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Each week of the Trump administration, there is another action stripping the National Park System of its intellectual, institutional, and moral core.
Often been referred to as America’s Best Idea, our National Park System has played a key role over the years in inspiring a global conservation movement.
But consider the plight of the National Park Service (NPS) today, nearly 10 years into its second century since its 1916 founding. Even as it sets new all-time visitation records, no one could claim our national parks are basking in a golden age.
Much has been made of the NPS hemorrhaging staff under Trump 2.0, with an estimated 25% overall workforce reduction just since January. At the same time, daily decisions governing national parks are made by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former software executive and South Dakota governor with no park management experience. Despite plummeting staff levels, Burgum has issued orders directing that
At the same time, Secretary Burgum has “consolidated” most all NPS administrative, human resource, and IT staff to work for all Interior agencies, a move costing NPS another 5,700 employees, approximately one-quarter of its remaining workforce. The disruptive impact of this internal move is now just starting to be felt, and its impact is magnified by new restrictions on park purchasing and contracts.
All of this is taking place without an NPS director, or even a nominee to serve as director. Even its chief deputy director is a career Army officer, with no prior national park experience. In addition, the entire chain-of-command through the secretary is almost completely devoid of any official with any background in national parks.
Meanwhile, most of the NPS regional director slots are vacant, and there are an unknown but large number of empty park superintendent positions. Compounding matters is the decision to shutter the two national park academies, which provide training to current and future NPS leaders in the laws, policies, and practices guiding park management. These shutdowns are major blows to the professionalism of this institution.
Even more profoundly, President Donald Trump’s budget plan proposes to divest as many as 350 of the 433 national park units to state or local governments. Meanwhile, the Trump mega-bill leaves NPS on even shakier fiscal status, while the few park investment proposals are highly questionable at best, and do little to help the park system, such as creating a new “Garden of Heroes,” filled with statuary depicting Americans the Trump administration deem as great.
Meanwhile, edicts issued under Trump and Burgum have gone further, such as demanding that all park interpretative displays be stripped of anything that could be interpreted as “negative” or “disparaging.” These orders have the effect of casting aside such essential notions as historical accuracy and cultural context. They also inject a corrosive politicization into park interpretive displays, lectures, and tours which had been designed to educate rather than merely placate.
The first and indispensable step for renewal will be recruiting a new generation of leaders who truly understand and appreciate the unique role of our national parks.
Compounding all of the above is the eviscerating of park planning, with National Environmental Policy Act requirements for considering long-term impacts and alternatives undergoing radical truncation. Consequently, road building and other development projects within national parks will be harder to stop or moderate regardless of damage to park resources. Moreover, since the scientific specialists within NPS are fast disappearing, there will be little capacity to even assess those impacts.
One example of this scientific retreat is the cessation of air quality monitoring at national parks. Maintaining the air quality of our most pristine places is apparently no longer of value, but it is far from the only scientific research work in our parks grinding to a halt.
In short, the combination of these developments means that our park system is being hollowed out. Each week there is another action stripping the National Park System of its intellectual, institutional, and moral core. The damage done in the past few months is both dramatic and cumulative, in many cases building on a slow degradation over the past 30 years. It will not be easily or quickly reversed.
Nor has the system touched bottom yet, as the impact of several of these moves has yet to be full felt. This descent will be long and painful with a turnaround not yet on the horizon.
The first and indispensable step for renewal will be recruiting a new generation of leaders who truly understand and appreciate the unique role of our national parks. They will have to rededicate our park system to an ethic of public enjoyment that also safeguards conservation of these resources for the balance of national parks’ second century. It cannot happen soon enough.
Broadway's spotlight on redwoods helps us understand why what happens above our heads matters so much for our future below.
A woman flees devastating personal loss and finds herself at the base of towering redwood trees in Northern California. There, she persuades two botanists to let her climb hundreds of feet above the forest floor into a hidden world that transforms her perspective—and her life. This isn't the latest adventure film or bestselling memoir. It's Redwood, Broadway's unlikely hit musical that's bringing attention to one of nature's most overlooked but critical ecosystems.
Many of us working in forest conservation and restoration management were delighted when it opened on Broadway. When a musical drives sold-out audiences to stand and cheer for characters climbing into a forest canopy, it creates a cultural moment that conservation science alone never could—bringing vital attention to something that most Americans never think to look up and notice.
As a child in the 1960s, I wandered among ancient redwoods, craning my neck upward in wonder, while my parents worked to establish Redwood National Park. My father, Edgar, who would later receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his conservation work, and my mother, Peggy, who wrote about redwoods and the need to protect them and lobbying President John F. Kennedy's administration to do so, taught me that what made these giants special wasn't just their massive trunks but the entire living forest system from roots to crown. Those early lessons helped shape my life's work because what happens hundreds of feet above the forest floor matters more than most realize.
The more people recognize the vital role and wonder of forest canopies, the more momentum we build for their restoration and protection.
These aerial systems represent nature's overlooked masterpiece—a complex world scientists call the "eighth continent." Redwood canopies host biodiversity found nowhere else. Leather-leaf ferns create massive mats—up to the size of cars—that can store 5,000 gallons of water per acre, keeping forests cool and moist during summer droughts. The dense foliage also captures fog moisture that sustains the entire forest below while creating microclimates that buffer against climate extremes.
Canopies contribute to the entire forest system, linking the top to the bottom of the forest. Dust captured in the abundant foliage of ferns and huckleberry plants combined with accumulated organic matter forms rich "aerial soil" that becomes the foundation for entire sky-high communities. Rare lichens, wandering salamanders, and small mammals thrive in this elevated habitat, maintaining delicate ecological balances. From these heights, the benefits cascade downward: Canopy cover shades streams, cooling water for salmon and other temperature-sensitive aquatic species, integrating the entire forest system from treetop to riverbed into a single, interconnected climate buffer.
Yet this hidden world faces a crisis. Only 5% of old-growth redwood forests remain and have intact canopy ecosystems. Young, secondary forests that are constantly harvested lack the structure—and are not allowed time to develop—to support these rich, diverse aerial worlds. Only the largest, oldest trees—many hundreds of years old—host these critical ecosystems, and they're increasingly rare.
But hope is taking root in innovative restoration work. Working with Cal Poly Humboldt's professor Stephen Sillett and research associate Marie Antoine, we have begun transplanting fern mats, collected from the forest floor after winter storms, into the tallest trees in secondary redwood forests we conserve and manage, rebuilding canopy ecosystems from scratch. Working in our Van Eck forest near Fieldbrook, California, we've nurtured these ferns and then "planted" them hundreds of feet high in trees that will remain permanently protected. These specially selected trees are designated as "Potentially Elite Trees" (PETs)—the giants of tomorrow. Individual old trees are a lot like the oldest elephants in a herd; they contain the wisdom and resources to help an otherwise young forest function as an old forest, just as those old elephants guide their herds. And, we continue to harvest timber on these forests—on average a million board foot a year—while restoring the structure and function of old forests.
Now, we are expanding our efforts, adding huckleberry to our plantings to support new sky gardens. This patient approach creates homes for birds, salamanders, and countless insects, jump-starting processes that would naturally take centuries.
Redwood captures an essential truth: Forests are not just timber resources. They're living systems with lessons to teach us about building resilience in an uncertain future.
The Broadway experience provides audiences a glimmer of what happens when people encounter these giants in real life—and that's critically important. The more people recognize the vital role and wonder of forest canopies, the more momentum we build for their restoration and protection. But awareness must translate to action.
As debate rages on the role of federal forests and the need to protect their old and mature forests, there is also a major opportunity for action on private forests, where landowners' decisions will endure beyond a political cycle. For private forests, working forest conservation easements offer a proven path forward—providing landowners financial incentives to conserve and manage for older forests, develop complex structures, and designate future "PETs" that can support the function of old forests. This can transform forest recovery from centuries-long waits to achievable timelines within human lifespans.
Recent sweeping cuts to the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service workforce threaten our old forests. Rangers and scientists do more than protect and research forests—they guide visitors to witness these majestic ecosystems firsthand. These cuts, applied "like an ax rather than a scalpel", endanger both the health of our forests and the transformative experiences for the public. When people stand beneath ancient trees and look upward, they understand viscerally why these forests and their canopies must be protected.
Protecting and restoring these overlooked canopy ecosystems has never been more urgent as climate change accelerates. Broadway's spotlight on redwoods helps us understand why what happens above our heads matters so much for our future below. When audiences gasp as Idina Menzel spins and embraces that massive trunk, they glimpse not just theatrical magic but a vision of what we stand to lose—and what we must fight to restore and preserve. The living world above demands our attention, protection, and active restoration—not just in California's iconic redwoods, but in every forest ecosystem on Earth.
"The Trump administration is trying to write us out of that history," said one transgender writer. "We will not let them."
They were on the front lines of the most famous uprising for LGBTQ+ civil rights in history, but the Trump administration has erased mention of transgender and queer people from the official website of the national monument marking the event.
The National Park Services' (NPS) website for Stonewall National Monument in New York City now welcomes visitors with the lines: "Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal. The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 is a milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights and provided momentum for a movement."
Previously, the site said "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person."
This, despite the fact that queer and transgender people including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera—who, according to a still-standing NPS web page, threw the second Molotov cocktail at police—were front-and-center during the six-day uprising at the Stonewall Inn gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.
In a statement posted on Instagram, the Stonewall Inn and its Stonewall Gives Back Initiative said they are "outraged and appalled" by the NPS move, adding that "this blatant act of erasure not only distorts the truth of our history, but it also dishonors the immense contributions of transgender individuals—especially transgender women of color—who were at the forefront of the Stonewall Riots and the broader fight for LGBTQ+ rights."
The statement continues:
Let us be clear: Stonewall history is transgender history. Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and countless other trans and gender-nonconforming individuals fought bravely, and often at great personal risk, to push back against oppressive systems. Their courage, sacrifice, and leadership were central to the resistance we now celebrate as the foundation of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.
The decision to erase the word "transgender" is a deliberate attempt to erase our history and marginalize the very people who paved the way for many victories we have achieved as a community. It is a direct attack on transgender people, especially transgender women of color, who continue to face violence, discrimination, and erasure at every turn.
Also gone from the NPS site is a page previously containing an interactive "Pride Guide" for visitors "to explore the legacy and history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people and places."
Stonewall National Monument—which was dedicated by then-President Barack Obama in 2016—commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Uprising at and around the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village.
Police raids of LGBTQ+ spaces were a frequent fact of life during a time when consensual same-sex sexual relations, cross-dressing, and even dancing with members of the same sex were illegal. On the night of June 28, 1969 New York City police raided the mafia-owned Stonewall Inn, ostensibly to investigate illegal alcohol sales and find "three-article rule" violators to arrest, provoking the six-day uprising that is widely credited with sparking the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
This is the New York Daily News' front-page coverage of the Stonewall Uprising. (Photo: New York Daily News)
Although there were earlier uprisings—like the 1966 trans-led Compton's Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco—Stonewall became synonymous with the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ+ equality.
While attempts to marginalize and separate the fight for transgender rights from the wider LGBTQ+ movement are nothing new—Rivera lamented this "gay liberation but transgender nothing" ethos a generation ago—such efforts have accelerated in recent years, fueled by the far-right and prominent figures in the "trans-exclusionary radical feminist" (TERF) movement, author J.K. Rowling, anti-trans gay activists, and others.
The NPS' move is part of Trump's wider war on transgender people that began during his first administration and continues today with the president's executive orders aimed at delegitimizing transgender identity, cutting off federal support for gender-affirming healthcare, pushing for a ban on trans women and girls from female sports, renewing his first-term prohibition on trans military enlistment, and other insidiously discriminatory and dangerous moves.
Transgender activists and their allies aren't taking the Trump's administration's latest move sitting down. A protest took place at the monument site on Friday afternoon, with others vowing future action.
#Stonewall today
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— bonnjny.bsky.social (@bonnjny.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 9:42 AM
"The Trump administration is trying to write us out of that history," Media Matters LGBTQ program director Ari Drennen asserted on social media. "We will not let them."
Lamenting that "the federal government is attempting to erase us and take away our history," researcher and self-described "transgender menace" Allison Chapman said on the social platform Bluesky, "This Pride, we riot."