Ink Tea Stone Leaf

I began supporting this organization in 2017, when I perceived an increasing danger to the safety and integrity of America’s public lands and natural environment. It’s 2025, and as you may have observed in some of my writings, I am still perceiving mightily.

The policies of the present administration create too many threats to our values, freedoms, and lives for one person to address without going mad, but one threat that has been foremost in my mind since the beginning of this era has been the abandonment (and even suppression) of initiatives to mitigate and reverse climate change. The consequences of a warming planet are grave: more frequent and deadly natural disasters, fierce competition over fresh water and other scarce resources, mass extinctions and devastated ecosystems, and the displacement and death of multitudes of people.

This administration would have you believe that climate change is a hoax, while simultaneously attempting to manipulate scientific research to create the impression that global warming is a net positive for humanity. I don’t need to define cynicism for you: you only need to look out the window to see it.

Since this will be the direction of our government for at least the next four years,  it is hard to feel hopeful about the environment. Many awful things will come to pass. But when I read through the Spring 2025 issue of the NPCA’s quarterly magazine the other day, I had at least one thing to feel hopeful about, namely the knowledge that there were people who knew what needed to be done and were organized to advocate and do whatever else they could.

Our system of national parks and monuments is not merely a vehicle for the preservation of aesthetically pleasing vistas and campgrounds, a framing which tends to suggest they are a dispensible secondary priority compared to whatever issues conservatives would rather address. In fact, the national parks and monuments are at the heart of our country’s scientific, cultural, and historical life.

Memorable articles in this issue cover scientific research into marmots of the north cascades, and how climate change has shrunk their range and made them more vulnerable to predation (and increased the population of predators); the impact of an invasive species of antelope in Texas on livestock and local wildlife, and the efforts to remove them; and the effort to preserve, nurture, and cultivate the native grasslands of the eastern United States, an ecosystem that is both severely endangered by climate change and extremely useful in mitigating its effects. There is a profile on ten national monuments added to the system during the administration of Joe Biden, established not only to protect and preserve vulnerable species and their habitats, but to honor the history of the land’s indigenous people, and other notable events and individuals; the Trump administration, we are warned, intends to reduce or eliminate protections for some of these monuments. There are also stories about the creation of works of art and sculpture from plastic pollution, the preservation of homes in the face of rising ocean waters, and the restoration of an indigenous community in the heart of Yosemite.

These are important stories that need to be told, and important causes that need to be carried out by responsible agencies. Unfortunately, employees of the National Park Service were among those targeted by the Trump administration’s purge, severely weakening the agency as a part of their calculated effort to destroy the Federal Government’s ability to do anything useful at all.

There is an all-too-common mindset that things like scientific research, historical preservation, and support for the humanities constitute “waste.” This attitude is laughably reductive. You may not know much about the impact of decreased snowfall on hoary marmots, but if you gave serious thought to the complexity of ecosystems and their potential impact on humans, you would understand that the knowledge created by that research forms an important piece of a very useful whole. Efforts to remove references to transgender Americans from monuments to LGBTQ+ history distort the truth of the events they commemorate and create tragic and unnecessary divisions between all Americans. And the country as a whole has much to gain from a well-funded establishment for literature and the arts, as well as the acknowledgement of, and respect for, the rights and legacy of indigenous culture.

It is too easy for us to be dismissive of anything that doesn’t turn millionaires into billionaires, and that is to our lasting shame. But the National Parks system exists to enrich and improve our nation, and it has the potential to contribute the same to the entire world. So lend an eye, an ear, and a hand to the NPCA, as they advocate not only for the system, but for the parks themselves, and the land, history, culture, and people they enshrine.