Trump-Musk governmental dismantling leaves National Parks, Yosemite in peril
The dual-president's Gleichschaltung has ransacked staffpower throughout the National Park Service. Yosemite is poised for ruin.
Yosemite National Park prepares for the summer—its busiest time of year—months in advance, onboarding extra seasonal workers in February and March and alotting reservations to visitors even earlier. This prior preparation is vital to managing the park’s millions of visitors while also protecting the health and longevity of its natural wonders. The motto of my old boyhood nature club comes to mind: “Be Prepared.”
Unfortunately, Yosemite won’t be prepared this summer. In the past weeks, the nation’s consuls have undertaken a likely-illegal purge of the federal government. Tens of thousands of federal employees have been fired, and additional hiring has been halted.
While we have been told that those nixed are parasitical, nameless bureaucrats existing only to siphon money from taxpayers, they have largely been anything but. In the case of the thousands let go from the National Park Service and the US Forest Service, they include rangers, fee technicians, and anyone who was “new” to their job (i.e. they were hired in the last year or two), largely regardless of what that job was.
And no, the Trump-Elon purge is not actually about waste or shoring up government spending. If it were, their party would not suggest adding trillions to the defecit, but that’s what’s happening.
Some statements from the Trump administration have claimed that seasonal workers, like supplemental Yosemite rangers for the summer, were not meant to be fired or have their hiring restricted, but SFGate reports that “no corrective measures were taken” to redress those fired. Hollow words and destructive actions mean you take the actions as the real message.
So, Yosemite should be currently gearing up for the summer. Instead, any attempts to prepare for the avalanche of tourists and visitors are dead in the water. Recent hires are gone, and rangers “months into the hiring process” have had their job offers rescinded. Even if the Trump-Musk administration about-faced and began sending out green lights to start hiring again, Yosemite would be behind schedule, possibly to the tune of months, and summer visiting would suffer.
But that’s the best case. The actual situation is that Yosemite isn’t just behind schedule; the schedule has been destroyed. If the park is left open this summer, which it well could be, it’s going to be completely understaffed and unprepared for an unbelievable number of visitors.
See, in the past couple years, Yosemite National Park has been utilizing an ahead-of-time reservation system which allows the park to regulate the number of people and cars coming in each day. This let staff know what to expect demand-wise which allowed for more appropriate preparation. This also limited traffic and visitor disappointment. Without a reservation system, busy days at the park meant an hours-long line of cars trying to get in plus a limited number of parking spots getting filled long before every attempted visitor found a spot for their vehicle. Add excessive trash and littering and an unsustainable strain on the park’s facilities/rangers, and we had a suffering Yosemite.
The worst case happened under Trump’s last term (shocker!), when a 2018 government shutdown (caused by Trump demanding billions for an ineffective border wall) prevented all of the park’s federal workforce from working. Despite this, the park was left open. None of the rangers were ranging, but people were allowed in, with essentially no supervision save for concession workers who were employed by a private company. I can’t state how bad this was better than the SFGate article, so read it from them:
Without park rangers to guide and monitor their behavior, visitors left garbage at scenic viewpoints, brought dogs to ecologically sensitive meadows and other areas where pets were prohibited, drove over curbs, and even defecated on the ground next to locked restrooms, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal. When temperatures dropped, the garbage and human waste froze to the ground.
Hoping beyond hope, there could be a late reservation system that gets implemented sometime between now and the summer, but sources currently at the park say that seems unlikely. So, Yosemite is looking at a summer surge without the moderating effects of a reservation system and without the supporting effects of even its baseline staff, let alone additional summer hires.
With the firings, Yosemite has less staffpower than it normally would, and it will likely not be allowed to make significant hires to replace this cohort or bring in its usual extra support. An unprepared park and 30,000 people attempting to visit daily means that the above horror story of 2018 is probably going to be overshadowed.
Hordes of people and their cars can be a big threat, especially without any guidance. To be fair, I, as a self-identified outdoorsman, would readily proselytize the importance of experience nature’s wonder, and I would give the advice to any individual that they should visit, but what I recommend to a person, I wouldn’t necessarily trust to people.
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.”
Tons of people, many in a rush, many without tons of knowledge about what wilderness protection may look like, trying to squeeze in a few hours in the park amidst a sea of cars and other people will spell destruction for the park. Cars will be driven to places they shouldn’t in search of extra space to park. Protected trails or areas will be overrun by people who don’t care too much or maybe don’t even know they are where they shouldn’t be. Facilities will not be serviced and that means trash and litter will abound. A ton of food trash means bears getting used to human food and learning to search it out, becoming a risk to themselves and visitors.
Conservation can be a years or decades long practice, especially when trying to nurse damaged or sensitive areas back to health. We humans unfortunately have a strong ability to stomp over delicate wildlife, whether with our boots, our tires, or our houses. Without a dedicated workforce whose job it is to make sure people can experience the joy of nature without damaging it, the average suburbanite can be a potential danger.
30,000 of them is a certain one.
We set aside land like that found in Yosemite because we want to preserve the world’s natural beauty and splendor for all to experience, now and in perpetuity. The natural world is an awe-inspiring blessing that we have unfortunately destroyed too much of. In our human pursuits for safety, power, comfort, and control, we have always let the environment around us fall to the wayside.
It makes some sense, when one is suffering and starving, that care for the world outside of one’s self becomes minimized. For so much of human history, the people who came before me faced unimaginable hardships, and I don’t fault them, in large, for a lack of concern with the health of the natural world. Heck, for most of them, the thought that we humans could destroy the unimaginably powerful Nature was preposterous, after all.
But we can. We do. We have bulldozed and torn apart so many irreplacable landscapes, habitats, and species. We have altered the atmosphere in ways unseen since at least the last ice age. We have infected with foreign pollutants almost every corner of the globe, from our bloodstreams to the ocean’s deepest trenches. We’ve changed the weather. Our power is terrifying, and we must account for and accept that.
This feeling, in part, was recognized at the turn of the last century, with the formation and expansion of the National Park Service. In honor of the day I am writing this, Presidents’ Day (oddly still officialy Washington’s Birthday), I would be remiss to not give a nod to the role presidents have played in protecting the nation’s lands. The most famous example is undoubtedly President Theodore Roosevelt and his conservation efforts which included a substantial increase in the amount of land protected among National Parks. In the 00’s of the 1900’s, Teddy completed the designation of five new national parks and helped establish 230 million acres of public lands.
Yosemite, though, was first protected before the Bull Moose. It was in 1864 when President Lincoln “signed a bill granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias to the State of California as an inalienable public trust,” according to an old version of Yosemite’s website. It continued, “this was the first time in history that a federal government had set aside scenic lands simply to protect them and to allow for their enjoyment by all people.”
Preservation, it seems, has long been in the purview of presidents, most notably among those with a keen eye to the future.
During the last administration, President Biden aimed to “conserve at least 30% each of our lands and waters by the year 2030… in order to safeguard our health, food supplies, biodiversity, and the prosperity of every community.” And in one of his last acts as president, Biden established two more national monuments here in California, “the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla National Monuments,” which protected more than 840,000 acres of “some of California’s most culturally and environmentally significant landscapes.”
The easy pickings were had early. Biden’s protections don’t have the historical wow-factor found in the likes of Yosemite and Yellowstone. Nonetheless, a clear line can be drawn from Lincoln to Roosevelt to him, from Yosemite to Chuckwalla, a line charting our nation’s efforts to safegaurd a portion of the natural splendor we find ourselves amidst, before it is overrun by suburban sprawl and parking lots.
Unfortuntaley, President Trump seeks to get as far away from that grand historical line as he can. In his previous term, he deleted the protections for millions of acres of monumented-land. In this term, he and Musk have decimated the workforce spanning across all of the national parks (and all the other agencies protecting the natural world, like the EPA, NOAA, etc.).
Surprsingly for an Eagle Scout from California, I have actually never been to Yosemite. Backpacked in the High Sierras, camped all over the state, tied a million lashings, but never made it to the grandfather of national parks.
I guess I really need to get out there soon, or else I might never see it in all its glory. What a shame that I even need to worry. Yosemite, which has stood protected since 1864 under the order of Lincoln, is poised for peril under Trump.
tragic. trump going to turn yosemite into a bass pro shop