Parks Are Being Dismantled Before Our Very Eyes

National parks as we know and love them are changing — dismantled before our very eyes under the new Trump administration in just six weeks. Fired staff, canceled building leases, erased history. We see the writing on the wall, and it’s dark.

But the National Parks Conservation Association was created for moments exactly like this, and we’re not backing down. In fact, the American public is really angry over these harmful disruptions to the National Park Service and engaging through our organization like never before.

Generations of Americans have seen fit to protect our nation’s natural wonders and cultural places. When President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon in 1908, industries wanted to mine it — but upon seeing the landscape’s unparalleled beauty, he announced in a speech, “leave it as it is… The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children and your children’s children and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see.”

NPCA’s first leader told the American public 100 years ago that the people must save the parks. Let’s do it!

Through wisdom, research and sheer awe, our predecessors learned to be deliberate in setting aside special areas within our states and territories. Congress created the National Park Service in 1916 to manage these cherished lands. Three years later, two of the first employees of the Park Service — Stephen Mather and Robert Sterling Yard — along with a small group of scientists, artists and civic leaders created the National Parks Association (now the NPCA).

NPCA’s founders knew the parks would need an independent agency, separate from government and its influence, to safeguard them. Yard, who served as NPCA’s first executive director, wrote in 1920, “It is the people who must save their own national parks.”

National parks speak to who we are as Americans. For more than a century, our country has designated and stewarded our natural treasures. We do so, not just because these lands are literally what make America beautiful, but also because scholarly study has determined the legitimate need for their protection. Some of the most brilliant scientists in our nation have amassed a tremendous body of knowledge that makes an objective, nonpartisan case for the conservation of public lands.

As well, we have increasingly sought through national historic sites and monuments to honor the social events that formed our nation and have shaped our laws, communities and life experiences. These sites also honor our intellectual and industrial innovations, as well as personal freedoms.

For the more than 300 million people who visit our national parks each year, these natural and cultural sites inform our understanding of the past and shine light on the way ahead. Such insight is invaluable in volatile and uncertain times. Lessons from the brightest and darkest chapters of our history are as vital as ever.

We might do well to step back and reflect on these things now.

“Through all the history that we have, all the wars we’ve been in, all of the population booms that we’ve been through, and no one has ever gone into these places and said, ‘Nope. Let’s stop protecting them,’” explains Kristen Brengel, NPCA’s senior vice president of government affairs, on the latest Secret Lives of Parks podcast.

“We don’t want to be that generation that disrupts over 100 years of protecting something and then ruins it. I think we want to be the generation that knows better.”

Yet despite the time-honored commitment and bipartisan public support to protect our national parks and monuments, these sites are in peril.

Steps are being taken to remove barriers to drilling and mining on public lands, with even national monuments on the table. Park staffing is being cut drastically. We’re seeing LGBTQ contributions to America’s history being erased. Plans have been announced to shutter visitor centers, museums and other important facilities through lease terminations. With reduced staffing to manage our parks, we already are seeing limited hours at visitor centers and closed sections of parks because the limited staff who remain just can’t keep up.

A record number of supporters have joined NPCA in rallying for our national parks to say they are mad and not ok with this. They have been marching, speaking up online and calling their members of Congress.

People across the political spectrum hold cherished memories in national parks — from family vacations to marriage proposals to solo sojourns and more — and they have shared how they want their grandchildren to be able to see the natural wonders and explore the sites that shaped our country’s history, just as they have visited and appreciated them over their lifetime.

NPCA has always been a member-driven, grassroots organization that empowers people to protect parks. I’m seeing the American public speak truth to power over treasured places that are simply too important to who we are as a nation — historically, morally and soulfully — to let fall into disrepair or worse.

I expect that the Trump administration’s actions so far are just the start. But we can do something. Remember, NPCA’s first leader told the American public 100 years ago that the people must save the parks.

Let’s do it! Stay vigilant, sign our petitions, barrage Congress with your calls. We were made for these times, all of us together. Truly, our National Park System may be lost without our action.