Most of the time, this is a pop culture blog. However, my country is turning into a fascist nightmare run by insane tech billionaires, and they’re tearing the U.S. government apart. One way they’re doing that is by illegally firing federal workers en masse. They’ve fired 3,400 new Forest Service hires (people who’ve been hired in the last years or so), along with 1,000 National Parks Service (NPS) recent hires. According to that article from The Guardian, that accounts for 10% of the Forest Service’s workforce and 5% of the NPS’s workforce. That’s important to know because Elon Musk and his Muskrats at DOGE (which is not a really or legal U.S. federal department) want the National Parks to shut down.

Why would a bunch of ultra-rich tech-bro asshats want to shut down the National Parks Service, which has been called “America’s Best Idea” in the past? So they can shut the NPS down, and then their billionaire buddies can develop housing and apartments on some of that land and drill on other parts of that land. I imagine Elon Musk also wants to build a mansion that overlooks Crater Lake National Parks or something like that.

But they’re not supposed to do that. That’s public land that’s set aside for everyone to enjoy, and in many cases, the NPS work with local Indigenous peoples in and around those parks to preserve their sacred spaces. And according to that Guardian article, the U.S. National Parks welcome 159 million visitors per year. 159 million people is the size of a large sovereign nation (for reference, the U.S. has around 330 million citizens, and it’s one of the top 5 most populous nations on Earth). The National Park Service guards so many wonderful things, and people clearly love visiting the sites it protects. That’s why we have to make sure that the NPS doesn’t go away.

That’s the reason why we need to protect the U.S. National Parks, but how can we do that?

We can do that by continuing to show up to the sites in the NPS’s system. We need to show that we care about these places and that we want to see and learn from them.

Continue reading “Why and How We Should Protect U.S. National Parks” →