National Parks

Inside Climate News -   With the second coming of Donald J. Trump, the first Native American director of the National Park Service packed up his belongings in Washington, D.C., and retreated here to the sagebrush outback of eastern Oregon.

Charles F. Sams III, whose Native name is Mocking Bird with Big Heart and who spent three and a half years in the Biden administration managing 85 million acres of public land, now lives in a modest suburban house not far from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation where he grew up.

From his subdivision with a view of Oregon’s Blue Mountains, Sams has had more than a year to watch, mourn and reflect upon what he and many other experts view as an annus horribilis for America’s national parks under Trump 2.0.

It began with a blitzkrieg of mass firings, buyouts and forced retirements. Within six months, 24 percent of the park system’s permanent staff, about 4,000 people, was gone, according to internal data analyzed by the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association. Public workforce data released by the federal government in January shows a one-year reduction of 16 percent, or 3,076 people.

Gone were 100 park superintendents, as well as legions of biologists, archeologists, climate specialists and other scientists and managers who monitored the health of the parks, planned for their future and accounted for most of the agency’s in-house human expertise.

This sudden hollowing out of institutional knowledge, Sams said during an interview at his kitchen table, was the most pernicious aspect of the attack on the park service—one that cannot be easily righted. “It’s the biggest tragedy I see,” he said.

But gone, too, were park rangers and other staff who collected entrance fees, conducted tours, maintained trails and cleaned toilets. More than 90 national parks (out of 433) reported management and maintenance problems in the first half of last year, according to internal agency data obtained by The New York Times. Admission fees (80 percent of which are used for operating costs at the parks where they’re collected) went unpaid because some entrance kiosks were not staffed. With a shortage of custodial workers, scientists at Yosemite National Park had to pick up shifts cleaning campground bathrooms, according to an internal email shared with SFGate.  MORE