Park bosses say they’re running visitor centers and even cleaning bathrooms as remaining staff try to keep sites open
Across the US’s fabled but overstretched national parks, unusual scenes are playing out this summer following budget cuts by Donald Trump’s administration. Archeologists are staffing ticket booths, ecologists are covering visitor centers and the superintendents of parks are even cleaning the toilets.
The National Park Service (NPS), responsible for maintaining cherished wildernesses and sites of cultural importance from Yellowstone to the Statue of Liberty, has lost a quarter of its permanent staff since Trump took office in January, with the administration seeking to gut the service’s budget by a third.
But the administration has also ordered parks to remain open and accessible to the public, meaning the NPS has had to scramble remaining staff into public-facing roles to maintain appearances to the crowds of visitors. This has meant much of the behind-the-scenes work to protect endangered species, battle invasive plants, fix crumbling infrastructure or plan for the future needs of the US’s trove of natural wonders has been jettisoned.
I’m not sure they should be trying to survive. Perhaps they shouldn’t try their hardest to keep these magnificent parks running, they shouldn’t work unpaid overtime or find creative new revenue streams.
Maybe they should demonstrate what happens to all your nice stuff when you don’t maintain it. You lose it. And then you find out that it’s way more expensive to rebuild and restore things after you’ve let them deteriorate.
That’s the goal. Point out that no one’s using the parks, the facilities are in disrepair and an eyesore, and then sell them off, either literally or least by selling oil/mining/gas/timber leases.
We stopped by mt st helens. There’s a husband and wife running it right now. They used to have a third helper, but they quit and now the two of them haven’t had the same day off in five weeks and have been at different sites every day. Sucks. My dream was to be a camp host at a national park when I retire and just move my motor home every three months when they want me at a different campground, but I don’t know if they’ll still exist when I retire
Crater Lake is closing for five years after this season, for renovations. Good call timing-wise I’d say, kind of like going dormant to avoid harsh conditions. Stay under the radar of the people in power looking to wreck anything remotely good about this country.
Close them! Close the fucking parks. We don’t deserve them with how low our society has fallen. It never was great for everyone, and we need to seriously suffer before doing the right thing. Close the parks. Close the post office. Close the schools. Shut down the hospitals. Shut it all down. We can’t keep just being cogs in a machine that’s actually trying to kill us.
It turns out closing the parks doesn’t work, and actually makes things worse. While some members of the public suck ass, the majority of the traffic through a park keeps those few shitheads monitored and honest. It’s not like there were a ton of park rangers to begin with. Most park preservation happens through good visitors gently educating and occasionally snitching. We learned this the hard way during the last Republican-caused federal shutdown when there was a ton of defacement and destruction of public land.
Closing it down may be the best way to keep them safe. The other side of that coin, is their lack of use could be used to justify doing other things on the land. Nothing is off the table anymore
Golfing pædophile: is it for meee 🥹
They kinda shouldnt keep them open tho. They should let things run into the ground, otherwise the people visiting wont know whats happening.
If they let things run into the ground, it’ll be used as an excuse to sell the land to private interests. It’s like, conservative anti government policy 101 to defund an institution you don’t like to then claim it’s ineffectual.
Additionally, covid showed us what happens when parks like joshua tree get closed, even temporarily. People took chainsaws to the trees to gain access to wherever they wanted to go. Having a presence in any form is a major deterrent. Also, fuck anyone who did this, obviously.
They could keep the staff there just not open it to visitors compared to Covid where no staff was there to enforce people damaging property
This. Close the park due to lack of staff, but keep everyone on to patrol and do trail maintenance.
I mean we joined an org that did local “citizens” patrols and maintained the place when they were closed, just less frequent? Found it on meetup. Like, twice a month at the local state park. I’m sure there was an org going by other times too, just I found what worked for us.
They care. They care about what they are doing and believe in it. Its a great feeling and I’m sure if you ever feel that you wont be so quick to dismiss them for not surrendering.
Especially because they care about it, they shouldnt allow it to slowly painfully die out like this. Keeping things barely running like this will not save them in the long run.
So give up and go home. How weak is that.
Unfortunately this is likely the idea. Keep them open, let the services at these parks become a “bad experience” for visitors, and change the public opinion on them from “we need these parks” to “sell them to corpos for pennies on the dollar”.
I’m getting real tired, boss, but I’ll buy this just like I bought my PBS subscription and hope the people can help save what this administration is destroying. And also that the people will draw and quarter these fuckers.
