Workers say the real crisis is happening behind the scenes.
This summer, many of Americans’ fears about their national parks—that budget cuts and staffing shortages would lead to unsafe, or at least unpleasant, vacations—did not come to pass. Gates and visitor centers were open (with reduced hours) and toilets were usable (mostly). Visitors to the Grand Canyon who developed heat exhaustion were still rescued. To the public, a trip to the national parks must have seemed normal enough, down to tourists getting way too close to bison at Yellowstone.
But rangers say the real crisis is happening beyond the trails and campgrounds, where visitors can’t see it. Park employees’ experiences, which several people described to me and dozens more have shared publicly, suggest that the Department of the Interior sacrificed long-term stewardship of American lands to maintain a veneer of normalcy for this summer’s crowds. “We are really pulling out all the stops to make sure that the impacts are being hidden,” an emergency-services ranger in the western United States told me. (She and other park employees I spoke with for this story requested anonymity, out of fear of losing their job.)
The National Park Service lost about a quarter of its permanent staff to mass firings, buyouts, early retirements, and resignations this winter and spring. In April, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum made the department’s priorities for the remaining staff clear: In an order, he declared that parks had to stay “open and accessible” and “provide the best customer service experience for all visitors.” Any facility closures or reduced hours would need to be approved by NPS and Department of Interior leadership in Washington. The order alluded to the general importance of conservation but showed little interest in research, monitoring, or maintenance.
This work has always happened at the periphery of the public’s experience of national parks, but it’s what keeps both their natural and human-made features from deteriorating. National Park Service researchers conducted 28,000 studies from 2000 to 2016, working at 412 parks, historical sites, memorials, and battlefields at any given time. The studies help workers protect what’s inside park boundaries by spotting early signs of trouble in time to help, and by contributing to general knowledge about climate change, ecological restoration, and wildfires.
All of that research required an army of employees, many of whom are now out of a job. Ryan Valdez, the senior director of conservation science at the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), told me that the Park Service’s science arm, which once employed hundreds of people in land, water, air, wildlife, and climate-change programs, is “pretty much dismantled.
