where I talked about how the poorly designed lighting of the Temples was adding to the light pollution of our cities. And the image used was of the Bountiful Utah Temple. So out of all the buildings in the country to single out, the National Geographic chose an LDS building for this article. And out of all the LDS buildings in the country, they chose the same building I used to speak about light pollution last year. Even more remarkable is I don't think the Bountiful Temple is any more of a light-polluter than other LDS Temples - I simply chose it as representative of all the others, and because I found such a great image of it. (As a side note, I like the image used in my original post more than the one used in the National Geographic. I think it does a better job capturing the excess light from the Temple.)

So is it even possible that this is just a random coincidence? In my weird little mind, I'd like to think I had something to do with this appearing in the National Geographic. But that, of course, would mean they saw my blog...I'll probably never know, but I can always hope, right? So on to the important stuff:

There were a surprisingly-high four beautiful images representing Utah in the article. It seems excessive, since Utah is not any worse a light-polluter than other states, but at least one of the images showed a beautiful example of no light pollution, while the remaining three showed examples of excessive light pollution.

Here are the four images included from the magazine with the captions below:


Photograph by Jim Richardson
"'Let thy glorious light ever shine upon it,' beseeched the 1995 dedicatory prayer for the Mormon temple in Bountiful, Utah. Plenty of earthly light bathes the granite structure, its brilliance exaggerated by a long photo exposure."



Photograph by Jim Richardson
"As if admiring a sunset, Balanced Rock in Arches National Park, Utah, basks in the glow of the town of Moab—with about 5,000 residents—less than ten miles away."



Photograph by Jim Richardson
"The electric blush of Salt Lake City, more than a hundred miles away, brushes the horizon over Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats."


And finally the positive one, showing us the goal of what we can return to. In my opinion, we shouldn't have to go to a National Park to see this kind of spectacular sky.


Photograph by Jim Richardson
"A starry night gleams above Owachomo Bridge in Utah's Natural Bridges National Monument—named the first Dark Sky Park by the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA). 'Here you see something forgotten,' says ranger Scott Ryan, 'and reconnect with the sky.'"

One of my favorite quotes from the article states, "Of all the pollutions we face, light pollution is perhaps the most easily remedied."
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General Authority concerned about the Environment

Elder Steven E. Snow was called to the First Quorum of the Seventy in April 2001. In Oct 2007 he was called to Presidency of the Seventy. Prior to his service in the Seventy, Elder Snow was quite active in conservation efforts in his home of Southern Utah. There are two published accounts of his I would like to highlight. The first is from an article he wrote entitled, "Skipping the Grand Canyon," included in the book "New Genesis: A Mormon Reader on Land and Community." The second is a statement read to the House of Representatives during a Joint Oversight Field Hearing when Elder Snow was a Board Member of the Grand Canyon Trust. The hearing involved the issue of air tour flights conducted over national parks.

"Our generation, more than any other, has the ability to irretrievably change the land. Financial rewards provide tremendous pressure to unleash our technology to reinvent our surroundings. There will be growth; change will come. But failure to care for the land on which we live means turning our backs on a heritage laid down carefully and at such great cost by our forefathers - and will leave us immeasurably poorer."
Steven E. Snow, "Skipping the Grand Canyon," New Genesis: A Mormon Reader on Land and Community (ed. Terry Tempest Williams, William B. Smart, Gibbs M. Smith eds. 1998, 244).


Highlights from the STATEMENT OF STEVEN E. SNOW, BOARD MEMBER, GRAND CANYON TRUST

Our organization is dedicated to conservation of the natural and cultural resources of the Colorado Plateau. We have been involved in this issue of natural quiet in the parks for about a decade now with special emphasis on the two dozen parks on the Colorado Plateau. We hope that the visitor experience is not threatened as a result of the growing number of commercial air tours over our national parks. Now, natural quiet, of course, means many different things to many different people, and clearly there is no one definition which suits everyone, but what is clear is that regardless of how the term is defined, there is little dispute among visitors to our national parks, who seek solitude and escape from an increasingly urbanized society, that natural quiet is one of the defining elements of the visit to the national park, and we believe that has been borne out as a result of surveys which have been conducted in the past.

We believe that the Park Service is the one charged to protect the resources of our national treasures like Grand Canyon and the Great Smokies, Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain, Zion and Yosemite, and many, many others. Aircraft management plans developed by the Park Service could prevent the development of conflicts between natural quiet needs and aircraft overflights. For example, as part of the development of the management plan at Zion National Park, park managers in cooperation with tour operators have developed voluntary measures to minimize air tour impacts on the park. However, these measures are just voluntary, and without legislation, such as S. 268, the Park Service does not have the authority to require compliance. We think the situation in Bryce Canyon is plagued by fixed wing and helicopter overflights that impair both natural quiet and visual resource because they fly below the elevation of the park overlooks. Other parks on the Colorado Plateau, such as Arches and Canyonlands, are also experiencing these overflight issues.

Grand Canyon, I think, has been referred to a great deal today. It is an example of what can happen. By the time Congress passed the Natural Parks Overflight Act in 1987, there were 40,000 air tour operations per year in the canyon, and natural quiet had already become a scarce resource, and the air industry was firmly entrenched and growing. Ten years later we still have not restored natural quiet, and the number of air tour operations in the park has now more than doubled. We think the caps on flight operations is one reason why these past rules have failed. We think that it is a good direction to protect the natural quiet resource in our parks.
(House of Representatives JOINT OVERSIGHT FIELD HEARING ON NATIONAL PARK OVERFLIGHTS as part of the ONE HUNDRED FIFTH CONGRESS on NOVEMBER 17, 1997 at ST. GEORGE, UTAH)
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