Public Lands are Under Attack
The twist is they have been for centuries.
The U.S. national parks and protected public lands emerged out of series of ethical, political, economic, and ecological systems that make them particularly susceptible the kind of political attacks they are currently experiencing.
Every February, Yosemite National Park’s oft overlooked Horsetail Falls erupts in a fiery mist, ignited by the setting sun. A phenomenon known as the Firefall, this incandescent moment draws flocks of photographers hoping to capture this brief moment of cascading light. This year, however, visitors were greeted with an additional, and no less dramatic sight—an upside-down American flag suspended from the top of the iconic El Capitan.
Originally a symbol of naval distress, the inverted flag has become a form of political protest, a way for people to say that all is not right in the U.S.A. Or in this case, in its proverbial best idea, the American national parks. The group of Yosemite rangers who unfurled the flag wanted to “draw attention to the fact that public lands in the United States are under attack,” a direct response to the recent layoffs of over 4000 public land employees.
There is no question that the lands and ecosystems that are now part of the American public land system are under attack. And it is also true that the loss of the dedicated workers who maintain, protect, and educated visitors about these spaces poses both an immediate risk to these lands and is a sign of potentially more dire threats to come.
However, I promised you tangled roots and a more complicated story, so here it is:
The national parks and public lands, these carefully constructed enclaves, performative remnants of a continent otherwise completely transformed by the twin forces of colonialism and capitalism, have been under attack for far longer than the first few weeks of this current administration. They were under attack under Biden and Obama, under Kennedy and Nixon, under all four noble heads blasted into the side of Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe.
While the protections that do exist, our litany of environmental laws and conservation designations, are a testament to the passion and commitment of activists throughout our nation’s history, they are ultimately paper shields.
In some ways, they are less than paper shields. In some ways, they are actually requisite to the vulnerabilities currently being laid bare.
The U.S. national parks and protected public lands emerged out of series of ethical, political, economic, and ecological systems that make them particularly susceptible the kind of political attacks they are currently experiencing.
Let me (briefly) break it down what I mean:
American public lands are carved out of land stolen from Indigenous nations through violence, trickery, bureaucracy, and infrastructure projects among other methods. They were stolen to be exploited for the production of wealth, a process only slowed and adapted (see the next point) by 20th century environmental policies. I am not going to get into the conquered vs. stolen debate here (although I do in this post, if you’re interested), but it should come as no surprise that these same methods have, are, and will continue to be used by extraction minded politicians and corporations to chip away at these tenuous protections and capitalize on the land to its “greatest potential”.
In other words, the ethical and political arguments marshalled in defense of the parks are undermined by their unethical and often unconstitutional foundations.
Both sides are private/public complexes that have a fundamentally extractive relationship to the land. The David and Goliath narrative of national parks, monuments, and wilderness areas, beloved and defended by hikers in Columbia boots and Patagonia puffies squaring up against DOGE, “Energy Sovereignty” policies, and the dark oil, gas, and mining money behind them hides the truth of this rivalry. While oil and gas (a $2.4 trillion industry) and their use of land is unquestionably more environmentally harmful than the outdoor industry ($1.4 trillion), the latter’s economic arguments for conservation and their colonial investment in state-controlled land preclude the kind of radical alternatives (ecological sovereignty, land repatriation, a realignment of our relationship to land as property, etc.) needed to truly protect these ecosystems.
They are two arms of the same apparatus. Protections offered by national park status only work until the other arm fabricates an emergency dire enough to justify removing it—for example, Trump’s proposed Sovereign Wealth Fund. The environment, its community of life, and our relationships to it are ground to dust in this gnashing of this binary system’s insatiable appetite for land.
These lands, what we’ve been trained to see as primordial wildernesses, are the result of aggressive management practices. There is nothing inherently wrong with that—humans are integral parts of an ecosystem and have always shaped the environments around them to fit their lives and values. However, management for the maintenance of wilderness is management for the maintenance of a paradox. If a key justification for the existence of these spaces is their wilderness natures, then the moment the wilderness façade falls, the value of protecting it falls as well.
The role of park rangers and the NPS in managing for wilderness was starkly revealed in the 2018 government shutdown and 2020 Covid shutdowns, which left many parks vandalized. In the coming weeks and months, we are likely to see spreading cracks in the wilderness myth as remaining park staff struggle to adequately maintain the parks. It’s a predictable and, some have argued, intentional outcome that could very well be used to justify new, extractive focused designations or even privatization.
You may be saying to yourself, “Joe, is this really the right moment to be challenging the legitimacy of some of the only American systems protecting critical ecosystems and recreational resources?”
I hear you. I do, but it is the right time.
A moment of crisis is an opportunity for change. When we rebuild these systems, rehire the devoted individuals who keep them running, and work to undo the environmental damage of this administration, are we going to repeat our past mistakes, patching a broken system with the same vulnerabilities, the same fatal flaws? Or can we imagine something different?
Perhaps at the time these structures were built, this was the only way to save these lands from development. However, I believe there were alternative paths that could have created juster, more resilient systems and it’s a question I’m going to dig into. But the question for right now is where do we go from here.
This future is one I hope you’ll explore with me as I share stories of new possibilities, imagine different relationships to land, and work to untangle the complex and difficult histories that created the environments we live in.