- Teton County is the world's first county to be certified as a Dark Sky Place, including the Jackson Hole Airport.
- A decade of volunteer and legislative efforts show that broader municipalities can take steps to protect their night skies.
- Made up of eight towns, two villages, two national parks and three national forests, the county receives millions of visitors every year.
Only 20% of Americans can see the Milky Way at night. Due to light pollution, the stars are mostly invisible for a full third of the planet’s inhabitants.
But through the work of a nonprofit, thousands of volunteers and legislators, efforts have been made to address the effects of significant light in night skies around the globe, which affect the health of both broader ecosystems and humans, too.
Dark Sky International, the nonprofit founded in 2001 in Flagstaff, Arizona, works with those volunteers, elected officials, private businesses and municipalities to give official designations of “Dark Sky Place.” The process can take years and requires proof of both established efforts to mitigate artificial light at night — introducing educational outreach and location wide “light policies”— and plans to enforce them over the years to come.
Its mission is “to restore the nighttime environment and protect communities and wildlife from light pollution.”
Around the world, there are over 230 places that have received accreditation — 32 of which are in Utah, such as Helper, Castle Valley and Moab as well as most of the big-name national parks. Most of those places are large parks, individual towns and a wide variety of nature preserves and its total reach is across 22 countries and covers more than 39 million acres.
Teton County goes big sky
And yet, within that scale and breadth of change, what happened in northwest Wyoming this past April is still a significant step forward for the organization and for whom might be eligible for Dark Sky accreditation.
“What makes Teton County certification so special is, of course, that it’s a full county, not just a town within a county,” said Michael Rymer, a program associate at DarkSky International. “Because the applicants, the volunteers, the people who headed up this project wanted to go big — they didn’t want just Jackson to be a certified community — they dreamt bigger than that."
That dream, which started a decade ago, resulted in the first broader municipality, one made up of multiple towns, in the world to be designated as a Dark Sky Place.
Teton County is made up of eight towns, such as Jackson, Wilson and the tiny enclave of Kelly, and two additional villages with a total population of 23,272. While that’s not a large community, per se, it does not reflect the millions of tourists who pass through the region every year to visit its internationally recognized outdoor destinations. It’s home to Grand Teton National Park, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, parts of Yellowstone National Park and three national forests.
Then, in May, the Jackson Hole Airport — one of a very few located within a national park — received its own world’s first designation, too. It was the first commercial airport named as an “Urban Night Sky Place” for its efforts to mitigate what light pollution it can while still staying FAA compliant.
“We certainly hope for places like Teton County to serve as a shining — to make a pun — example of dark sky conservation," Rymer said. “If a place like Jackson in Teton county can do it, then there’s no reason that no one else should at least try to attempt it.”