A buffalo in Yellowstone National Park
Credit: Sandy Sisti
In this waking nightmare, the Trump administration has filled the parks department with anti-public land sycophants.
Under this administration, nothing is sacred as we watch the nation’s crown jewels being recut for the rings of robber barons.
For more than 100 years, professional management of our national parks has been respected under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Yes, they have different priorities, the Democrats often expanding the system and the Republicans historically focused on building facilities in the parks for expanding visitation. But the career public servants of the National Park Service (NPS), charged with stewarding America’s most important places, such as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and the Statue of Liberty, were left to do their jobs.
Even in the dark days of interior secretaries James Watt and Gail Norton, both former attorneys with the anti-environmental Mountain States Legal Foundation, the National Park Service (NPS) […]
There are those who don’t understand the healing power of nature, and the current Whitehouse and Congress are among them. They prefer to sell these places off to fossil fuel companies that are, in effect, weapons of mass destruction. Now is the time we invest all our power and passion into saving these wild places which have inspired and nurtured countless numbers of people. I have to wonder, as I look back thru history about the fathers, the grandfathers of the people who see these places as worthless except for what they can extract from the ground. The price we’re paying has far exceeded what the earth has provided. For some unknowable reason, these people believe they’re exempt from repercussions that come from pollution, dirty water, etc. In their minds, they live under some strange protective dome, their health immune to what they ingest, breathe in.. and their sole source of joy seems to be money which, in the end, holds a lot of empty promises.
For years now we have supported the Center for Biological Diversity https://www.biologicaldiversity.org and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility https://www.peer.org. CBD works to protect the land and the species which live on it. PEER works to protect the people who manage that land. If we are to salvage any part of our critically important National Park legacy, we need to support the people doing the heavy lifting on our behalf. Adding irony to this issue is the fact that right here on Whidbey we are fighting off the US Navy’s proposal to use 29 of our shoreline State Parks for Navy SEAL training. Imagine walking a trail in South Whidbey State Park and realizing that people with large weapons are hiding in the bushes spying on you. Comforting, eh? Contact me at wean@whidbey.net for further info. I’ve never understood what the rape-it-for-profit crowd expects to eat, drink, or breathe when they’ve accomplished the ultimate end and destroyed everything.
I spent my youth in the woods, either public or privately owned and that gave me a love for nature. We do need to protect what is left of our national parks. They are a meditative place to become one with nature itself.
I don’t understand the “un-conservatives” who want and see only money as the ultimate goal in life, oh and being saved so they get into heaven after all their good works. Such a disconnect with the natural world from which we all arise without which we will not continue. Talking with one prosperous sort once who told me “it’s just dirt”
While I agree with all the opinions expressed I also noted that all comments are what nature does for us humans. I want to add that the natural world is for itself she gives birth to all life in simplicity and evolving complexity. Mother Gaia though is finally unforgiving, as we humans might view it and will have her way that will show humans are not why she exists.