Ota Bluehorse wears a ceremonial headdress adorned with bison horns while attending a naming ceremony for a white buffalo calf, Wednesday, June 26, 2024, at the headquarters of the Buffalo Field Campaign in West Yellowstone, Mont. The reported birth of a white buffalo calf in Yellowstone National Park fulfills a Lakota prophecy that portends better times. (AP Photo/Sam Wilson)AP
Scattered across the vast landscapes of America’s 85-million-acre National Park System, you’ll find the fabled bronze plaques dedicated to conservationist Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service (NPS) when it was founded in 1916.
No one knows exactly how many plaques are within the 431 national park sites, but each one bears the same enduring inscription: “There will never come an end to the good that he has done.”
But will that always be true?
As the nation prepares for November’s election, the future of the NPS, an agency that has long been a symbol of America’s natural beauty, is at a critical juncture. A Donald Trump victory will almost certainly lead to more attacks against public lands and the undoing of climate progress.
“The Trump administration tried to isolate the national parks and then whittle away at their protections and sound management by denigrating the science and perverting the data to make it harder to make good decisions,” said Dr. Gary Machlis, a former science advisor to the director of the National Parks Service under President Barack Obama and the author of several books about the agency and conservation.
This election and $150 million in federal budget cuts between 2023 and 2024 present the NPS with one of the most severe challenges in its 108-year history.
But as the agency awaits its fate in an increasingly divisive and environmentally hostile political arena, it also continues to reconcile its noble mission to protect nature and its long legacy of racial discrimination.
The racist writings and questionable associations of John Muir, known as the “Father of the National Park Service,” and the historical injustices of Indigenous displacement can never be scrubbed from the agency’s history. But it has made great strides in righting those wrongs, including the appointment of Charles Sams III, its first Native American director.
What controversies have shaped one of the most loved and trusted federal agencies, and what formidable threats could reshape its future?
The Good
Next month, Yosemite officials will begin a planning process that could result in permanent reservation requirements for day-use visitors after 2024. (Dreamstime/TNS)TNS
Thanks to Muir and Mather’s decades-long conservation advocacy, America’s national park system is often celebrated as one of the nation’s greatest achievements.
Muir’s descriptive and passionate writings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were some of the first to capture the beauty of the country’s wilderness and the importance of preserving it, transforming him into a public influencer of the time.
In his 1901 book Our National Parks, Muir observed that the modern world’s stresses had led “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken” people to finally discover that “going to the mountains is going home.”
“Wildness is a necessity,” he wrote in the book. “Mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
Mather, on the other hand, used his wealth and connections to organize park tours for influential business people, journalists, and politicians. His work highlighted the need for better management and protection of the country’s natural treasures, culminating in the passing of the Organic Act of 1916 and the creation of the NPS.
Since then, several presidents have expanded the park system and strengthened conservation laws. Obama grew the system considerably, expanding 34 national monuments while creating two new national parks and adding to others. Biden reversed several of Trump’s actions against national monuments.
In Aug. 2024, the National Park Foundation, the fundraising arm of the NPS, received a $100 million gift from the Lilly Endowment Inc., the world’s largest philanthropic foundation. The money will go toward programs to enhance the park system.
While conservation has generally been a bipartisan issue, beliefs around climate change have unified the growing environmentally conscious youth movement with Democrats. The movement began to coalesce in response to Trump’s anti-environmental actions.
“What we’re witnessing is an intergenerational transfer of power that’s advancing the importance of conservation in Americans’ lives,” said Dr. Machlis, whose latest book, Sustainability for the Forgotten, critiques the sustainability movement’s history, policies, and practices, urging inclusive approaches for marginalized and overlooked communities. “We saw that during the Democratic National Convention, where progress tied together the ability of young people to unify around conservation and political strength.”
The Bad
FILE – This June 12, 2017 file photo shows pumpjacks operating in the western edge of California’s Central Valley northwest of Bakersfield. Oil production from federally-managed lands and waters topped a record 1 billion barrels in 2019, according to the Department of Interior on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020. (AP Photo/Brian Melley, File)AP
However, the national park system is not without its dark side. Much of the land it protects involved the forced removal of Native Americans—who had safely stewarded those regions for thousands of years—adding to a legacy of injustice that continues to haunt the conservation movement today.
While the exact number of Native Americans removed for the creation of the national park system is challenging to quantify, dozens of tribes were forced from their lands to create some of the country’s most well-known national parks, such as Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, Grand Canyon, and the Badlands.
While Muir’s contributions to the protection of public lands are undeniable, he also pushed racist stereotypes about Native Americans and African Americans in some of his early writings.
In 1868, not long after Muir arrived in the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges, he wrote that Native Californians live “a strangely dirty and irregular life,” calling them “half-happy savages.” He also expressed some shame for having such feelings, writing, “To prefer the society of squirrels and woodchucks to that of our own species must surely be unnatural.”
He used the term “savages” more than once when describing Naive Americans in his work.
He also maintained associations with white supremacists, further chipping away at his legacy as America’s greatest naturalist and the founder of the Sierra Club, one of the most influential grassroots environmental organizations in the country.
“Many of our inspiring leaders are flawed,” said Dr. Machlis. “How do you separate their achievements from their flawed values and actions? It’s exceptionally complex, but it teaches humility to those of us in the conservation movement.”
While NPS and the Sierra Club can address their relationships with Muir, little can be done about a President’s actions.
In December 2017, the Trump administration reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah. It cut Bears Ears by about 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly 50%, a combined cull of about 2 million acres. The reduction opened the sites up to mining, drilling, and other forms of development. In March 2018, internal documents revealed that the reduction had been influenced by oil and gas interests, according to the New York Times.
His administration aggressively promoted fossil fuel extraction on public lands, including areas near or within the boundaries of national parks. He notably opened parts of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. He also weakened the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), making it easier for development projects to proceed with less scrutiny.
“Trump had to be careful how he attacked the park system because it’s one of the most well-respected elements of the government,” said Dr. Machlis. “It has a deeply loyal constituency, and there’s nothing to be gained from drilling in Yellowstone or Yosemite National Park.”
Trump sought to slash around $1 billion from NPS’s budget. He also showed the extent of what he could do to any agency he wanted to weaken when he moved the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Colorado, which some believe was a way to upend the agency by isolating it from its partnering federal entities and through the loss of experienced staffers. Rather than relocate, 85% of workers retired or quit. Biden moved it back to Washington, D.C., when he took office.
But the threats keep coming.
Project 2025 is a conservative-right document The Heritage Foundation wrote as a policy blueprint should Trump win the election. Among its litany of attacks against progressive ideas, it targets the NPS and conservation movements, proposing to delist animals from the Endangered Species Act, repealing the Antiquities Act that will make it easier to drill for fossil fuels on protected lands, and reversing practically all action on climate change.
“They’re also proposing the politicization of the National Park Service so that superintendents would be political trumpets and remove federal scientists from doing research that would establish the evidence to protect national parks,” said Dr. Machlis. “Their ultimate goal is to privatize as much of it as possible and make money off it.”
Trump has distanced himself from the extremes of Project 2025 on several occasions.
The park system has an outsized role in American society. It has remained a symbol of conservation since Yellowstone National Park was granted protection in 1872, decades before the NPS was founded.
Today, the service employs 20,000 people with assistance from 279,000 volunteers and supports 380,000 jobs nationwide. In 2023, around 325 million people visited national park sites, helping generate over $55 billion in economic output on an annual budget of about $3.6 billion.
It will likely face cuts in the next budget, even though its maintenance backlog has grown to $22 billion. Despite being more popular and profitable, national park programs and the offices that support them are woefully short-staffed. Staffing dropped by 13 percent between 2012 and 2022, while visitation grew by 10 percent.
The Questionable
FILE – This 1907 photo provided by the U.S. National Park Service shows naturalist John Muir in Yosemite National Park, Calif. The Sierra Club is reckoning with the racist views of founder John Muir, the naturalist who helped spawn environmentalism. The San Francisco-based environmental group said Wednesday, July 22, 2020, that Muir was part of the group’s history perpetuating white supremacy. Executive Director Michael Brune says Muir made racist remarks about Black people and Native Americans, though his views later evolved. (Courtesy of U.S. National Park Service via AP)AP
While Mather is celebrated for his contributions to conservation and establishing the NPS, he made his fortune mining for borax, a white powdery substance used in cleaning. While mining harms the environment and can complicate conservation efforts, the harms we know about now were not well known over 100 years ago.
Those aware of Muir’s past shouldn’t be surprised to learn that his legacy is good, bad, and questionable.
The racial stereotypes he expressed in 1869 were accompanied by more neutral language that the Indigenous people he encountered were his “fellow beings” and “brothers.”
His views appeared to soften as he got older. In 1880, while at a dinner party in San Francisco, Muir confronted a colonel involved in California’s Indian Extermination campaign, according to private letters from a guest to Muir’s future wife, Louie Strentzel. Muir told the man that he was engaged in a “mean and brutal policy” and that he should be “ashamed.”
Muir also wrote about an Indigenous tribe he lived with in Alaska in 1879, noting that they behaved with “serene dignity” and kindness, which made him feel at home in their community.
Upon meeting the Inupiat of the Bering Sea, Muir similarly wrote: “They are better behaved than white men, not half so greedy, shameless or dishonest… These people interest me greatly, and it is worth coming far to know them.”
Still, Muir’s posthumous cancellation does, in some ways, deprive the conservation movement of one of their most enduring heroes. But, sometimes, when the good is eroded, it’s replaced by more good.
“Muir’s voice may be less relevant today because of those flaws,” said Dr. Machlis. “But because of that, new and younger voices have and will become an inspiration for the next generation of conservationists. We can only hope they won’t make the same mistakes we made, but they will make mistakes.”
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Publish date : 2024-08-27 01:18:00
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