Zion National Park
Credit: utah.com

For much of the first decade of the 2000s, America’s national parks were an area of rare bipartisan agreement in Washington, D.C. President George W. Bush’s Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proposed a $1 billion National Parks Centennial Challenge program to raise public and private money for the National Park System. First Lady Laura Bush launched new initiatives to get more young people outdoors, promoted cultural and historic preservation, and lauded and advanced the Save America’s Treasures initiative, which was started by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton to protect and preserve historic buildings, documents, and art. Likewise, Congress passed dozens of national parks, wilderness, and public lands bills with the unanimous support of its members.

Today, Washington’s bipartisan work to protect America’s parks and public lands seems like a distant memory. Since 2010, Congress has been incapable of passing individual parks and wilderness bills, legislators are pressing to sell off tens of millions of acres of publicly owned lands, and laws which help protect at-risk public lands—including the Antiquities Act and the Land and Water Conservation Fund—are under relentless attack. A Center […]