In desperate need of an Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Occurrence
How has it only been six weeks?
Every time I’ve sat down to write this weekend I’ve been overwhelmed by horrible dread. I feel it in my chest—heavy, tight, claustrophobic.
Maybe it’s writer’s block, not knowing exactly what to say or how to say it. Maybe it’s a visceral aversion to reading, writing, or thinking about—well, you know. How has it only been six weeks? I feel like I’m staring into a very long, very dark tunnel, with no end in sight. So, keeping this intro short…
It was warm and gusty in New York on Saturday; cold and clear on Sunday. I got outside both days. Gave our houseplants a shower. Opened and closed and opened my laptop again, ad infinitum.
reading list
On Saturday, thousands of people congregated at National Parks across the country to demonstrate their support for public lands and to protest the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts at the National Park Service and other land management agencies. [New York Times; NBC News; Wes Siler’s Newsletter]
Exactly how many people have been fired from land management agencies? SFGate’s recent (Feb. 27) estimate is ~1,000 permanent Park Service employees and ~4,700 permanent employees at other public land management agencies. But one “rogue” seasonal ranger is tracking and confirming exactly how many parks employees have lost their jobs, and where, in a spreadsheet. They’ve confirmed 759 so far. A sampling of some of the biggest cuts: 15 at Everglades; 15 at Shenandoah; 14 at Carlsbad Caverns; at least 12 in the Great Smoky Mountains; 12 at Rocky Mountain; 11 at Zion; and 10 each at Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, and Sequoia Kings Canyon.
What does this mean for anyone planning a trip to a National Park? Neil Desai, Pacific regional director at the National Parks Conservation Association, told KQED visitors should expect worse traffic, more trash, fewer camping reservations, fewer maintained bathrooms and trails, and fewer tours and ranger programs. National Parks Traveller has already found tours and ranger programs have been cancelled or reduced at Carlsbad Caverns, Pinnacles National Park, and Great Basin National Park. Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays due to “lack of staffing.” Yosemite has halted camping reservations. Alex Wild, an emergency medical technician who was fired last month from his job at Devils Postpile National Monument, told the San Francisco Standard that people should treat parks like “a wilderness area” and to prepare to “self-rescue” in emergencies.
Angela Moxley was just 10 days away from the end of her probationary period as a parks employee at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia when she was fired. She was the only botanist on the park staff. “I’ve seen so many posts about overflowing toilets. There will also be closed visitor centers. There could be delays in search and rescue responses, and all of that is really, really important,” Moxley told National Parks Traveler. “I’m not trying to say that it’s not, but there is also a huge behind-the-scenes effort at national parks to protect the resources that visitors enjoy. We don’t typically wear the flat hat, and the visitors may never encounter us, but without us there wouldn’t be the resources for the visitors to enjoy. And so I really hope that people, in addition to speaking up for the toilets, can speak up for the forests and the archaeology and the museums.”
The National Park Service says an Australian company is illegally mining for rare earth minerals in the Mojave National Preserve. The company says that the Bureau of Land Management gave permission more than 40 years ago. “How the Trump administration responds to the situation with Colosseum Mine will be an indicator as to how they respond to threats to our public lands in general over the next four years,” Chance Wilcox of the National Parks Conservation Association told the Los Angeles Times. “Will they favor an unauthorized foreign mine or will they better support the institution that protects America’s treasured landscapes?”
At least 880 NOAA employees were fired last week, according to Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the ranking member on the Senate Committee that oversees the agency.
The Bureau of Prisons wanted to build a $500 million prison complex to incarcerate more than 1,300 people on a former strip mine in Kentucky. Instead, an Indigenous woman-led community building and land restoration group bought a 63-acre plot within the proposed site with the goal of “collectively restor[ing] the strip-mined property through Indigenous land rematriation practices and to provide an alternative to the harms of incarceration.”
Just for fun: Severance filming locations from my camera roll. I don’t know about you, but I’m in desperate need of an Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Occurrence, or ORTBO.
I hope our president and his gangsters don’t get their greedy tentacles into Minnewaska