In Brief: Parks and Devastation
How wokeness is destroying America’s national parks.
“Everything the Left touches it ruins,” as Dennis Prager is fond of saying. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Parks, and Wildlife Jeremy Carl says that’s certainly true of our national parks.
I was at Glacier National Park, in the farthest reaches of Montana where I live, when it hit me how deep and comprehensive the woke takeover of environmental policy has become. I had driven for some backcountry hiking to a ranger station, one that can only be reached by going 27 miles down a rough gravel road.
“On the signboard at the station,” he says, was out-of-date information news and a host of completely irrelevant woke happenings from tribal burial grounds to Juneteenth to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland “raising the ‘Progress Pride’ flag (this is the freaky new one with the weird triangles that look like they are sexually assaulting a Rainbow Pride flag) for the first time over the Department of the Interior.”
Carl says that “shows a profound loss of focus.”
It shows a government agency obsessed with every aspect of identify politics at the expense of its core mission. Literally the entire message board was devoted to one form or another of minority activism, whether for Hispanics, African Americans, Hawaiians, Native Americans, LGBT, or the disabled. Any notion that the Department of the Interior had a core mission to serve the entire American people was lost completely.
More to the point, Carl recounts the problems at and history of Glacier, “arguably the most beautiful national park in the lower 48.”
Going-to-the-Sun Road, the Park’s main attraction, didn’t open until July 13 this year due to unseasonable snowfall. It will typically close by Mid-October — just three months later. …
As a result, Glacier sees 85% of its 3 million annual visitors between June and September and half of its annual visitors in just the two months of July and August.
There are now limited tickets for that road that must be obtained 60 days in advance, and 300,000 visitors were turned away this year. Parking is a horrendous problem in the park, as well, with permits now required and also necessary months in advance.
What has the Department of the Interior done to alleviate the crush by adding more parking in the Park’s most popular areas?
Nothing.
What have they done to deal with in-park lodging reservations that sell out almost as soon as they open, almost a year in advance?
Nothing.
What have they done to increase off-season snow plowing and perhaps keep one or two of the Park’s spectacular hotels available in the winter?
Nothing.
But you can bet that they use the right pronouns, and the podcast created by the Glacier Park Conservancy that I listened to was sure to include a land acknowledgement to local Native American tribes.
He concludes:
It was not always this way. Our Park Service, like so many other branches of our government, used to actually function pretty well. In 1964 just 642,000 people visited Glacier National Park, about 1/5 of the total of recent years. Yet in those years, Going-to-the-Sun Road regularly stayed open for a longer season than it does today. And in the early 1940s, with just 175,000 visitors, the park had a greater amount of lodging than it does today with seventeen times more visitors.
Say what you want about New Deal-Era liberals, but at least they built things rather than just screaming about how oppressed they were. By contrast our environmental bureaucracy in 2022 is a microcosm of the American government as a whole. Obsessed with wokeness and unable to provide even basic services competently to American citizens.
