August 21, 2026

U.S. Forest Service

Tom Shultz, Chief

201 14th Street SW

Washington, DC 20250

Submitted electronically via: https://www.regulations.gov

RE: U.S. Department of Agriculture Intent to Rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule—Docket No. FS-2025-0001

I am writing to register my strong opposition to the proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. I served 40 years with the US National Park Service as ranger, biologist, park superintendent, regional director and as the 18^th Director from 2009-2017. Over my decades of public service, I have been directly engaged with park and public land conservation, recreation and stewardship in the field and in Washington. The proposal to rescind the stewardship of 45 million acres of currently conserved public land is equivalent to “eating your seed corn”. These lands are an investment in the future as well as a promise to our children that they may experience nature that has not been altered for short term profit.

One of my favorite adages is that whoever makes the economic argument first wins. There is a strong economic argument to preserve the 45 million acres as roadless. The US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reports annually on the economics of outdoor recreation economy. In 2026, the BEA reported that the outdoor recreation economy accounted for 2.4% of the US GDP, at $696.7 billion. In the western states, where many of the roadless areas lie, the percentages of state GDP is even higher: Wyoming (4.5%), Montana (4.9%), Utah (3.4%), Colorado (3.3%). Outdoor recreation takes place predominantly on public land, is growing and is sustainable. The US timber industry, the only likely beneficiary of the roadless rule rescission, ranks only 1% of GDP, or about $288 billion. The proposed rescission of the roadless rule is trading off the sustainable long term outdoor economy for a short term extractive economy that is less than half of the value.

There is also a strong economic argument of the value of undisturbed forest for the preservation of water quality for downstream users. Studies of this economic value put the estimate at $600 to $4800 an acre. (ValuingEcosystemServices-RHR-SWGANF.pdf)

That would put the 45 million acres of roadless areas worth a minimum of $27 billion just for its value of water purification. Municipalities have long invested in watershed protection over the construction and operation of treatment plants, such as when New York City opted to protect the watershed in the Catskills versus building an $8 billion water treatment plant.

When the Roadless Rule was debated in the early 2000’s it was recognized that these lands had been bypassed by the timber industry and the US Forest Service because they were difficult to access, would be very expensive to build roads and often had less valuable timber. Those facts have not changed, making it even less economic to open them up now.

My experience with the National Parks such as Mt. Rainier, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Wrangell St. Elias is that their integrity depends on the quality of the lands in their surrounding ecosystem. Wildlife ignore park boundaries and use the entire ecosystem. We have both the science and experience that these treasures do not exist in a vacuum and require collaborative stewardship of adjacent lands. That does not mean these adjacent lands must be managed to NPS standards. They can include working ranches, communities, and working forests but also corridors for migratory wildlife. Roadless areas are integral to these large landscapes, offering wild places to hike, bike, hunt, fish, camp and experience some of the country’s most pristine places. Roads will ruin those experiences and permanently alter the landscape. Past road building and logging around Mt. Rainier National Park is so apparent that the boundary of the park can easily be seen from space.

As a nation we are fortunate that we have lands that are in public ownership available for our enjoyment, recreation and collective benefit. From these lands we extract minerals and fuels, forest products and other resources for our economy. But we also need to preserve some lands as a savings account, for the benefit of our children and their children as well. The roadless lands are their inheritance, and should not be sold to those who will carve roads and cut the last of our primeval forests to make plywood, toilet paper, and 2x4s.

Jonathan B. Jarvis

Pinole, CA

Joshua Tree National Park. Photo: NPS / Robert Zuniga

The Trump administration is diverting your money to his vanity projects in Washington, DC. I don’t just mean your tax dollars, but also the money you paid last time you visited a national park. The National Park Service has been charging entrance fees, at least to some of its national parks, for over 100 years. Fees paid by the visitors are in addition to the taxes paid by the American people that support the national parks. Fees were never intended to offset the annual funding from Congress, but rather to “enhance” the park resources and visitor experience. The Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act passed with bipartisan support in 2004 requiring that 80% of the fees collected are to be spent in the collecting park and 20% goes to the entire system of national parks. Congress directed the NPS to use the fees for specific purposes: repair and replacement of park facilities, visitor safety, habitat improvements and accessibility. This practice recognizes that while your tax dollars support all the parks, fees collected at the gate of an individual park are used to help that particular park in its conservation responsibilities and to enhance your experience. This balance of fees and funding from Congress has resulted in public support for fees, as long as they are kept low, reasonable and accountable. The NPS also puts up signs that state “Your Fee Dollars at Work” to help the visitor see how their funds are being spent.

Of the 400 plus units of the National Park System, about 150 collect fees at the entrance or for other visitor amenities such as camping. Many parks do not collect any fees due to low visitation, multiple entrances, or in some cases like the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, legislation that prohibits charging a fee. With an annual operating budget for the NPS around $3 billion, fees contribute an addition average of $350 million. The numbers demonstrate that the national parks could never achieve their stewardship and public enjoyment mission on fees alone. By law, fees are not to be used for basic park operations. The Trump administration violated this requirement during government shutdowns, by redirecting fees to keep parks open without an appropriation for park operations. The Government Accounting Office, in 2019, reported to Congress that the Trump administration violated the Anti-deficiency Act and the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act when it used fee funds for park operations during the 2019 government shutdown.

Now, the Trump administration is diverting your fee dollars to his pet projects in Washington, DC. Back in the days when things were normal, each unit of the National Park System would develop a five year priority list of projects that met the criteria for use of fee dollars. This applied to both the parks that retained 80% of their fees and to the parks that did not collect fees and were eligible for allocation of some of the 20% fees. Projects were prioritized using strong criteria such as resource or facility condition, public safety, asset value, importance to the park mission and to enhance the visitor experience. Typically funded projects include failing water treatment plants, restoration of historic buildings, accessible board-walk trails, improved restrooms, mitigation of fire risks, park signs, and restoration of disturbed areas. Instead of using the priority setting process, Secretary Burgum has redirected over $100 million fee funds to President Trump’s pet projects: repair fountains in DC, paint the bottom of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool and contribute to the construction of the White House Ball Room.

It is important to point out that these facilities are a part of the National Park System and therefore are technically eligible for rehabilitation with NPS Fee funds, but they would not normally rank as high as critical needs across the entire National Park System. Your fee dollars are no longer working for you, but instead working at the whim of the President. As a result, projects across the National Park System that are truly in need of repair go unfinished.

After several centuries of taking lands from Native Americans, in 1849, Congress established the Department of the Interior as the steward of the lands and waters that remained in public ownership. There were not yet national parks, nor wildlife refuges, but vast swaths of forests, deserts, rivers and grasslands that had not been transferred to private ownership. The new Department was tasked to use those lands to benefit the whole of the nation. Forests provided lumber, mines provided minerals and coal, and rivers were dammed for power generation. At the same time, generations of Americans enjoyed these lands for hunting, fishing and recreation, including the much needed escape from grueling jobs in crowded and polluted cities. As more Americans became familiar with these lands, they identified extraordinary places that deserved to be conserved rather than exploited. It began with a few national parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Mesa Verde, and by 1916 a careful selection of special places became a system of national parks.

Starting in the late 1940’s millions of returning veterans from World War II traveled with their families to parks and public lands, beckoned by the Dinah Shore television ditty: “See the USA in your Chevrolet”. Historians began to identify the places to preserve where our nation and our values were tested, from Independence Hall to the Civil War and Revolutionary War battlefields. With each of these actions, the Department of the Interior, and specifically the Secretary of Interior’s stewardship responsibilities began to shift, not away from extraction, but to include equal footing for the conservation of our nation’s most important, fragile and precious places. By public demand and law, the Secretary now had to balance this stewardship responsibility alongside the extraction of raw materials for a growing nation.

As administrations swung back and forth between Democrat and Republican, most Interior Secretaries found a degree of balance, tipping the scales one way or the other, but rarely abandoning the conservation and preservation side of the portfolio. For instance, I served as Regional Director for the NPS under Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican senator and governor of Idaho. I traveled to national parks with Secretary Kempthorne many times and he was deeply supportive of the work of the NPS, respectful of the career public servants, and at the same time focused on energy development on public lands such as those of the BLM. When I heard of his recent passing, I reflected on his balanced leadership and determined he would not have lasted long in this administration.

This is all in contrast to the current administration and the Department of the Interior, under Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum. They have proven themselves unworthy of the stewardship of our parks, refuges, wilderness and historic sites. They cannot be trusted to “conserve our national parks, unimpaired, for the enjoyment of future generations”. The evidence of their unworthiness is clear as the night sky from the high meadows of Yosemite National Park:

· DOI left national parks open during the shutdown with resulting vandalism

· DOI ordered the removal of interpretive signs that explain our complex history

· DOI fired senior leadership in Washington and the parks

· DOI closed centers for scientific monitoring of park resources

· DOI stopped the NPS from collecting data on climate change

· DOI removed reservation systems designed to prevent over-crowding at major national parks, like Yosemite

· DOI proposed a budget cut of 1/3 of park operations to Congress

· DOI has cut NPS staffing by over 25%

· DOI identified historical national parks as “cost centers” to be transferred to the states or the private sector

· DOI liberalized hunting in 50 national park units

· DOI authorized mining adjacent to Chaco Culture National Park

· DOI prevented Park Superintendents from speaking to the media

· DOI reopened the authority for Alaskan hunters to kill female brown bears and their cubs in their winter dens

· DOI closed the NPS training center for historic preservation, where techniques for the conservation of historic homes are perfected.

I could go on and on, and this list is just the direct impacts to our national parks. There is a list of similar impacts to the system of National Wildlife Refuges, wilderness areas, and our national forests. Never in the history of the Department has there been such an extreme shift away from the stewardship of our parks and public lands. The pendulum has pulled to the right and is stuck there. This administration has proven themselves unworthy of our trust and our most treasured national assets, our national parks and public lands.

George Hartzog, Jr. was a legendary director of the National Park Service, leading the agency through one of his largest growth periods, designed to welcome home the WW2 veterans and their families with new visitor centers and new parks. He was fired by President Richard Nixon for not letting one of his friends park his private boat at a NPS dock. Nixon’s political transgressions now seem quaint.

Recently the Trump administration released its 2027 Budget request to Congress. This is an annual process where the President sends his request for funding priorities to the appropriators in Congress. As NPS Director from 2009 to 2017, I participated in this normal process eight years in a row, and this budget request is far, far from normal. The President’s request is full of contemptuous pejoratives: the word “woke” is used 34 times to characterize federal programs that have served diverse populations for generations. The term “green new scam” appears 21 times to characterize science based programs to assist communities that are impacted from a warming planet. The document goes on to denigrate small federal programs as “bloated management”, Beltway Bandits, and gender extremism. The word “war” appears 86 times, while “peace” only 10 times. In my four decade career with the US Government, I have never read a budget document that goes to this length to trash the funding that past administrations and appropriators have provided to support the people of the United States.

The budget for the National Park Service is a part of the President’s 2027 request. I struggle to characterize how devastating this would be to the national parks if enacted. The budget reveals an administration bent on destroying this highly popular public land agency. For instance, let’s start with how many rangers will be in the parks in the future. The government counts staff with something called the FTE, or Full Time Equivalent, essentially one person working full time for a year. Two people working half time for a year is also counted as one FTE. The budget submitted by the President caps the FTE’s for the National Park Service, thereby limiting the number of total employees, both full and part time. For comparison, in 2017, Congress enacted 17,844 FTE for the National Park Service. This president’s budget requests 9,206 FTE, a reduction of 8,638 FTE or 48% in NPS staff. The NPS FY 2017 budget request was $3.048 billion. The President’s NPS budget request is for $2.210 billion, a reduction of $838 million or 27% in operations of our national park system.

Past budget requests for the National Park Service included the individual national park units FTE and budgets. The ability for the public, members of Congress and gateway communities to see individual park budgets has always been the hallmark of transparency and a key to the long term stability of the NPS budget. For the first time in memory, this level of detail is missing from this President’s budget request. Instead there is the following statement:

These funding levels continue to support many national treasures, while fulfilling the urgent need to streamline staffing and utilize State, local, and private sector management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park system. Page 1.

The implication here, not so subtle, is that the Administration will determine which parks are “national treasures” and to hell with the rest. The term “private sector management” occurs 26 times in the document. Fears that the Administration plans to turn over some national parks for “private sector management” are substantiated by this budget proposal statement. The document goes on to articulate the priorities within park management:

The budget provides funding levels necessary to ensure that parks remain open and accessible by prioritizing operational funding at the park level, focusing on core operations such as law enforcement and safety, visitor services, and facility operations and maintenance, Page 1.

Note that this statement omits any reference to the “preservation” mandate of parks natural and cultural resources. The budget clearly shows that conservation of park resources is not one of their priorities. The proposed budget reduces funding for natural and cultural resources by $213 million or 55% from the enacted budget of 2025. Reductions of professional natural and cultural resource specialists are from 1,787 to 942, a reduction of 47%. This level of staffing and funding will set the NPS to fail to meet its statutory responsibilities to preserve the national parks “unimpaired” for the enjoyment of future generations.

Do not, for a second, believe the rhetoric about protecting the parks and public lands while providing for the visitor. That is complete bullshit. This has nothing to do with bloat, efficiency, or serving the public. At best this is incompetence, or at worst, a game plan for ultimate failure and privatization of our parks. Even when they stated that the funding will focus on “facility operation and maintenance” they propose cuts of another 38%, or $366 million and reduction of 613 FTE of the highly skilled park maintenance employees who keep park facilities open, clean, safe and operational.

As the nation’s premier natural, cultural and historic park manager, the National Park Service also administers a variety of grant and technical assistance programs to help states, tribes and communities to preserve park land close to home or restore historic properties for commercial or housing needs. Some of the National Park Service’s most essential programs that deliver conservation and preservation at the community level have been zeroed out in the President’s budget:

· The restoration of the Everglades: ZEROED OUT

· Centennial challenge: funds that are leveraged with a match: ZEROED OUT

· Technical assistance to States and Tribes for natural resources: ZEROED OUT

· National Heritage Areas funding: ZEROED OUT

· International Assistance to other nations developing their national parks: ZEROED OUT

· Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance: ZEROED OUT

· Chesapeake Bay Trails: ZEROED OUT

· National Natural Landmarks: ZEROED OUT

· Federal Lands to Parks (helps transfer closing military bases to parks): ZEROED OUT

· National Preservation Training Center: ZEROED OUT

· Japanese American Confinement Grants: ZEROED OUT

· 9/11 Memorial grants: ZEROED OUT

· Native American Graves Repatriation: ZEROED OUT

· American Battlefield Grants: ZEROED OUT

· Southwest Border Resource Protection: ZEROED OUT

· Save America’s Treasures: ZEROED OUT

· Historic Preservation Fund Projects: ZEROED OUT

· Historic Preservation Grants to Tribes, States, African American Civil Rights: ZEROED OUT

If the nation were in a financial crisis and the NPS had to take a major cut to share in the fiscal pain, that would be understood. But the irony of their budget proposal is revealed with a one addition to the NPS budget of $10 Billion:

The budget includes $10 billion in permanent funding to establish the Presidential Capital Stewardship Program within the National Park Service to coordinate, plan and execute targeted, priority construction and beautification projects in and around Washington, DC, Page 6.

The President’s budget cuts the NPS by $838 million and then adds $10 billion for “beautification projects” in Washington. There is no list of “beautification projects” in the budget, thereby giving the President a $10 Billion dollar slush fund to transform Washington, D.C. into Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac.

If you are a visitor to your national parks and public lands, or a camper, hiker, mountain biker, hunter, fisher, wildlife photographer, kayaker, boater, or outdoor enthusiast of any kind, this administration does not have your interest at heart. If you are interested in American history, archeology, paleontology, or science in general, this administration is betraying our nation’s natural and cultural heritage and our ability to pass on our national parks unimpaired to our children.

If you go to the National Park Service website for Olympic National Park and click on the “History of the Elwha”, you will find a short and dry synopsis of the river, the fish, and the removal of two dams. The write-up makes the restoration sound so simple and easy, but it was neither. It is a great story of restoration and many, many people deserve credit for the largest dam removal (at that time) in the United States. Having been blocked for over 100 years, now salmon and steelhead are swimming unimpeded from the Strait of Juan de Fuca up the watershed 70 miles to their historic spawning grounds.

Let’s start this story with the fish and the tribe. Since the Olympic peninsula emerged from the glaciers 14,000 years ago, the Elwha River has been home to five species of salmon and five species of trout. Each year salmon returned to contribute their bodies as nutrients to enrich the complex ecosystem of the temperate rainforest, supporting eagles, bears, elk and many other species. From time immemorial, the Native people of the Elwha relied on these fish as core to their culture, lifeways and sustenance. The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has deep spiritual connections to the Elwha River and believe that they emerged as people from the river valley.

As the NPS website notes, a developer with financial backing built two dams on the Elwha River, completing them in 1913 and 1927. The dams were constructed without any consideration of impacts to the fish or the Tribe. The dams decimated the salmon and steelhead populations, where the runs of hundreds of thousands of salmon dropped to near zero. The dams also captured the sediment that flows from the river, resulting in the near disappearance of the sand bars which provide habitat for birds and shellfish along the south shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The dams had even greater impact on the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, as they were deprived of their primary source of food and culture as well. The upper dam and its associated lake buried the Tribe’s sacred sites. Confined to a small reservation at the mouth of the river, Tribal members longed for the day the dams would be removed.

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established Olympic National Park, covering almost one million acres of mountains, forests and rivers, including the Elwha River and one of the two dams. With a mission to preserve the resources of the national park for future generations, the NPS had always viewed the dams as an unwelcome intrusion. In the early 1980’s, Olympic Park Deputy Superintendent Randy Jones called the Department of Interior Solicitor and asked a simple question “are dams legal in national parks?” According to Jones, the Solicitor said “no, but…” and Jones hung up on him before he could spell out the caveats. The next day, the park put out a press release stating their intent to take down the two Elwha River dams. The NPS endorsement of the dam removal helped galvanize a coalition of environmental groups and the Tribe to engage in the political fight that ensued.

One of the obstacles was that the dams were privately owned and provided electric power as well as water to the Nippon Paper Mill in Port Angeles. Water taken from the river also delivered municipal water to the town of Port Angeles. Another obstacle was Washington’s Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA). Gorton had the reputation of strongly opposing tribal sovereignty and was openly opposed to the dam removals. The politics slowed any action for ten years, until Congress finally passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act of 1992. The law authorized the Department of the Interior to purchase the dams and begin their removal, but required the NPS to satisfy every party that would somehow be impacted by the dam removal. The NPS developed budget estimates and determined the dam removal would cost $50 million, while all the supporting projects would require another $150 million. That was more than the entire NPS annual appropriation for construction projects. The NPS, with no experience in dam removal, turned the dam removal project over to the Bureau of Reclamation, a sister DOI agency in charge of large dams such as Hoover and Roosevelt. The NPS hired Brian Winter, a fisheries biologist who had worked for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, as the NPS project manager for the dam removal. Brian became a pivotal leader in the effort. After eight years of negotiation, the dams were purchased in 2000 for $29.5 million. The Bureau of Reclamation continued to operate the dams but there seemed to be little progress in their removal.

In 2002, I became the Regional Director for the NPS, with direct oversight of Olympic National Park and the Elwha project. I traveled to the park, met with park staff, and told the park superintendent that dam removal must be their top priority. I met with Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles and Elwha River Restoration Director Robert Elofson and learned of their frustration that little progress was being made on the actual process of dam removal. They were patient but determined. They lamented that only a few of the oldest elders remembered what the river was like before the dams.

I called the Regional Director for the Bureau of Reclamation with whom I had a working relationship. He was honest: he said, “we build dams, we don’t take them down”. I thanked him for the honesty and pulled the project back into the NPS. I then took the project management to the NPS Denver Service Center (the NPS office for major construction management) to rework the timeline, the individual projects and the budget. The new estimate was now $350 million. Yikes! I now had the job of going back to Congressman Norm Dicks (D-WA) and telling him the estimate for the project had gone from $200 million to $350 million. But Congressman Dicks took it in stride and ensured that the project would continue to be funded. As the chairman of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, Dicks earmarked 17 individual bills to fund the project. Knowing the NPS could not use all the funds at once, Dicks appropriated the funds in $20m chunks, which the NPS could hold until they had enough funds to award a component project. The NPS Denver Service Center put their best team on the project and began to click off the major projects necessary before removal could start: a levee to protect homes along the river, a new sewage treatment plant for the tribe, a fish hatchery, and a brand new water treatment plant and water intake from the river for the city of Port Angeles.

The NPS negotiated an agreement with the City of Port Angeles that the NPS would build and operate the water treatment plant for five years, during the dam removal period, and then gift the new plant to the city. Getting the city to agree to accept the gift was another challenge. I remember driving Congressman Dicks to Port Angeles to meet with the city council who were balking at taking over the water treatment plant. As we traveled to the meeting, Congressman Dicks called each council member on their phone and chewed them out. He turned to me and commented “you would think that if you bought someone a car they would at least be willing to buy their own gas.” We arrived at the council meeting and everyone was happy and signed the transfer, with only one comment “who gave Norm Dicks all our phone numbers?”

There were moments of frustration as new challenges arose: a higher water table under the reservation made septics systems fail, sediment clogged the water intake, and river banks eroded during storms and threatened homes and roads. But the team: NPS leadership, especially Brian Winter, the Tribal leadership, especially Robert Elofson, Congressman Dicks and the NPS team at the Denver Service Center and the Pacific West regional office, especially Patty Neubacher, and many others rose to the occasion and kept the project moving. Finally, between 2011 and 2014, the dams came down, over 30 years after the idea was floated. Today, the river flows free and the shorelines are filled with shrubs and trees fed by the nutrients of returning salmon. The sand bars of the Strait of Juan de Fuca have thriving clam beds. The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has returned to their sacred sites and can now catch fish as they did for thousands of years. This restoration has inspired similar dam removals around the country, such as those just removed on the Klamath River in California. It is also a reminder that when we bring together the right set of partners who are dedicated to a common goal, great things can be accomplished over seemingly insurmountable odds and political swings. And when given a chance, nature does the rest.

A long line of vehicles queue up to enter Arches National Park in 2013. Photo by Leah Hogsten/ The Salt Lake Tribune

In the summer of 2022, I traveled through the National Parks of Utah with four of my old college friends. With my long career with the National Park Service, I was enlisted to be their park ranger, planning out which park we would visit and where we would go when we got there. Though tempted, I did not use any of my NPS connections, but instead, just like every other visitor, we stood in line, made reservations, looked for parking, and rode the shuttles through Zion, Capital Reef, Canyonlands, Bryce and Arches. Arches NP had recently implemented a timed entry/reservation system and I was interesting in how it was working. It had been developed to prevent lines at the entrance that backed cars out for miles. Some of the entry tickets were available in advance and the rest could be reserved the night before. I waited for the night before and booked on-line a timed entry for the next day. The following morning we got in line at the entrance and showed our reservation to the ranger at the booth, then stopped at the Visitor Center first to get oriented. As I was walking around the center, I was spotted by a ranger whom I had met in the past, giving me a chance to ask how the new reservation system was going. She laughed and said it was really great and “there are no more fist fights over parking spaces!” My friends and I spent the rest of the day in the park, always finding parking along with busy but uncrowded trails.

Preserving our national parks, while simultaneously providing opportunities for enjoyment has been at the heart of the NPS mission for over 100 years. It is fodder for endless debates by conservation organizations, gateway communities and the tourism industry, all looking to see where the thumb rests on the scale: preservation or enjoyment. I have always felt that these two parts of the mission were inextricably linked; to truly enjoy the park experience, it must first be preserved. When making a complex decision, years of NPS experience demands that the thumb rests on preservation first.

The NPS employs an array of systems to meet a standard of preservation while inviting the public to have a safe, inspiring and enjoyable visit. Many of these systems go unnoticed by the public. For instance a well-designed and maintained trail allows the visitor to walk through the park while having minimal impact. The trail also enhances visitor safety and provides for an enjoyable experience. It also keeps their feet off a sensitive resource such as the cryptobiotic soils of Death Valley NP, or the travertine crusts surrounding Yellowstone NP hot pools. But if there are too many people on the trail, impatient visitors step off the trail to pass and that impacts park resources. So there are upper limits to the physical limitations of visitor facilities like trails. The presence of rangers on the trails markedly improves visitor behavior including staying on the trail, not littering, and keeping their distance from wildlife. The Law Enforcement rangers have an additional tool for those who choose to walk off the boardwalk or cross the fence to get a better view. They go home with a special park souvenir, a ticket with a hefty fine. These two systems of well-designed facilities and rangers on patrol are complementary, and work best when both are deployed.

Other visitor management systems include copious forms of information on how to visit without impacting the park: brochures, signs, websites, visitor centers, and walks and talks by rangers. These efforts all have varying degree of effectiveness. Shuttle systems can be very effective at reducing traffic and distributing visitors around the park more evenly. Reservation systems with timed entry are new systems that have already demonstrated their value to both preservation and visitor experience.

With National Park visitation around 320 million, more than all of the Disney Parks, and National Baseball, Basketball, Football and Soccer combined, there is an upper limit to visitation that meets the preservation mission. This is why for popular parks, like Yosemite, Arches, Mt. Rainier, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain a timed entry reservation system makes sense. You don’t walk into the most popular restaurant in your city and just expect to get the best table or a table at all you make a reservation! You make a reservation for a hotel (including the ones in national parks), to rent a car and to fly on an airplane. So why is it so hard for the Trump administration to understand that busy parks also need reservation systems? In these busy parks, a reservation system ensures you will not wait in a miles-long entry line, you will find parking, and when you are hiking the view will be more than the rear of the person directly in front of you. These parks have been implementing successful, as well as popular, reservation systems for several years, but they have all been canceled by the Department of the Interior leadership.

It seems that the Trump administration, specifically Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s view of the national parks, is akin to an amusement park, where higher visitation is better and the resource is irrelevant. Their actions are to take away the some of the most important tools for park preservation: reduce staff, reduce the budget, and now eliminate reservation systems. The people who look at Yosemite and Rocky and Arches as just entertainment sites are currently in charge. Let’s work to ensure they are gone before they can do permanent damage.

The needless sacrifice of this scenic and cultural heritage during the war would deprive the American people of some of the most potent symbols of their national greatness... pride and love of country. NPS Director Newton Drury (1940-1951),

Fortunately, even when our nation was engaged in a World War, our national parks were spared the logging impacts that would have left a lasting impact. Now, the Trump administration has argued that we are again at war, this time with immigrants who seek safety and asylum at the border between the USA and Mexico. Using the “war” analogy, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has waived 28 environmental and historic preservation laws to allow the border wall and its accompanying roads and infrastructure to be constructed in Big Bend National Park, Texas. One could argue that a wall will help stem the flow along open and easily accessible lands that characterize much of our border with Mexico. But that is not the case in Big Bend National Park. I can think of a long list of logical reasons building a wall through Big Bend National Park is a very bad and wasteful idea.

· Big Bend NP is in the middle of nowhere and statistically, very few immigrants cross in the park, because the conditions are very harsh. Just this past November, park rangers and border patrol rescued an immigrant family that called 911 when they ran out of water and food in the park.

· The area of Mexico south of the border at Big Bend National Park is remote, rugged and a very long drive on bad roads to the nearest city.

· Those seeking to cross to the US avoid Big Bend NP because it is part of the Chihuahuan Desert, one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet with blistering daytime temperatures, below-freezing temperatures at night and few sources of water.

· In this park, nearly every plant has thorns, every insect bites, it is home to scorpions, tarantulas, poisonous centipedes, and venomous Western Diamondback, Black-tailed, Mojave, and Mottled Rock rattlesnakes.

· As local residents know, the park already has a wall: canyon walls: In many sections of the Rio Grande river, it is bounded on both sides by vertical 1000 ft cliffs.

· While we see the Rio Grande river as a border, wildlife do not. Black Bears, mountain lions, desert big horn sheep, javelinas, mule deer, foxes and even an occasional ocelot or ringtail move back and forth across the river. A border wall will block that migration, isolating populations and curtailing genetic diversity.

· The desert is an unrepairable environment when impacted. A bulldozed road in the park will be seen generations from now.

· Last year, over 560,000 visitors explored Big Bend NP and contributed over $56 million dollars to the local economy. Visitor spending supported over 500 jobs in the local communities. They come for the natural quiet, the starry skies, the feel of old Texas, and a chance encounter with wildlife. A border wall will change that experience and the impact will be felt by the gateway communities.

· Many visitors come to visit the only town in the Mexican border across the river, Boquillas Del Carmen, population 400. The town has enjoyed a long relationship with Big Bend NP, inviting tourists to travel across the river by row boat to enjoy a bit of small town Mexican hospitality. A border wall will halt this relationship.

· Border wall construction has been reported as costing $25 million per mile on level ground. Big Bend NP is a complex landscape of river canyons and with 118 miles of border, it will take over $3 billion to build the wall through the park.

Building a border wall through this extraordinary National Park makes no sense economically, environmentally, or for the reported purposes of homeland security. But I am guilty of applying logic to this decision, a value that is often lacking in the decision making of the Trump administration. Perhaps instead, they should look at our national parks as something inherent in patriotism. As Drury stated during the pressure of WW2, we must protect our national parks because they are “some of the most potent symbols of their national greatness... pride and love of country.

At this point, the people who could stop the desecration of Big Bend National Park are the Texas republicans. I hope their love of country and their national park will bring the administration to its senses and spare this priceless source of American pride.

The US border Patrol and the National Park Service Law Enforcement Rangers at Big Bend NP have a long history of a supportive partnership. A much less expensive and more effective alternative to a wall would be to increase the funding for Big Bend park rangers, who, in partnership with Border Patrol, conduct frequent backcountry patrols along the border and the river. An increased ranger presence will deter those few who venture into this harsh environment and save those who try.

Jonathan B. Jarvis, 18th Director of the National Park Service

Former Frijole District Ranger, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas

Episode 1: Prince William Forest Park: Cabin Branch Pyrite Mine Restoration

In 1978, I transferred from the National Mall in Washington, DC as an Interpretive Ranger to Prince William Forest Park, Virginia as a GS-5 Law Enforcement Ranger. The NPS sent me to train at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and commissioned me to enforce the rules and regulations in the park. For me, a young ranger, patrolling the roads, trails and the campgrounds, answering visitor questions and doing “ranger” things, I was enjoying myself.

Prince William Forest Park (PRWI per the NPS acronym rules) covers 15,000 acres of lovely oak, hickory, poplar and pine forest surrounding two branches of Quantico Creek, a tributary to the mighty Potomac River. Only 45 minutes south of Washington, D.C., it is a natural oasis surrounded by a sprawling metropolitan area. The park was once the homelands and hunting grounds of the indigenous people of the area and part of Powhatan’s chiefdom. Since colonization, it had a complex history including a town of freed slaves, a poor-house, cut-over and eroded lands, a training site for spies for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War 2, and the site of a major sulfur mine. From 1933 to 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) putting over 3 million men to work on our parks and public lands (including my father). On the lands that would become Prince William Forest Park, the CCC’s established the Chopawamsic Recreation Demonstration Area, planting trees, building trails and bridges and constructing five rustic cabin camps. Their work has stood the test of time and those cabins and trails are still enjoyed by the public and youth groups today in Prince William Forest Park, a unit of the National Park System.

As biologist, in the words of Aldo Leopold, we walk in a world of wounds, cognizant of the impact of our own activities. I saw resources that needed to be restored and following an appeal to Chief Ranger Johnny Neal, I was assigned new duties that involved managing park resources. I was promoted to a GS-7! With a staff of one Student Conservation Association assistant, (and when I was not on law enforcement patrol) we began to take on the management of a variety of resource projects: planting new trees in the campground to replace those that were under stress, controlling invasive wisteria spreading from old home sites, and relocating sections of trail that eroded into the creek. We also wanted to better understand the ecology of Quantico Creek, so I invited the scientists from the NPS Ecological Services Laboratory (ESL) to come and assist. ESL was one of the few offices in the NPS dedicated to bringing science to the management of parks. They sent Water Resource Specialist Rusty Davis and we began to monitor stream water quality. Rusty’s data showed that Quantico Creek was nearly pristine through much of the park, with two exceptions, there was heavy sediment coming in from the Quantico Marine Corps base (that is another story) and serious problems downstream of an abandoned pyrite mine.

Alongside the northern section of Quantico creek were the remnants of the Cabin Branch Pyrite Mine, which had operated from 1899 to 1920. Its primary product was sulfur, used to produce sulfuric acid, a major component in the manufacturing of gunpowder. Open mine shafts, foundations from the mill buildings and tailings piles created a barren “moonscape” alongside the creek. The bottom of the creek was bright red from the residual iron in the soil. Rusty Davis tested the pH of the creek and it measured 2.8, as acidic as vinegar. Above the mine, the creek was nearly pristine with robust aquatic life. Below the mine, the creek was dead and had been for the last 50 years. I asked around and no one at the park had even tried to restore the site, but I was determined to at least try. I again turned to the Ecological Services Laboratory. With much begging and pestering (and no money), I was able to enlist the assistance of biologist Dick Hammerschlag, botanist Jim Sherald, botanist Jim Patterson and Rusty Davis to try to see if we could get plants to grow in the barren and acidic soils of the Pyrite Mine. They came in 1980 with loads of compost, a tractor and plow and planted fescue seeds in a set of plots to test their efficacy. It was a moderate success, proving that with a greater effort, the site could be restored. I transferred in 1982 to Guadalupe Mountains National Park, but the mine restoration efforts continued. Sensitive to the historic significance of the site, the park staff nominated the mine for the National Register of Historic Places, while at the same time planned the restoration that would protect the creek and preserve some of the historic integrity. Project design and funding for the restoration came from the non-point source program of the Clean Water Act, the NPS Water Resources Division and the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy and other agencies.

Led by the park Chief of Resources Jennifer Lee, the mine tailings were buried under soil and lime, diversions created to route acidic runoff and native plants were installed. The restoration included interpretive signs that told the area history and the efforts of restoration. While working in Washington as Director, I traveled down to see the progress of restoration at the mine site. It had been over 30 years since I had visited PRWI. I was delighted to see a forest of Virginia pines, willows and a crystal clear creek meandering through the mine site. There were still a few bare patches, signaling that restoration takes time and persistence but the abundance of trees and shrubs signaled that the future of the site was very bright.

My take-home lesson from this early experience is that someone has to start, even with few resources to restore impacted areas in our parks. Then as each successive team inherits the project, they continue the work, regardless of the politics, priorities and funding. Given a bit of help, nature does the rest. If you are in the DC area, you too can stop by PRWI and learn of its history and be inspired by the restoration.

Photos credit NPS.

“Take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape”.

Last fall, the Secretary of Interior ordered a review of all informational signs and materials displayed in 400+ sites managed by the National Park Service (NPS). Visitors and NPS staff were asked to report to the Department signs that violate the above order. Now, those signs are being taken down despite strong public support for their continuation. Let me first point out that it is not the National Park Service itself that is directing the sign removals, it is the political leadership of the Department of the Interior. NPS employees are just following orders under the fear of retaliation and for many, it breaks their heart to see the signs removed.

Three examples of recent removals stand out to me as symbols of this attempt to revise American history, removing stories that we need to hear:

· The removal of the display at Independence National Historic Park that discussed the ownership of slaves by George Washington and other “founding fathers”.

· The removal of signs at the Grand Canyon National Park regarding the forced removal of Native Americans

· The removal of signs at Glacier National Park regarding the effects of climate change.

As I write this, there are dozens, if not hundreds of signs being taken down across the national park system. Signs can always be put back up when this administration finally exits, but in the interim, millions of visitors will miss the honest, historically accurate, scholarly and scientifically based interpretation of our nation, its history and nature. For most of the last century, the National Park Service has been a trusted narrator of our American experience, including the good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s start with slavery. There is no avoiding the fact that our nation’s beginnings included the forced labor of men, women and children captured from various countries in the African continent and sold as private property on the auction blocks of the south. Their slave labor contributed to the economic growth of the southern plantations and the northern cotton mills. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others of that time who led us to independence were slave owners. They fought fiercely for our independence from Britain, and penned the line “all men are created equal” which they intended to only apply to white men. Telling the full story, including the hypocrisy, does not diminish their accomplishments, nor their importance to our nation, but rather shows them as people, with both extraordinary accomplishments as well as deep flaws. I had the opportunity to be the NPS director during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and with the assistance of historians and scholars, we set about to correct the long held belief that the Civil War was about “states’ rights” and not about slavery. The true cause of the Civil War was the continued existence of slavery and the spread of slavery to new states. The argument for “states’ rights” obscures the fact that the right they wanted to retain was to own and sell other humans. For our nation to better address racial inequality today, we must understand the trajectory from the Civil War to the civil rights movement. The NPS tells these stories from the blood soaked battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam, to the dark swamps trekked by Harriet Tubman, to the footsteps of the Selma to Montgomery Trail. These stories do not “disparage Americans” but instead inspire us to live up to the ideals that our founding fathers and mothers penned but did not fully achieve.

Let’s talk about the forced removal of Native Americans. When the earliest European explorers landed on the shores of the new world and laid claim to the land for their monarchies, there were already millions of people thriving on this continent. Native Americans had been here for at least 10,000 years, developing art, music, agriculture, architecture, religion, culture, languages, and writing. We must remember that everyone who has come to or been born in the Americas in the last 500 years is a recent immigrant and that every square inch of land in the US was once the homeland of Native people. But indigenous people stood in the way of an expansionist United States, of the “manifest destiny” to grow from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We came in the millions, overwhelming the natives with disease, war, assimilation, broken treaties, and forced removal. Such were the practices of colonial expansion by European nations, and the consequences can be seen all over the world. While the Trump executive order would prefer we “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people” it would be a tragedy to not recognize that Native Americans paid an incalculable price for that progress. The National Park Service is not innocent in this history. In many of the early national parks, the native people had been decimated by disease or already forcibly removed to reservations. The parks were considered “unoccupied” and designations by Congress were completed without additional removals. But that was not always the case, as in Death Valley National Park, where the Timbisha Shoshone traditionally resided for the winter. In the 1950‘s NPS destroyed their winter lodges to force them to leave. Resistance, litigation and eventually legislation resulted in the return of 7000 acres of their homeland within Death Valley National Park. The lessons learned and shared with the public have been recognized around the world as new national parks are being considered within the homelands of indigenous people. Now, local stewardship is being supported while respecting indigenous knowledge and practices. To remove park signs that recognize the original inhabitants of our park lands is to portray a false story, and erase the fact that Native Americans are still here and willing to share their traditions, culture and knowledge with park managers and visitors.

Finally, let’s talk about human caused climate change. The Trump administration has openly disparaged the science and the scientists who have been documenting the warming of our planet from the burning of fossil fuels. From the leaving the Paris agreement to the expansion of coal and oil extraction, President Trump is leading the nation away from taking any meaningful action to address a rapidly changing climate and ignoring the science that calls us to action. For those of us who have worked in National Parks, climate change is not just a body of science that predicts significant impacts in the future. The impacts are visible today. For instance, at Mt. Rainier National Park, where I served as the Park Superintendent, decades of snow surveys indicate that historically, snows began in the fall, accumulated over the winter, then in spring, rains were absorbed and fed the streams and rivers in the surrounding valleys. It was a predictable climate model that affected everything from where facilities were built to the timing of local agriculture. In recent years with a warming planet, there has been a shift. Now the fall is accompanied by both snow and warm rain, resulting in catastrophic floods. Mt. Rainier’s Sunshine Point campground, which had served the public for almost 100 years, was scoured to bedrock by one of the fall floods. Across the National Park System, fires are burning longer and hotter, wildlife is on the move, storms are more severe, droughts dryer and rainy seasons wetter. These are not theories, they are observations by rangers who have dedicated their lives to the stewardship of these amazing parklands. We owe it to the visitor to share what we know and see, as the future of these parks is in their hands.

Poet and writer Maya Angelou said “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” The signs once scattered across the national park system help us face the past and hopefully prevent future tragedies. But it appears that the Trump administration, in the words of Colonel Nathan R. Jessup in “A Few Good Men” (played by Jack Nicholson) “You can’t handle the truth!”.

Photo: United Nation delegates, representing 46 different nations, attending a memorial service for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Muir Woods National Monument. (photo circa 1945.) Save The Redwoods League

On January 7, 2026, President Donald Trump issued an order for the U.S. government to withdraw from 66 institutions within the umbrella of the United Nations. The press statement issued the next day by Secretary of State Marco Rubio states:

The Trump Administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity.

The Trump administration ignores the fact that it was U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt who invited representatives of 46 nations to come to San Francisco in 1945, in the wake of World War II, to work towards world peace. Word soon reached this first meeting of the United Nations that FDR had died from a stroke. To pay tribute to this great man, they gathered under the towering canopy of redwood trees in Muir Woods National Monument. The Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes wrote:

Not only would this focus attention upon this nation’s interest in preserving these mighty trees for posterity, but here in such a ‘temple of peace’ the delegates would gain a perspective and sense of time that could be obtained nowhere in America better than in a forest. Muir Woods is a cathedral, the pillars of which have stood through much of recorded human history. Many of these trees were standing when Magna Carta was written. The outermost of their growth rings are contemporary with World War II and the Atlantic Charter.

Only three years later, perhaps inspired by their time in the cathedrals of redwoods, the newly formed UN agreed that one of their investments in peace and prosperity would be in the conservation of nature. In 1948 they established the International Union for the Protection of Nature, which today is known as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature or IUCN. IUCN is one of the UN institutions from which Trump has withdrawn the United States.

My involvement with IUCN has been through one of its commissions: the World Commission on Protected Areas or WCPA. WCPA engages thousands of volunteers around the world to exchange ideas, science, staff and practices in the management and conservation of national parks and equivalent protected areas. Again, the US can lay claim to the idea of national parks with the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872. The park idea has spread around the world and has been adapted to national identities, local traditions and culture, and indigenous stewardship. WCPA assists countries to protect and sustainably manage the very best of a nation’s natural and cultural resources, instilling patriotic pride and creating sustainable economies. In contrast to the negative statement by the President and the Secretary of State, these designations and the coordination with IUCN serves the US in countless ways. The US National Park Service has provided technical assistance, in partnership with WCPA, to emerging national park systems all over the world. These relationships were often characterized as “soft diplomacy” building trust, opening lines of communication and providing mutual aid with minimal cost. The exchange of ideas include how to benefit local economies, mitigate climate change, showcase extraordinary ecosystems, preserve endangered species, restore clean water and build sustainable tourism. The learning has always been mutual, for no country has a lock on the best management practices of protecting nature for future generations.

There has always been a fringe element in the U.S. who are suspicious, if not openly hostile to the UN. I have encountered them in my time with the NPS. When I worked at North Cascades National Park we held public meetings on the draft park management plan, which recommended International Biosphere Reserve designation. Several speakers at the public meeting in Wenatchee, WA stated that the UN would soon be running the national park. When I worked in Alaska, I was called to testify before the state legislature about the World Heritage designations of Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve and the Canadian parks of Kluane and the Alsek-Tatshenshini. I was paired in testimony with the president of the Alaska Coal Miners Association. Chatting before our testimony, he told me that these international conservation designations were specifically designed to lock up all the world’s coal. I laughed and said he was giving us too much credit, that we could not even think of such a scheme! It is this kind of conspiracy thinking that has infiltrated the current administration, leading us to withdraw from international cooperation in the preservation of the most extraordinary environments on the planet. Such a withdrawal does not serve our nation, but instead diminishes our influence and respect.

During the eight years of President George W. Bush’s administration, there were similar attitudes about the U.S. involvement in international cooperation in conservation. Political appointees in the Department of Interior denied NPS professionals from attending conservation meetings or assisting other nations with technical advice on parks. We were absent from international conservation efforts for eight years. In November of 2009, the World Wilderness Congress was held in Merida, Mexico, with 1800 participants from 50 nations. Now under the leadership of President Obama, we were free to participate and I attended the conference with colleagues from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. When it was my turn to speak, I stepped to the microphone and said simply “we’re back”. The entire gathering rose to their feet and applauded, testimony to the value of the United States participation in world efforts to preserve our planet’s most special places.

Our National Parks and public lands are a treasure to be enjoyed by all, not just a few who can afford them. Author Wallace Stegner said “they are America’s best idea, absolutely American, absolutely democratic”. While our parks and public lands are primarily funded by your tax dollars, they also benefit from fees. On an annual basis, the National Park Service collects around $300 million in entrance and camping fees, and, by law, uses those funds for park improvements. While these fees are very helpful, it has always been the intent to keep them fair and easily affordable, so that everyone feels welcome. The annual “America the Beautiful” pass to national parks and our public lands has always been one of the best bargains in the US. For $80, about what a family of four would pay to go see one movie, that same family could visit as many national parks as possible in a year! And if you are 62 or older, you can buy the Senior pass which gives lifetime access to the parks. During the Obama administration we acknowledged that some of our population had not taken advantage of their public lands, so we created the free Military pass in 2012 to honor those who have answered the call of duty. We created the Every Kid in a Park pass in 2016, offering every 4^th grader in the country a pass to bring their family to a national park, a true investment in the next generation. We also resisted the suggestion that we increase the fees for non-residents of the US, because we knew that showing your citizenship could turn away many who would otherwise enjoy a park visit. Keeping the fees fair and affordable means that everyone can enjoy America’s national parks and public lands.

I had to laugh when I saw the DOI announcement of the new “America the Beautiful” pass with a photo of Trump alongside our first president, George Washington. The Department of Interior rolled it out with much higher fees for non-residents of the US and the elimination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday as a fee free day. These new policies along with the requirement to revise historic interpretation and remove sales items related to DEI will undoubtedly turn many people away, having the exact opposite effect of our work under President Obama. It made me wonder what our first president would think about sharing the pass photo with President Trump who is undermining the democracy for which Washington and so many patriots fought. As told in Ken Burns’ new film about the American Revolution, without Washington as a strategic military commander, we would likely still be subjects of the Crown. If you want to learn of his military challenges and success, use your National Park pass to visit one of the many national park units that commemorate the Revolutionary War such as Minute Man, Saratoga, Valley Forge, Cowpens, or Yorktown. After two terms, Washington stepped down, voluntarily relinquishing power and setting the precedent for ALL future presidents. We are fortunate that Washington had experienced authoritarian governments and set us on a new course for democracy. As I look at the images on the new pass, I imagine Washington looking over at the scowling Trump and wondering what went wrong.

PS: If you want to buy the “America the Beautiful” pass for next year and really can’t stomach the idea of carrying around a picture of Trump in your billfold or purse, then check out the entrepreneurial artist who came up with a perfect sticker to cover the photo on the pass.

Sage Leaf Studio

A National Park Service employee working in the Jacqueline Kennedy garden: Photo Credit: National Park Service

President Trump has systematically dismantled constitutional protections, expectations of Presidential behavior, international relations with our most trusted allies, environmental protection and the values we believe to be core to the American people. The reaction of Congress has been to abdicate their role of budget and oversight. The reaction by the high courts has been to overturn precedent and to twist the law to fit Trump’s authoritarian vision. The reaction by the public has been a mixture of vociferous defense, outrage, or indifference. Each day, the media delivers the news of another assault on democracy and yet a common response is that Trump is being Trump. Now that he has torn down a large section of the White House, suddenly people have been surprised. As the arm of an excavator tore into the East Wing, they asked how can he just do that? There is something both deeply symbolic and jarringly tangible about this destruction.

What the general public might not know is that the White House is a national park, and its physical structure, grounds, gardens, and all the historic objects inside are managed by the National Park Service (NPS) as President’s Park. If you look closely at those gardeners carefully tending the flowers, you will see the NPS uniform. By long standing tradition, the NPS keeps a low profile at President’s Park, there to ensure the “People’s House” is maintained to a high standard. As the NPS Director during the tenure of President Obama, I was asked to make some changes to the White House and grounds. We installed (and later removed) a playground for the Obama daughters, planted First Lady Michelle Obama’s kitchen garden, converted President Bush’s tennis court to a basketball court for President Obama, upgraded the decorations and furniture in the family dining room, and added new art from prominent artists.

When the destruction of the East Wing began, including the removal of the Jacqueline Kennedy garden, I received many calls from reporters asking for comment. I did not respond, since I saw this action in the context of the far more destructive actions of a rogue president. But there seems to be a deeper symbolism of this destruction. Under normal procedures, there would be engagement from a wide range of preservationists. For instance, the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, which I chaired as the NPS Director, is charged with bringing a preservation ethos to the suggestions for alterations by any sitting president. The Committee includes the Curator and Chief Usher of the White House, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the Chair of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, and the Director of the National Gallery of Art. Consulting on major changes would also engage the Secret Service, the National Capital Planning Commission, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the White House Historical Society, and other preservation professionals. But normal procedures have not been followed by President Trump. Maybe this time, the public will see the symbolism in the destruction of the “People’s House”, the dismantling of many things we hold dear at the whim of an unrestrained president.

As the days since Congress failed to pass an appropriation surpasses a month, the impacts of a dysfunctional government become more and more evident. The only benefit of a shutdown is the rise in visibility of programs that often exist in the background. We only notice them when they are gone, as Joni Mitchell says “ “don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got / Till it’s gone. One of those background systems is the stewardship of your national parks. With the combination of retirements, fork in the road, firings, and now the furloughs during shutdown, the national parks you love have been left open, unstaffed, and unprotected. I know this from 40 years of working for the NPS, starting as a GS-4 seasonal interpreter on the National Mall in 1976 and working my way up as ranger, biologist, park superintendent, regional director and as the 18^th Director of the NPS. Your national parks, in order that they remain “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations” require the services of a professional public servants. These dedicated employees do not just clean toilets and pick up trash, or collect your fee at the entrance, they also monitor air and water quality, restore impacted meadows, fight fire, search for lost children, study archeological sites, manage the budget, rehabilitate historic buildings, and curate cultural artifacts. They maintain trails and webpages, fix plumbing in the campground, patrol bear jams to ensure the public is safe, use unique skills to repair the adobe of historic missions, and restore rock walls laid by Italian stonemasons working for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the great depression. It is the dedicated, highly skilled staff of our National Park Service that makes the US National Parks the envy and destination of the world. And yet, these people have been the target of elimination by the Trump administration. It is a failure on their part to protect your national parks for you, and as Teddy Roosevelt said “..your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you”. My brother Destry, who has dedicated his life to advocacy for the protection of national parks and I recent wrote an op-ed published in High Country News (link below). We call out the Secretary of the Interior for his failure to meet both the law and the desire of the public that our parks are protected for future generations. As we point out in our co-authored book “Fifty Years of Fighting and a Case for Independence” UC Chicago Press it is time that the NPS be removed from the conflicted Department of the Interior and made an independent agency, with direct oversight by Congress.

High Country News Op_ed

What’s the Trump Administration’s End Game for the National Parks? I Saw It in Yosemite

Thank you to Green Foothills for the invitation to join you in this wonderful setting.

Thank you to the Amah Mutsun people for their stewardship of this area for thousands of years.

Thank you all of you modern day stewards for your decades of work in preserving this area for all to enjoy.

Take a moment to breathe, look around at this extraordinary landscape and know that each of you have played a role in its conservation.

But conservation across our nation is under siege by the current administration. Our four federal land management agencies, BLM, FWS, FS and NPS, responsible for 28% of the land of our nation, including over 100 million acres of wilderness, are all being systematically dismantled, employees threatened and fired, billions cut from their budgets, and the policies and regulations protecting wilderness areas and national parks being re-written to allow greater development.

Long term protection and monitoring of our clean water and clean air have been curtailed.

And the complex history of our nation is being rewritten, to eliminate the contributions of people of color and women, and deleting the periods when we did not live up to the ideals of our constitution.

The Trump administration has rescinded the Forest Service roadless rule, which has protected 60 million acres since 2001 from road building and logging.

The so-called Big Beautiful Bill now requires the BLM to offer for development any lands, regardless of its conservation value, to the private sector for the mere act of asking.

The Secretary of Interior has also proposed transferring hundreds of national park units, many of which tell our history, to the states.

Conservation and climate mitigation grants have been cancelled, including the Bay area restoration grants from the EPA. I know this personally as one of those cancelled grants was for the restoration of Pinole Creek, which carries one of the last Steelhead runs in the bay area.

In my career with the National Park Service, I worked in the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush, Clinton and Obama.

I do not know the politics of this gathering, and I don’t really care, because at least historically, conservation has been non-partisan and a-political. We all breathe the same air and need to drink clean water.

But, I have never seen anything like this attack on conservation.

Every day we wake up to the news of a new assault on our democratic values, of which conservation is just one.

You ask yourself, what can I do, how can I resist?

Wallace Stegner, Stanford professor and one of the founders of Green Foothills is quoted as saying:

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst’. I have always loved the second half of this: absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst’.

In Stegner’s 1960 Wilderness letter, he said “What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself.”

In these two quotes, Stegner points out that both wilderness and national parks are an idea, that citizens would gather their political strength, pool their fiscal resources and work hard to preserve a special place.

It started when a small group of Californians convinced President Abraham Lincoln to set aside the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias in 1864, literally during the Civil War.

Lincoln knew that after the war, the nation would need places like Yosemite to heal our divides.

I often remind reporters and pundits when they say the nation has never been more divided, that they might read a bit about the Civil War, when more Americans died than all wars since combined.

When documentary film maker Ken Burns was developing his National Parks, America’s Best Idea film, I asked him when he realized that the story behind the national parks was more than just beautiful landscapes, it was a story of people taking action to save something they loved.

It became a focus of his film, that every national park we enjoy today has a story behind it of dedicated individuals who stepped up and demanded that a special place be preserved for future generations.

His PBS film highlighted the many individuals from UC Berkeley graduate and first NPS Director Stephen Mather to the Buffalo Soldiers who marched from Fort Point to Sequoia to protect the park from poachers. Without the actions of thousands of individuals, many unsung, the national parks we enjoy today would not exist.

Ken Burns called our national parks the Declaration of Independence applied to the ground, where people of all ethnicities can stand side by side on the rim of the Grand Canyon and share that experience.

The national park idea has now spread to over 400 sites in the US and to hundreds of countries around the world.

I like to say that when the idea went around the world, it came back different, an idea that still embraced conservation, but now included people, local knowledge, indigenous practices and community engagement.

This absolutely American idea, that reflects us at our best, has now taken root near home, protecting local open space, recreational lands and wildlife habitat where we live.

We go to national parks on vacation, but we also need natural places to walk after dinner. We now know that being near nature improves our physical and mental health, and there are doctors across the nation prescribing time outdoors for everything from cancer to depression.

We know that open space creates corridors for species to travel from one conservation areas to the next.

And we know that conservation is one of the best investments to mitigate the warming of our planet, to absorb carbon, reduce heat islands and maintain watersheds.

Stegner’s Wilderness letter closed with “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

Our National Parks and Wilderness areas and local open spaces are the geography of hope, but I would suggest that hope is not a strategy.

Just as thousands of individuals demanded that an area be protected in the past, we must demand those same areas are protected for our children and their children’s children.

And active conservation of lands and waters near home is a strategy to push back on the assault on our values.

Conservation is an act of defiance.

Conservation is an act of resistance.

Every acre you help conserve, saves a bit of our nation, our sanity, and our souls.

Thank you

Park Leaders Show

Although the National Park Service gets most of the attention, the other three public land agencies: the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the US Forest Service (USFS) are suffering the same funding, staffing, and policy cuts by the Trump administration. Together, the four federal land management agencies provide conservation, recreation, watershed protection, climate mitigation, wildlife habitat, and countless ecosystem services on 600 million acres or about 28% of the land base of the country. For most of the recreating public, which agency is managing public lands does not really matter, as long as the lands are accessible, clean, appear well-managed and fun. In my forty years with the National Park Service (NPS), I had the honor of working closely both in Washington, D.C. and in the field with the professional public servants in these agencies. There are statutory and policy distinctions between the agencies and in my view, we need all four public land agencies to be funded, functional, and supported by the American people. Particularly in the west, the lands managed by agencies are often adjacent and the boundaries are porous, meaning that wildlife, rivers and streams, and the recreating public move back and forth. Each agency contributes to a more sustainable and resilient ecosystem and to local economies. At the moment, all four agencies are being attacked, defunded and intentionally dismantled by the Trump political appointees.

The following is a brief primer on the federal family of land management agencies. My apologies to those of you well steeped in their history and status, and for the brevity that requires leaving out valuable programs of the agencies.

The National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the US Fish and Wildlife Service are in the Department of the Interior. The Department of the Interior (DOI) is a cabinet level department led by a presidentially appointed, Senate confirmed Secretary, currently Doug Burgum. There are other bureaus in DOI, but for this discussion we are going to just focus on the four land management agencies.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service manages in 95 million federal acres in 570+ wildlife refuges spread across all 50 states. The Director is a presidential appointment, senate confirmed position and is currently held by Brian Nesvik. The refuges were established for conservation and are maintained by the professionals in the USFWS to protect wildlife and their habitats. Some refuges were established to protect migratory birds by maintaining high quality areas for birds to rest and feed on their annual journey north or south. Others protect habitat for resident species like bison, pronghorn, elk, bears, or alligators. Approximately 400 of these refuges are open to some form of hunting, regulated by the states in coordination with the USFWS. The establishment of a wildlife refuge system was strongly supported by the hunting community, and the sale of licenses, conservation stamps, and hunting and fishing equipment provide some of the funding for refuge operations and maintenance. The USFWS also has program responsibilities beyond the refuges, most importantly the listing of threatened and endangered species and the enforcing of the Endangered Species Act to protect those species from harm, no matter where they are. The USFWS annual budget in normal years is around $2 billion. The Trump administration has proposed a cut of $900 million or 45%. These cuts will seriously undermine the USFWS conservation efforts across the wildlife refuge system.

The BLM manages 244 million acres of public lands and has a complicated mission which combines both conservation and development. The BLM Director is a presidential appointment, senate confirmed position and is currently vacant. BLM lands are generally open to all forms of resource extraction that contribute to the economy. BLM offers public land to the private sector for extraction of oil, gas, coal, gold, uranium, gravel, critical minerals and forest products.. Still under a mining law written in 1872, the private sector can stake a claim on BLM lands and eventually own those lands for $2.50 to $5.00 per acre, mine them for profit and pay nothing to the federal government. The BLM also offers large sections of public land for renewable energy development such as solar arrays and wind farms. The BLM also has a recreation and conservation mission, managing designated wilderness on 10 million acres and 38 million acres in National Conservation Lands. Most of the BLM lands are open to hunting and cattle or sheep grazing. The annual budget for the BLM in normal years is around $1.4 billion and the Trump administration has proposed a cut of $514 million or about 35%. The BLM already struggles to provide even a few rangers to its conservation and wilderness lands. These cuts will leave many of these lands completely unprotected.

The Director of the NPS is also a presidential appointment, senate confirmed. The position is currently vacant with leadership carried out by an acting director. The NPS manages some 430 “units” spread over 80 million acres that include large national parks, recreation areas and historic sites and monuments. More than half of the NPS portfolio are sites of historic and cultural importance such as Civil War battlefields, former presidential homes, civil rights sites and pivot points in our complex history. The NPS organic act requires the NPS to protect all these places, regardless of size or title, “unimpaired, for the enjoyment of future generations.” The NPS hosts over 300 million visitors a year. National Park units, with exception of the national preserves in Alaska, are not open to hunting. The NPS has a variety of programs that have nothing to do with the units: such as designating sites for the National Register of Historic Places or distributing Land and Water Conservation Funds to the states for the creation of state parks. The operating budget for the NPS in normal years is around $3 billion. The Trump administration has proposed a cut in that budget of $1 Billion or about 30%. These cuts would require the closure of hundreds of smaller national parks and historic sites.

The US Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres, is not part of the DOI, rather part of the Department of Agriculture, a cabinet level department led by Secretary Brooke Rollins. The fact that the USFS is in the Department of Agriculture and not DOI is a vestige of history that goes back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt and a utilitarian view of our nation’s vast forests. The Chief of the Forest Service is appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture and not subject to Senate confirmation. The position is held by Tom Shultz, who is the first non-Forest Service career person to hold the position in the agency history. The National Forest System has 154 National Forests and 20 National Grasslands. The USFS, like the BLM, provides an opportunity for the private sector to harvest trees to feed local lumber and pulp mills. The annual “cut” is determined by the Congressional appropriation process. Lands under National Forests are also open to mining and mineral extraction, administered by the BLM. The USFS also has a conservation mission, managing 36 million acres of designated Wilderness. Most of the National Forests are open to hunting. The annual budget for the USFS in normal years is around $4.6 billion and the Trump administration has proposed a cut of 1.64 billion or about 35%. The Trump administration recently rescinded the “Roadless Rule” opening up 60 million acres of USFS lands to development.

Together these four federal land management agencies provide extraordinary opportunities for outdoor recreation that include hunting and fishing, hiking, wildlife watching, camping, off road vehicle use, mountain biking, alpine and big wall climbing, skiing, snowmobiling and sightseeing. Together they conserve some of the most spectacular natural landscapes in North America and provide habitat for thousands of species. The human benefits from this conservation include clean air, clean water, climate mitigation, and public health. The non-partisan US Bureau of Economic Analysis calculated the economic contribution of the outdoor recreation in 2023 as 2.3% of the Gross Domestic Product, or $639 Billion and supporting 5 million jobs. While many major American companies, like REI, design and sell products that make the outdoor experience safer and more pleasurable, much of this economic spending is in local communities that provide food, lodging, guides and outfitters. These are jobs that cannot be exported to another country and keep small “gateway” towns to public lands viable and vibrant.

The Trump administration is presenting a happy face, that everything is just fine in the National Parks like Yellowstone, or that the proposed cuts are to just eliminate redundancy and increase efficiency. These are just smoke screens while they decimate all four land management agencies staff and budget and reverse a century of conservation actions.

Let’s take a moment to assess the absurdity of the current situation. The national parks are extraordinarily popular, hosting over 300 million visitors a year. The public lands are enjoyed by millions of hunters, and fishers, mountain bikers and four wheel enthusiasts. For an annual federal investment in the four agencies, totaling $11 Billion, the economy reaps $639 Billion in return. That is a Return on Investment (ROI) of 5700%. So why on earth would the Trump administration want to kill that golden goose? The answer is pretty simple and deeply disturbing to those of us who love our parks and public lands. They want that ROI for their pocketbooks, not for the American people.

Recently, Senator Mike Lee of Utah proposed to sell millions of acres of public land to private individuals or entities. His proposal was opposed by the Democrats but defeated by a few Republicans. There are still a core group of Republicans who see the value of our parks and public lands and have constituencies who use and rely on the public lands. They know that selling off the public lands is a mistake but until faced with a real threat, have been unwilling to challenge the Trump direction. We need Republicans to continue to speak up, call hearings on the cuts to parks and public land budgets and firing of professionals. Those hearings should host business owners from gateway communities, travel and tourism representatives who rely on parks and public lands as destinations. And they should drag in the Trump administration officials leading these agencies, and tell them to back off our parks and public lands.

In 1982, I transferred from Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. My wife Paula and I went from the heat of the Chihuahuan desert to the snows of the Cascades. I was a newly appointed resource specialist, part ranger, part biologist, tasked with ensuring the natural and cultural resources of the park were “conserved unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations”. I arrived at a time of controversy for this venerated national park: a visiting scientist had reported in the news that the water quality of the Crater Lake had declined by 25%. This scientist had been coming to Crater Lake for years and measuring the lake clarity with a secchi disk, a dinner plate sized disk that is lowered into the water column until a person could no longer see it. While not exactly a sophisticated measurement, it was the standard of the time and much to the chagrin of the NPS, the park had not been monitoring the lake’s water quality. The park was caught flat-footed, and accused of being a poor steward of its prime resource. The public was correct; for much of its history, the NPS had focused on the visitor experience and not the resource. The NPS had invested little in the understanding of Crater Lake itself, admired by thousands of visitors for its deep blue color and astounding clarity. The task of putting together a lake monitoring program fell on my shoulders and I had to start from scratch. At Oregon State University I found a fantastic limnologist (a person who studies lakes) in Dr. Gary Larson. There is nothing like controversy to get more funding and I was able to hire bio-techs, purchase a research boat, and set up a field lab. With Dr. Larson’s guidance we started a comprehensive lake research and monitoring program.

Working on Crater Lake is a bit like working on the ocean if it were perched on a mountain top. The lake is 5 miles across and 2000 feet deep and sits at the bottom of a collapsed volcano, surrounded by 1000 ft cliffs. The water is cold, very cold. The crater that was Mt. Mazama, which erupted over 7000 years ago, now rises above the Cascade range and intercepts the clouds from the Pacific and captures snow in astonishing volumes. The average snowfall for Crater Lake is over 500 inches per year. In our first winter, we had 22 feet of snow on the ground at our house. High elevation, deep snow, deep water, complicated access, and short operating seasons combine to make monitoring the lake a logistical challenge. But the good news is that my fellow rangers were a tough, adventuresome, creative bunch and with their can-do approach, we were able to pull off the summer monitoring program with ease. However, Dr. Larson said that to understand the lake’s complex limnology, we needed to sample a full 2000 ft deep profile in winter. So again, my task was to plan, organize, and execute a winter expedition to the lake to collect water samples. I will not go into the many details of this successful adventure, and save them for another story, but I did want to tell of one awe inspiring moment. Our small team was transported to Wizard Island by helicopter with food, scientific equipment and survival gear to stay for a few days, launch the boat, collect samples and be picked up. The first day we shoveled 20 feet of snow off of the boat house and crashed for the night. The next morning, we made coffee and emerged from the boathouse to greet the morning sunrise. To our surprise, the lake had frozen over and a skim of ice, perhaps ½ inch thick covered the surface. Because of its depth and frequent wind, it is rare that Crater Lake freezes so we just stood quietly and contemplated this phenomenon. Crater Lake National Park, distant from cities and major highways, is known for its sound booth quality quiet. Then a gentle breeze began to roil the ice and drive it into the rocky shoreline at our feet. Wind-driven sheets of ice rose up and fell against the black volcanic rocks, tinkling like thousands of tiny bells. It was a jazz concert played by nature. No one spoke. When the concert ended, we just said “wow” and headed over to prep the research boat for a day of sampling

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