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Wild Times: Live Event with Former Parks Director Jon Jarvis
Join Marissa Ortega Welch and former National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis as they discuss the evolving challenges facing America's public lands. This live event captures the essence of wilde...
Wild Times: Live Event with Former Parks Director Jon Jarvis
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Hi everyone, this is Marissa from How Wild.
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How's your summer going?
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Have you been camping or hiking in any wilderness areas?
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What changes are you noticing?
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For me this summer I went on my first backpacking trip in the Trinity Alps of Northern California.
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I've also spent a lot of time getting ready for the John Mir Trail.
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My friend Holly and I are hiking at this August.
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And in mid-July I hosted a live How Wild event at the K-A-L-W Studios in downtown San Francisco
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about the changes I've been hearing about to public lands.
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I was joined by John Jarvis, who worked for 40 years as a National Park Ranger,
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Superintendent, and eventually was the Director of the National Park Service under President Obama.
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We ate s'mores and he shared his perspective on the threats parks are facing.
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We recorded the conversation for those of you who weren't able to make it,
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so grab some s'mores, gather around the proverbial campfire, and enjoy this live How Wild event.
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It is my absolute pleasure to introduce to you a print and radio journalist
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who is the host of the How Wild podcast Marissa Ortega Welch.
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Thanks Ben.
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Thanks everyone.
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Thank you so much for coming.
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I'm going to talk for a little bit before I invite John up to have a conversation.
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I just kind of want to set the scene for what we're talking about.
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I'm honored to have so many of you in the room that are already very knowledgeable about this,
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so thank you for coming.
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I'm hopefully we can add to what you know and as well as take your questions at the end.
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But just to set the scene for folks who maybe don't know and also to tell you a little bit about myself.
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So it's actually the 25th anniversary of the first time that I went backpacking.
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It was 25 years in August.
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I got to go backpacking as part of a program for young women that was actually in honor of a naturalist
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and educator named Joey Armstrong who died way too soon, who inspired me and changed my life.
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She was my environmental educator in seventh grade and I got to go back on a backpacking trip in her honor.
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And I was hooked.
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Fell in love with you, somebody fell in love with backpacking.
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Not a lot has changed since that time.
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Every year I'm very lucky to have a best friend who I go backpacking with, my friend Holly,
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who's featured in the podcast.
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We've been all over the west.
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We've been backpacking in the Wind River Range in Wyoming.
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The Grand Teton's Olympic National Park.
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All over the Sierra, which is one of my favorite places.
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But in 2018, we were hiking a section of the Pacific Crest Trail in Washington state.
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And it was this trail that was supposed to have amazing views of Mount Rainier and the Cascade Range.
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And we could barely see off the bridge line because it was so hazy from the big fires that were
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happening in Washington and Canada and even Siberia I was looking up today.
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It was a big fire year.
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On that same trip, we ran into some folks who were hiking the whole Pacific Crest Trail.
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And they showed us an app that they were using that gave them up to the mile information on
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where to camp, where to get water, how to safely cross the rivers.
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And I'm a lay adopter to technology.
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So maybe I shouldn't have had my balloon.
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Mind blown in 2018, but I did have my mind blown.
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And that's where I first really started thinking about the ways that this concept of wilderness
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was being tested by severe fires, by climate change, and by increasing technology in the back country.
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So then when I put my journalist hat on, I realized that there is actually a legal definition of wilderness.
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There is the 1964 wilderness act, which set aside parts of the four federal land agencies
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to have an even higher level of protection as wilderness.
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So those four agencies are national parks and national forests, which often get all the
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love in that order, and then the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service.
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So there's sort of these areas within those four agencies that get this extra level of protection.
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And there's a specific definition. They have to be roadless areas.
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They have to be natural, untrammeled, which just sort of means unrestrained or free of human
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manipulation. And they have to have beplaces where you can find solitude and engage in primitive
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recreation. So my podcast is delving into how all of those words are being tested again in an era
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of severe fires and climate change. So I went hiking off trail with a Sequoia King's Canyon biologist
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to see this grove of giant Sequoias that had burned down. The park wanted to go in and restore.
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They did go in and restore. Some environmentalists felt like that was going against the idea of
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untrammeling. It was manipulating the land, but the biologists felt like it was necessary to restore
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natural conditions. I look at how with increased visitation, it's harder and harder to find places
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to have solitude. I went to the Maroon Bells, which is a beautiful and very popular area in Colorado.
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And then again, looking at how tech is changing our ability to unplug in the wilderness.
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Everyone's hiking with their apps these days. I talked to a search and rescue captain who told me
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that phones are taking the search out of search and rescue, making it easier to find people,
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but they're actually doing more rescues now. Either because people are getting out a little bit
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over their skis because they're emboldened by their phones or even for the most experienced among us,
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like the days of hiking out on a broken leg with your friends helping you, that's just over. Why
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wouldn't you call for a helicopter and that would be here in an hour, right?
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And another change that I see is really positive change is that the federal government has been
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slowly but surely coming to recognize the indigenous history of public lands. All public lands
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were an R, indigenous homelands, and public lands were created by the dispossession of indigenous
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people. So this has been a long road that I'm hoping we can talk a little bit more about tonight.
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But we are seeing the government engage in what are called co-stuartship agreements, especially
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under the last administration. This means it's a spectrum of what it can mean. It's the hope or the
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goal is to bring tribes to the table in terms of managing these lands. Sometimes it's only a name
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only and there are certainly a lot of tribes and indigenous people who say that really what we need
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is that land to be returned to tribes. So that was all going on before 2025. And you had a park
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service, the Forest Service, the other federal land agencies that were already understaffed
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and already had their budgets cut. We're working under budget, trying to catch up with all those
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changes, right? Then we get to January and the Trump administration across the board with federal
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agencies started slashing right through doge. There was a concerted effort to cut federal agencies.
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And that very much came to the park service and the other public land agencies. Mass layoffs,
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there's another round of layoffs that's supposed to come, budget freezes, hiring freezes. There's
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a proposed 25% cut to the 2026 budget, voluntary early retirement options, and voluntary buyouts.
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So I think we're down to, we're looking at if it's all, when it all plays out, anywhere from a 15 to 30%
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cut to staffing and you can correct me if I'm wrong and up to 25 to 30% cuts to budgets. Unprecedented.
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On top of that, the Trump administration recently issued an executive order that's looking at
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how, what information is communicated by federal agencies. So this was what last month. All national
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parks now have to post these signs that invite visitors to report any information that is negative
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about either past or living Americans. These are up now in all national parks. Some of them are more
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parks also had to review all of their content for any information that was negative or disparaging.
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So I talked to one ranger who spent two weeks driving all over their park unit, taking a photo of
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every single sign and could be doing other things with their time is what they told me.
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So these photos and information were submitted for review and the decisions are supposed to now
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come down from national as to what of what of any of these exhibits need to change. But actually
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the first exhibit has already changed in mir woods. It was changed on Friday. And it's a really
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interesting story because the exhibit is actually called history under construction. Sometimes it
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feels like you just can't make this up, you know, it's like what, this is like a novel. If I were
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writing a novel, this is what I would call it. So it's an exhibit in mir woods that rangers,
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a bathing was in 2021. They looked at this timeline of the founding of mir woods and they felt like
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it was inaccurate by omission. There was information missing from this timeline. The timeline starts
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in 1872, which is when Yellowstone National Park was founded. So the timeline is sort of, as one
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ranger put it, attempting to put mir woods within a sort of ecosystem of other national parks. But if
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you expand out that logic and say, okay, how do we think about mir woods and even larger ecosystem,
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then when does your timeline start? Right? And so for these rangers, they realized, well,
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hey, how about the original stewards of this land that go back thousands and thousands of years?
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So they added literally using posted notes in the beginning, the indigenous history of mir woods
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to this timeline. They also added other information like the fact that mir woods was actually
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founded through a grassroots campaign largely led by women. That was off of the timeline. They did
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also add that Gifford Pinchot, who was one of the main leaders in conserving and preserving redwoods,
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was also very tightly connected with the eugenics movement. And there's, you know, read the book Ghosts
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Forest. If you're interested in more, there's a long history of these ties between eugenics and
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redwood preservation in California. So these post-its came off on Friday. And there's potentially more to
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come. Another exhibit that did experience some change, at least temporarily, was at Rosie the
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Riveter, which is the National Historic Park in Richmond. We have Donna Graves with us, who's the
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historian who helped found the National Historic Park. So I interviewed her for Australia,
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did for High Country News about how back in January, February, when Trump issued the EO dismantling
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DEI programs, the park there took down this exhibit about LGBTQ people, I think, you know,
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fearing that it would create the, put a target on the park's back. The, there was community outcry,
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it went back up very quickly. But who knows if it will say, if it will pass, muster. Last thing,
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there has been a lot of resistance to this. There have been protests in over 100 national parks
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across the country. And there is a group of off-duty park rangers who have been organizing
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together across the country, largely just through a messaging app. And they are actually documenting
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on their website. Some of the changes to, on their website, the changes to national parks website.
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So they're archiving that information if it's a person throughout history who's been taken down
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because they're queer trans. If it's a climate change report, that's on their website. They also
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just started a podcast. So there is a lot of resistance. And I can't overstate enough how people
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who work for the National Park Service believe in the mission of the park service. And so to see
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these folks so emotional and fired up and activated has been really interesting. You know,
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these are what I would have said before 2020, if I have radical people. I mean, they are government
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employees, right? And yet they believe so fiercely in this mission and are feeling really
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at odds with how to go to work and live up to that mission every day. So speaking of a consummate
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Ranger, I'm so honored to have John Jarvis here today. Let me get to your bio.
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To talk through some of this with me, John Jarvis has served for 40 years with the National
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Park Service as a Ranger biologist and superintendent in national parks across the country. He was the
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18th director of the National Park Service from 2009 to 2017 under President Barack Obama.
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During his tenure, he led the National Park Service and its 400 parks through its centennial
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added 22 new parks and launched a climate change strategy for the National Park System,
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among other accomplishments. He retired from the National Park Service in 2017 and became the
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inaugural executive director of the Institute for Parks, People and Biodeiversity at the University
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of California and Berkeley. And you're now the chairman of the board, is that right? Okay.
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And he provides advice and training to National Park professionals around the world.
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And is the co-author of two books, The Future of Conservation in America, A Chart for Rough Water,
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and National Parks Forever, 50 years of fighting and a case for independence. So thank you so
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much, John, for joining me. Thank you, Melissa. It's great to be here. Thanks. Thanks, everybody,
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for coming. Yeah, some familiar faces in the room. So I want to start with, I think a lot of us in
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the room can picture what a day in the Ranger, day in the life of a park ranger might look like.
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Maybe even a day in the life of a superintendent for some people in the room. But what does the day
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in the life of the director of the National Park Service look like? What is your role?
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My day was usually handed to me as I walked in in the morning by my assistant said,
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here's your day. And it was like every five minutes or 15 minutes I had to deal with something
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different. So you think about the park service. It's 80 million acres. It's in 13 time zones that
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run from Virgin Islands to American Samoa on the other side of the day line. There's 300 million
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visitors visiting. So at any given moment there's some sort of disaster happening, flood, fire,
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someone's being killed, you know, wildlife doing people doing stupid things in parks. And then
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and then there's in Washington, I used to say that you're basically serving three masters at
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any given moment. It's the White House, the Congress and the Department of the Interior and they all
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have demands. Members of Congress calling them up and complaining about something that they didn't
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like or they want. You're preparing the budget for the next cycle of hearings you're being called
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before inquiries. It's just it's a 365 day 24 hour job that is very, very intense.
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About a blast by the way. It's one of the best jobs in Washington frankly.
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So that's interesting. The White House, the Department of the Interior and Congress. I mean it's
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interesting to think about how those might have been three different different bosses under your terms.
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I'm just curious, you know, given this insight that you have into the national level on that role now,
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you know, how do you think that what those those different entities want is changing now?
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And what I'm really getting at is just what is the Trump administration? What are they trying to do
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here? What do you think they're now telling the director of the National Parks Service, the acting
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director? Well, yeah, and I feel bad for the acting director, Jessica Boran, who was came to the
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park service as a as a budget person. She's fantastic in sort of analyzing the park budget and
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preparing it, but she was never really prepared to serve in the role of of the director where you are
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dealing, you know, with an onslaught of ideas and proposals essentially to dismantle the agency.
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From all aspects, from staffing standpoints that were down something like 24% of the
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total personnel have either retired or taken the fork in the road or been forced out.
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And the riff hasn't even happened yet. The budget cuts, the reduction in force. The seasonal
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hiring, which was a big mess at the beginning of the of the year, that's normally higher.
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Six to eight thousand employees to work in the parks in the summer. And that was that was stopped and
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restarted and then basically failed. And so I think that as strange as it may sound within a highly
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popular agency like the National Park Service that has a very high profile with American public,
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you know, the 321 million people that visited last year were at all Democrats. I'm sorry,
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they're they represent everyone in the country. And they also host some 60 million
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international visitors that come that create jobs, creates, you know, 55 billion into the economy.
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And these are these are local money in the local communities, restaurants, lodging, guides and
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outfitters. So you look at that and you say why on earth would they be dismantling this this agency?
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And I also want to include my fellow agencies like the Forest Service and the BLM and the
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Fish and Wildlife Service. The parks service gets all the attention, but they are also
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being targeted for dismantling. And I can propose a couple of theories because in my time and in
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the service when I was regional director here, that was during the George W. Bush administration,
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I certainly met some of the ideologues that are now sort of in power in the Trump administration.
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Folks that don't really believe in the role of federal government. They believe in that
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the private sector can do it better. And if it's of value, the private sector should do it.
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And the federal government should not. And that if you're going to do what during the Reagan era,
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the, you know, Grover Norquist said, I want to get the government small enough to drown in a
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highly popular federal agency because it's the antithesis of what you believe that you believe
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the government should basically not exist so that you can do whatever you want. And here you have
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this agency that does really good things and does, and the public like it. And it takes care of
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resources and it tells the American history and does all these great things. The goal is to kill it.
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And so I think they're setting the agency up for failure with the ultimate goal of privatization.
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I honestly believe that's where they're headed with the cash cows, the, you know, the Assemblies,
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the Grand Canyon's Yellowstones and the like where they could turn it over to the private sector
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under a stewardship contract and make money. What would that actually look like?
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Like would it truly look like the entire park being sold off and renaming it the way we rename
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stadiums, you know, like Coke, Coke Valley or I don't know. That's not a good one. Let's not use that one.
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Or is it, is it kind of more insidious of it? Still we still see the typical font and the green
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ranger uniforms, but behind the scenes is privately run. How would it actually work? Well, I think it's
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an experiment we haven't, we haven't tried. So it's really hard to tell. But I think that they would
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probably not, I mean, the brand, the, the arrowhead is international. I mean, it is, it is a,
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a coveted brand. So why would you get rid of that? Right? You basically want to, you put that brand
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and put behind it a corporate entity that would use that brand to make money. And you could,
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they would increase fees, of course, for everything, probably layer those fees. And they would look for
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opportunities for the public to pay for other things. I mean, you can probably see paddle boats on
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the Merced River and zip lines from the top of LCAP and, you know, rent a drone and, you know,
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feed the bears. And I mean, you can, you can see it. Right now, I mean, there are plenty of
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imitators out there. Right now, that, that would probably jump at the chance. The problem is,
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is that there are 400 and what, 30 units of the national park system. They're not all cash cows.
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Now, a lot of them are incredibly important, usually smaller. They tell America's story,
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at least up until recently, with authenticity based on good scholarship. And the current secretary
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of interior has suggested that they'll just give those to the states. I don't think he's
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checked with the states that they'll take them. But that's, that's what's been talked about. Now,
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there are a couple of little blinking bright lights out there. One is that they proposed
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essentially a billion dollar cut to the park service budget. That would be about a third.
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Congress didn't buy that. So the interior appropriations acted this week. And they cut the
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budget. They cut it about 200 million. Which is a big cut. No, I'm not saying that's, but it's not a
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billion. So that's much better than, than what the administration. And so what I know that there,
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when you go up on the hill, there, there are still a lot of strong supporters of the national park
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service and the public lands in the Republican Party. But they're, they're afraid to be, to be honest
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about it. They're, they're all under this sort of blanket of fear that comes out of the Trump
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administration about whether or not they would, somebody will be proposed to run against them and
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they'd lose their seat even in very strong Republican districts. But there are plenty of folks
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up there that that will work to protect the park service behind the scenes. Yeah, I mean, we even had
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the former secretary of the interior under the Trump administration representative Ryan Zinky,
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who at that time environmentalist thought was like the villain. And now even he started a
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public lands committee to fight back against some of what Trump has been trying to do. So is that
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what it is? Just fear around, you know, being reelected and keeping your status? I'm just so
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surprised, I guess, at how quickly given the bipartisan support for public lands at how
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quickly some of this has been able to happen? Well, you've seen a little bit of their reaction. And
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Zinky stepped up and saved Montana from the public land sale deal that Mike Lee was proposing from
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Utah, which would have been a disaster. Just put that on the table that the idea of selling
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America's public lands to the highest bidder would result in all kinds of things. I mean, the
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the greatest lock up of public lands will be to sell them. And without thinking it through, I mean,
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that brought the iron of the hunting community, the fishing community, the ATV community,
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all of those people that use public lands, the live and rural communities that really rely on them
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for grazing. I mean, I was out in rural Wyoming when this was happening. And I was out talking to
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ranchers. And they were like, I mean, if they sell this piece of BLM or Forest Service land,
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I will not be able to get my cattle into these other public lands. I'll be landlocked. And so there
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was a lot of opposition. So they're not thinking these things through, frankly. And fortunately,
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there are still people on the hill that are at least a little bit willing to push back.
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You know, we need more of them to push back. But so far, they've fended off the very worst of the ideas.
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I love bringing history into things. And I loved it in your books. You've looked into history.
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Can you talk a little bit about how maybe the National Park Service sort of
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be and the other federal land agencies being subjected to political, willing and dealing right now?
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Isn't new?
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So what is happening is I believe new. There's always, I mean, you're never going to avoid
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political influence. I mean, the politics are at play locally and nationally. And, you know,
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as a director of the Park Service, I would be called up to the talk to a member of Congress about
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something they didn't like or they heard or they got a complaint from constituent. But it was never
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as sort of direct and pervasive as we're seeing now where with these signs, they're basically saying
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to literally whitewash history is to tell only happy stories. Well, how do you tell a happy
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story about man's and are and the confinement of American citizens of Japanese ethnicity into
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remote prison camps? How do you tell that with a happy face or how or slavery? There's just no way
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to put a happy face on slavery in America. And yet the Park Service has numerous sites that represent
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the history of slavery and enslavement and the treatment of people that were, you know, treated
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horribly. And our role in the Park Service is to tell that story with authenticity based on good
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scholarly research on the advice and consent of historians who've done the work on this.
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And when I was director, I really put an emphasis on bringing these stories out, telling the
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untold stories. And we sought out parks that have not been told that Cesar Chavez, Harriet Tubman,
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Colonel Charles Young, the Buffalo Soldiers, Freedom Riders, Birmingham, Stonewall. I held a
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meeting in my office with the top scholars that have written about the LGBTQ plus movement and said,
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we can't get them all, but I want one to start. And what is it? And they unanimously said,
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it's Stonewall. You got to get Stonewall. And so we worked towards achieving that, which was
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complicated in a lot of ways. And got it in. And that's one where the history is being changed.
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They changed, they took off the T, the Q and the plus, and it's now just LGB on the website
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and the interpretation, completely ignoring the role of transgender women of color and others
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were there in the riots that basically changed the way we think about the gay rights movement.
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So yeah, I think that the park service is struggling with this direction as you heard from
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the Ranger that every day they're being tasked with reframing the role of climate change,
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the role of a complete story about the contributions of women and people of color to our country.
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And our country has very high ideals, but we don't always live up to them. And I've always believed
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that our willingness to tell those stories is what makes us great. It's what makes us different
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than countries that don't tell those stories and cover that up in their own history. And the park
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service, like the Smithsonian, tells these stories through its collections and we tell the story
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through place, through the actual physical location where the hottest fires of our democracy have
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burned. And that is incredibly important. And we tell those stories to get people to think about it.
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Not we're not lecturing them. We're not, you know, glorifying any aspect of it. It's to bring
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authenticity and scholarship to the public. And it's been working for 100 years. Until now.
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Well, what's interesting in terms of the park service telling more diverse stories is, you know,
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they really had to be pushed on that, right? Like it's funny to think about the park service now
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being seen as this sort of agent of radical liberal ideology when I mean, tribes have just been begging
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to be recognized as still existing, right? And so it's just, yeah, funny isn't the right word,
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but over the last as you're saying, you know, starting maybe even earlier than Obama, there was this
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effort to tell more diverse stories at parks to then, like, partly with the call of like, okay,
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and then we want more diverse audiences to visit our parks, right? So I loved it in your book,
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you talked about the park service as the sleeping giant that needed a little, like,
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rousing or waking up. And I wondered one of the theories that or one of the hypotheses you put
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forward is maybe having the park service separate from Department of Interior. Can you talk a little
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bit more about about that idea or how we can rouse the sleeping giant a little bit?
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Well, I would say right now that Department of Interior has proven themselves as unworthy to
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manage the National Park Service as they are attempting to dismantle it and to change the way
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we interpret history. So I wrote this book with my brother, Desteri, who has been a long time
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conservation advocate in the DC areas, worked for in PCA and other conservation organizations and
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sort of understands the workings of Congress, even better than I do. And I just, if you contrast,
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basically, the Smithsonian, which is kind of an equivalent institution to the park service in
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its own way, during the Trump one, the park service had no director. In his first term,
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we had a series of actings through the whole term. And over at the Smithsonian Lonnie Bunch,
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who's a friend of mine, became the director of the Smithsonian and was really leading it forward.
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And it has an air of independence that it's not free of politics. Their board is the chairman
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of the Smithsonian board is the Supreme Court, the chief of the Supreme Court. So they're not free of it,
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but they can take on complex issues with the fair amount of freedom. And so I look at the park
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service in every four to eight years. We get an administration that comes in and says, okay,
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you can't talk about climate change anymore. You can't talk about this. You can't talk about that.
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We're going to emphasize something totally different. And that whipsaw is demoralizing and it's
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confusing to the public and it's confusing to the staff about what our role is. And
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let's just say climate change, for instance. We launched climate strategy here in the Pacific West,
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in California and the Pacific States during the George W. Bush administration. We were 3000 miles
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away, so we could sort of get away with it. But we were really starting to talk about parks are
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being impacted by climate change. And you could see it. I mean, our field folks could say, yeah,
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the glaciers are melting at Mount Rainier and we're getting flooding. The fires are burning
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year-round now. They're burning hotter. They're standard placing. We're seeing beetles,
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you know, overwitter all these in a direct climate impacts. We need to be doing something.
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We can't just sit around it. So we figured out what our role was. What is the role of the park
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service in climate change? You know, we could be carbon neutral and that would mean basically nothing.
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Worldwide, but we can talk about it. We can interpret it. We can raise the public's awareness,
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but we needed to learn how to do that. We needed to be able to talk openly about. We need to begin
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to adapt and come up with adaptation strategies. And we need to monitor. We need to be able to
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sort of measure these changes. And so we began, I took that to Washington when I went as director
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and implemented it nationwide. And we did a lot of training for our employees about how to talk
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about climate change. We worked with NASA, EPA, and others about interpreting science. And now,
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you know, nothing in terms of the resource in climate has changed, just the politics.
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You feel that we're flashed as a journalist. I remember under the first Trump administration
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learning that if I included the words climate change in an email that my interview request wouldn't
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get approved. So I would just say something like changing environment or something like that.
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Now I will say no one wants to talk to me about anything on the record. In fact, even partner
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organizations don't want to talk to me because they don't want to draw attention to positive programs
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that haven't been cut yet. Another version of the Whiplash was under the Biden administration
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Secretary Deb Haaland was really as the first Indigenous secretary, Indigenous person to be in
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the cabinet at all, was really leading the way around as I talked about before the idea of
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co-stewer chip agreements, parks working with tribes. And I'm just wondering what you think the
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future of that is right now. I haven't really heard the administration weighing in one way or another.
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Yeah, it's certainly not going to be an area of emphasis for this administration. I'm hoping that
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they don't try to dismantle any of it. I mean, I think we did a lot of the parks service mood for
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significantly not only under Secretary Haaland, but also the director Chuck Sam's was also native
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Indigenous was adamant that the parks would enter into these co-stewer chip agreements.
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And many of them were put in place, which is in many ways the beginning of the process of building
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a trust relationship. We co-hosted a sort of lessons learned conference with UC Berkeley and the
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federated Indians of Great and Ranchuria two years ago to sort of harvest the best ideas of how
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this works, which are the best agreements and helped host a number of presentations around
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co-stewer chip. The US frankly is behind many other countries in developing really true
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co-stewer chip relationships with Indigenous people, Canada's way ahead of us. They've been doing
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it for a much longer with First Nations. And I like to say that US can rightfully claim the
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National Park idea with the establishment of Yellowstone in 1872. But when that idea went around
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the world, it came back quite differently because as it was being applied in other nations,
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there were people living there. And in the US we had forcibly removed in most cases. So these
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were unoccupied lands by the time the park service came along and took over Yellowstone or others.
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And in some cases the park service forcibly removed people like the northern Shashone out of
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Death Valley. So we're trying to play catch up now in the US and I think we made a lot of advances
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during Secretary Holland and Chuck Sam's leadership. And I'm hoping that that will continue
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under the radar. Because that's probably the only way it'll happen.
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You had mentioned earlier the National Parks get all this spotlight. Is there anything
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about what's happening within the other land agencies, so National Forest, Bureau of Land Management,
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and Fish and Wildlife that anything else that's happening with them that we should be talking about
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and ways that they're impacted? Yeah, so for the Forest Service, they were already
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in significant financial challenges due to fire. The Chief of the Forest Service,
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when I was director, was a buddy of mine and he said basically we're spending 75% of our budget
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now on fire. And so that's why you rarely ever see a Forest Service employee if you go out on
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record read on National Forest lands because there's just no money for them. So these lands are
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essentially becoming increasingly abandoned. You rarely run into a wilderness ranger and you can see
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the decline in their facilities as well. The BLM, they get whips on more than any other of the
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agencies because you come in with a Democratic administration and it's all about public access.
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It's about conservation. It's about managing your wilderness areas, the landscape conservation
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service. And then the next administration comes in. It's all about oil and gas. It's about development.
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It's about power lines and the poor people, they just got the thousand miles stair because they
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were working on this yesterday and tomorrow I'm now leasing all those lands that I was thought I was
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protecting under a area of critical environmental concern. And then the Fish and Wildlife Service,
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the same thing in terms of budget cuts where they're getting hammered is on the endangered species.
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That there's a bunch of riders on the appropriations bill that are basically stopping a lot of
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the conservation efforts around ESA around the Endanger Species Act. So no one is escaping this
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unscathed at the moment. The park service gets all the attention but we can't do it without
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the Forest Service, the BLM and the Fish and Wildlife Service. We need them to be successful as well.
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One more question before we turn to something more hopeful. I cannot not ask about Alcatraz.
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That was another thing that I thought it was just like a passing comment but then here we had the
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secretary of the interior actually visiting Alcatraz last week to begin the plans for converting it
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from a prison or from converting it from a national park to back to an active prison. Setting aside
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all of the logistics of that that were like you know the reason why we abandoned it as a prison in
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the first place. How does that even work to change a national park like that? How could that even happen?
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So I honestly don't think they can do it administratively. Alcatraz was added to the Golden Gate
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National Recreation Area in the original 1972 legislation signed by Richard Nixon
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and to extract it from the park would require legislation. I don't think they can do it legally.
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It was of course it was Indigenous land and then it was part of Mexico, then it was you know
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transferred to the federal government so it's always been in federal property since 1858 or so.
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So you can't just sort of transfer it out and then it was established as a part of the park service.
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It's got National Strike Landmark designation that would have to be
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de-designated and only Congress can do that. The secretary can't do that. So yeah it will be a
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slog and I can't think of a more complicated place to try to build something. I mean it is one tough
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piece of property to do anything on. So I was reflecting on how I think something we have in
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common is a desire to be thoughtful and critical about the National Park Service and I mean critical
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in a good faith way of like when you love something and you want it to be better. You from having
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worked within it and me from the outside I have been thinking a lot lately about how I wish I could
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get back to telling thoughtful critical stories about the park service instead of just reporting on
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it being cut. And so what you know sort of what if when the dust settles when we can get back to
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thinking hopefully and thoughtfully and critically what is your hope for the park service for the future?
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Well I think that the front of mind always says that the future that you want actually exists
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out there you just got to sort of find it and nurture it. And I think here in San Francisco and
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Golden Gate, Presidio there are some really good models for partnerships, community relationships,
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a building community, engaging young people, telling a much more complete story and and practicing
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conservation in an urban frame. That to me I mean to a certain degree we've got Yosemite figured
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out and Yolesta we haven't figured out the urban conservation model yet and I think there are
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some really fantastic lessons here in San Francisco. You can't replicate it in New York or Boston
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but you can learn from it. And I think that what I would like to see the park service in the future
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to be more innovative and particularly as it relates to partners and to philanthropy and to
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people of color and and and young people in really building a sort of a new generation of
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of advocates for not just the national parks but for public lands and for common spaces.
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Yeah okay this is the lightning and thunder around. It's like a lightning round but because
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it's national parks it's lightning and thunder. Okay. Which means I'll keep my answer short.
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Yep yeah just first thought first thought. Favorite wildlife sighting you want to share.
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So I was hiking out of Slook Creek in Yellowstone and a bison herd was stampeding towards me.
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Then we probably spoke by bear because we knew there'd been grizzly bear activity and I was with
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my son and we stepped behind a boulder probably no bigger than two of these tables and they just
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parted around us at full run and you know as they go by you could I could have literally just run
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my fingers through their hair. They were that close. Wow. Yeah. Oh that's amazing. Yeah. Wow.
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National Park that not a lot of people have heard of. That they've not heard of. Yeah but you know
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that not favorite National Park that isn't you know the ground. Okay. It's easy. Rangles say to
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Elias. Well yes that's where you get to go on government dollars. I live there for five years. I
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know. Oh or that or that. Yeah. Where is it? To Alaska. It's the largest park in the system. It's 13
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aspect of Alaska that you'd want big bears big mountains big glaciers big rivers. Rangles say to
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Elias. Okay. It up. Reading it down. Go. Favorite National Park in California.
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Oh man that's a tough one. I think Lassen is a hidden gem. You know a lot of people don't
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know about Lassen. It's a gem. Last one is favorite food to take camping. Favorite food to take camping.
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Burritos. Like premade or you make them out there. Yeah like bring all the fixing. Yeah they're
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real fixing some big burritos. Wonderful. Well I want to open it up for questions now. I want to
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thank you so much for this conversation and take some questions from Elias. You call. You call
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what I'm I think Ben's gonna tell you a bit. Okay. Yeah. So Ben will hold the mic. Are the instructions
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I believe. I'll hold the mic. Okay. Okay. One of the episodes in Merce's podcast talks about and
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she referred to it in her opening is about the the burn in Sequoia and the controversy regarding
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whether to recede them with seeds that they I think they got them from elsewhere and then
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implanted them and she presents it as a journalist as a good faith dispute between well-intended
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nature loving people and there's probably lots of what's going about it to this day but it
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drives me crazy that she will not give her opinion. You're not a journalist and you're not a bureaucrat
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so you really are a period. So what's happening in the sierra's with these fires that have
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killed many many Sequoias as well as hundreds of millions of other trees are human cost. They are
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they are the result of climate change and the result of years of far suppression as well.
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And so that to me says we need to act. It's not a natural event. And so we need to take and
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the wilderness act allows for that. If you're a student of the wilderness act the wilderness act
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while it imposes a set of management restrictions it does not diminish the overarching mission
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of the agency itself. And so in the case of the wilderness act applied to the National Park Service
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the governing act is the organic act of the National Park Service which says to preserve these
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places unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. And so how they do it is derived via
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the wilderness act but whether or not they do it is based on the organic act and I would say in
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this case the park services right to take action.
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Hi I was hoping you could speak a little bit about the impact that you see for the rescinding
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of the roadless rule particularly National Forest Land and if that can ever go back to being
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roadless. So if you're not familiar with I believe it was in a Clinton era that we put in place
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the roadless rule and so it was an attempt administratively to protect lands mostly on
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forest service and and someone BLM lands that had not been roaded basically road construction.
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Not yet wilderness. This wilderness is a designation that only Congress can make. The
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Cannabis made administratively so roadless rule was an administrative approach to protecting
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these lands and of course the Trump administration is rescinding that. And what happens then is it
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opens it up to the development of roads and one of the things that the Forest Service does
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is it builds roads it gets money to build roads and once you build a road it's not going to go away
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for a long time unless you've got a lot of money roads are very hard to put to bed. It can be done
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it's being done in the Redwoods as we speak but it's a project that's been going on for
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you know decades decades so yeah that one that one's going to be very hard to put back in the box.
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Hi thanks for talking today it's been really interesting. I was surprised how little coverage the
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potential sell-off of federal lands got in the media that I pay attention to which is mostly
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fairly left-leaning or centrist with the merisses reporting except that of course but one more
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right-leaning podcast that I listened to on the subject was talking about how they thought that
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the reason it was able to get removed from the recent bill was because the keeping public lands
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and federal agencies is relatively apolitical and that the left didn't really jump on it in the
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way that they've jumped on things like signs in public parks and I'm curious if you think that that
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really is apolitical and if it is is it advantageous for some of these issues for the left not to engage
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in some of these things where there really is traction on the right.
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Yeah that's a it's a good question in that that when the left you know rallies around something it
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fires up the right to step up I mean I think that for the most American people
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the concept of public lands is just sort of taken for granted and that they're out there and I can go
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participate in them and I mean most people probably can't even distinguish them in the four
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federal agencies they don't really you know separate in their mind who's where in the
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where he was wearing the flat hat and so the concept of selling public lands to pay for something
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it just probably just didn't resonate with a lot of a lot of the media just wasn't it was just one
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more thing when you when you I mean part of the strategy that I think we're seeing with the Trump
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administration is inundation of of all their actions simultaneously that was part of the project
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2025 kind of goal and so selling public lands was just one more thing and I just think it just
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didn't catch catch fire in the media. Thank you you mentioned that there is a possibility that
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co-stuorship agreements with tribes could stand or the radar of this administration and persist
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through it I'm curious too though about the possibility for 638 compacting and sorry to bring
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up something so technical but which this provision allows interior and correct me if I'm wrong but
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to contract with tribes to carry out stewardship management responsibilities a whole lot of things but
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to potentially carry out stewardship management of public lands could this be an opportunity for
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tribes to ask for more 638 compacting agreements to to basically fill in the positions that are
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being cut from government from the park service for example. It's possible there was a line that
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brings up a line I heard many many many years ago and it's not specific to 638 it was about
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sort of using an opportunity when you've got a sort of a hospital administration to do good and
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and he said when you step with the devil use a long handled spoon.
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I would be worried that there would be an ulterior motive to 638 contracting that
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that would be built into that expectation of development as a part of it and if they use it
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as it's legitimately to be used is to to give tribes the authority to manage ancestral lands
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for the benefit of the tribe and and the people that's one thing but if they use it to just
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do more oil and gas then that's a problem. Director how you doing sir?
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Hey Cash. So we've talked a lot about the resources and how we're protecting them and where we
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going but we haven't talked much about the people that are still left and so there's some left.
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So for the folks that may be listening to this right now that are in the grain grain still
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won't be your word of hope to them to hang on and how to keep pushing forward for this this legacy
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that we're we'll part of. Well this will end first of all. It has a termination date on it.
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I think I think I think it's a pretty well assured one. I don't think it'll be easy.
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There'll be drag marks on the floor of the White House but I think it will happen
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and I think we need really good people to still be there to help rebuild the park service to
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rebuild our relationship with the American people to bring back all those signs that they've
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tucked underneath the bench. You know one of the things that a group of us did in November
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right after the Trump administration, Trump was elected. A group of us got together and we
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downloaded the entire park service, Forest Service, BLM, Fish and Wildlife Service and USJib
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Web Presence. We got, we cloned the entire climate science database. We've come to
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cloned all the monitoring data. We cloned all the DEI information for all of the agencies.
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We collected three we had three servers running 24 hours a day from November to January 19th
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and we downloaded three terabytes of data. So we can restore when they change is all of that
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information. We're in the process right now of indexing it and we'll bring it live so that
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scientists, scholars and others can access it. But we're preparing for restart.
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Now there will be damage. There's no question. There'll be damage. That will be really,
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really hard to fix. But I have great faith in the people that are still there and you know some
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of them are resistance rangers and some of them are trying their best to just keep
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a good face to help the public have a great experience in the national parks this summer.
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And we're going to need them. We're really going to need them. And we're going to need all the
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folks that retired too, frankly, that in your retirement and we're going to need partners.
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That our friends groups out there like the Osemite Conservancy and the Golden Gate Conservancy
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and others are going to have to step up to help out in the end.
spk_0
Thank you so much John for this and thank you everyone for being here tonight.
spk_0
Thank you very much. Thanks for your time.
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Thank you.
spk_0
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