Episodes
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So much is happening so quickly to the National Park Service. There have been staff reductions, hiring freezes, spending freezes, orders from the Interior Secretary to make sure that visitors find national parks welcoming, no matter what it takes.
Every week seems to bring something new, and quite frankly dire to the National Park Service. Most recently we’ve heard about the loss of about 60 employees from the agency’s Alaska regional office, and there are concerns the Trump administration is going to push through even greater reductions in force for the Park Service.
How are those moves impacting the parks and the Park Service? Our guest today is Kristen Brengel, the Senior Vice President for Governmental Affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association.
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Is green a red and blue construct? Put another way, is there a political partisan divide over the environment?
That’s a particularly interesting question, no doubt more so in recent years as the country seems to have drifted farther and farther apart because of our political beliefs. To that point, a reader reached out the other day to say our stories shouldn’t be negative on the Trump Administration because the national parks are going to need the help of all of us - Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and everything in-between - to survive.
But are environmental issues highly partisan? For the Traveler’s purpose, we’ll define “environmental issues” as those focused on public lands, wildlife, clean air, clean water, and of course the national parks.
To help us try to answer that question, our guest today is Caleb Scoville, a professor at Tufts University who has received an Andrew Carnegie fellowship to explore that question.
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News around public lands these days seems to revolve entirely around the Trump administration. In the case of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, many of the steps the administration is taking with the operational efficiencies of the National Park Service and other land management agencies certainly are keeping PEER busy.
But what exactly is PEER, and what is their mission? For as long as the National Parks Traveler has been in existence, going back 20 years, stories recounting PEER and its lawsuits against land-management agencies have appeared frequently in our coverage. To explain the nonprofit organization’s role, our guest today is Tim Whitehouse, PEER’s executive director. -
True birders are some of the most determined and persistent hobbyists out there. If you want to call bird watching a hobby. For many, it’s more like a passion. Many look forward to “Big Day” competitions, where individuals and teams strive to see how many different bird species they can spot in a 24-hour period.
Many birders log their sightings and identifications in eBird, a smartphone application created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society. The good news is that millions of birders use this app. The concerning news is that their bird sightings over a recent 14-year-period point to population declines in 75 percent of North American bird species.
To learn more about this news, we’ve invited Dr. Amanda Rodewald from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Cornell University to join us today.
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It’s fair to say that the nation’s public lands, those managed by the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land-management agencies are at risk under the Trump administration.
There’s no hyperbole in that statement if you pay attention to what the administration already has done in terms of downsizing those agencies’ workforces, and when you listen to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum say he wants to open more public lands to energy development and mining.
Federal lands in the United States are owned by all Americans, but at various times there have been efforts to wrench those lands away from the government to give to the states or sell off.
Walt Dabney spent his professional career protecting public lands during his decades-long stint with the National Park Service and then as director of the Texas State Parks. Now he is working to educate Americans on their vested interest in those lands and what could be lost if Congress or the White House tries to get rid of them.
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The first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term might be the most tumultuous first 100 days of any president. He certainly came in prepared to move his agenda forward, no matter what barriers to it existed.
We don’t usually discuss presidential politics, but President Trump has released a blizzard of executive orders and directives touching all corners of the federal government, including the National Park Service.
What we have seen so far is the loss of perhaps 2,500 Park Service employees, and along with them some crucial institutional knowledge. Any day we expect to hear of a further reduction in force of the Park Service.
The president and the Republican Congress have also taken aim at environmental laws and regulations, determined it seems to weaken the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, among others, and there’s been talk about selling off federal lands.
And, of course, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has made it clear he wants to see more coal mined and more oil and gas reserves tapped. The administration also is taking aim at agency responses to climate change, and the president has ordered the militarization of federal lands – including national park lands – along the country’s southern border with Mexico.
To get a take on what’s going on and what the impacts might be, we’re joined today by U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.
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There has been much upheaval in the National Park Service this year, with firings, then rehires, and staff deciding to retire now rather than risk sticking around and being fired. There have been fears that more Park Service personnel are about to be let go through a reduction in force.
While Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has ordered the Park Service to ensure that parks are properly to support the operating hours and needs of each park unit,” that message said nothing about protecting park resources.
Among all this upheaval the question that goes begging is whether the Interior Department is as concerned about protecting natural resources, including wildlife, as it is about seeing that visitors have a good national park experience?
Our guest today is Dr. Michael Soukup, who during his National Park Service career served as the agency’s chief scientist. When he joined the Park Service in 1975 Dr. Soukup, a distinguished coastal ecologist, biologist and researcher, brought a clear vision for natural resource stewardship that would be embraced throughout the NPS and supported by visitors and local citizens.
He was directly responsible for launching the Natural Resource Challenge, a $100 million funding initiative that brought the protection of natural resources of the parks to the forefront. -
George Melendez Wright was a brilliant young scientist with the National Park Service back in the 1920s and 1930s. You could say he was ahead of his time, in that he wanted the Park Service to take a holistic role in how wildlife in the parks was managed.
While Wright tragically left the world too young when he was killed in a car crash in 1936, his name lives on today in the George Wright Society, a nonprofit organization that is focused on stewardship of parks, protected & conserved areas, cultural sites, and other kinds of place-based conservation.
Our guest today is Dave Harmon, executive director of the society. We’ll be back in a minute with Dave to learn more about the society and the role it plays.
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One of the greatest shows on Earth has been going on now for several months in Hawaii, where the Kīlauea volcano at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park has been erupting since late December. The Kīlauea volcano is the most active volcano on Earth. It’s also a relatively safe volcano in that it spends most of its time simmering and bubbling without any spectacularly explosive eruptions. But lately it has been putting on some incredible shows of lava fountains, with one glowing string of magma soaring about 1,000 feet in the air, a truly spectacular sight to see.
To understand what’s going on with Kīlauea and what danger it poses, we’re joined today by Matt Patrick, a research geologist with the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. -
There are more stories to be found in the National Park System than one could write in a lifetime. Or several lifetimes.
Sometimes those stories can be hard to spot. How many were aware of the factoid from Great Smoky Mountains National Park that Jennifer Bain dug up, that if you stacked up all of the park’s salamanders against its roughly 1,900 black bears, the salamanders would weigh more?
Talk about national park trivia.
We’re going to talk about stories in the parks today with Kim O’Connell and Rita Beamish, two long-tenured writers for the Traveler. The ones they’re currently working on are pretty interesting.
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In this week’s podcast we thought we’d take a break from the unsettling news happening in and around our national parks and federal lands regarding park staff reductions and threats of reducing park boundaries to make way for mining.
Instead, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick catches up with a former scientist who’s now a comedian to hear about his experiences during his artist-in-residency program at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii. Selected for the residency by the National Parks Arts Foundation, Ben Miller spent a month with park staff and scientists to absorb as much as possible about Hawaiian culture, landscapes and history. The end result was a comedy routine designed specifically for Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.
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There is, across the country, some upheaval going on as the Trump administration works to reduce the size of the federal government. Whether you support that effort or oppose it, you can’t deny there’s not upheaval going on.
That upheaval has hit all federal government agencies. At the National Park Service, seasonal ranger job offers were rescinded back in January. Roughly 1,000 probationary employees were fired on Valentine’s Day. Another 700-1000 Park Service employees took up the administration’s offer to resign now, but stay on the payroll through the end of the fiscal year. And this week the Park Service and other government agencies are expected to send their plans for a reduction-in-force to the administration.
To discuss these developments, we’ve invited Rick Mossman, president of the Association of National Park Rangers, to join us.
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Across the United States there are hundreds of millions of acres of public lands. Indeed, there are more than 500 million acres of federal lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Park Service, just to name the three largest land managers in federal government.
A majority of those lands, the 245 million acres managed by the BLM and the 193 million managed by the Forest Service, are managed for multiple use. Logging, mining, recreation, and even official wilderness. The National Park Service lands, of course, are primarily managed for conservation of natural resources and enjoyment by you, the visitors.
But the Trump administration has an eye on some of those lands for energy development and mining, whether that’s oil and gas production or hard-rock mining. To better understand what’s at stake under that strategy we’re joined today by Dan Hartinger, the senior director of agency policy at the Wilderness Society.
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It was just over a week ago, on Valentine’s Day, that the Trump administration wiped 1,000 employees off the National Park Service staff without any apparent strategy other than that they were dispensable staff still on probation and so lacking any real protection for being fired without cause.
Those cuts swept across the 433 units of the National Park System, taking custodial workers, scientists, even lawyers. Today we’re joined by one of the 1,000 who lost their jobs, Angela Moxley, who was just ten days shy of clearing probation when she lost her job at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia. Angela was a botanist, one of the many Park Service employees who you’re not likely to encounter in a park, but as you’ll hear, one whose job is just as vital as that of the park interpreter who takes you for a hike.
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The Trump administration’s determination to reduce the size of government regardless of the cost is having a hard impact on the National Park Service.
Last month the agency was forced to rescind job offers to seasonal workers, saw a hold placed on millions of dollars distributed through the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act to address climate change, been told to prepare a reduction-in-force list of employees, and ordered to "hire no more than one employee for every four" let go.
There was a wee bit of good news late last week, with the decision Friday to allow the Park Service to hire 5,000 seasonal workers. But at the same time, the agency was told to fire 1,000 probationary workers.
Discussing these developments and their impact on the parks and the Park Service are Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, and Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. -
National parks are home to many iconic trees. Bristlecones pines, Whitebark pines, Sequoias, even mangroves. And, of course, redwoods.
These trees hold many stories. The size alone of redwoods and sequoias are enough to hold your attention. But there are backstories, as well. In the case of redwoods along the Northern California coast, the backstory can be heart breaking. There are chapters of logging fever, of course, as well as of political machinations, and stories of loss.
Greg King presents the stories swirling around Redwoods in his book, The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods. One particularly interesting chapter for national park lovers is that Newton B. Drury, the 4th director of the National Park Service, actually worked against the creation of Redwood National Park.
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Rising sea levels, stronger storms, eroding shorelines, and sinking terrain are taking a toll on the fragile ecosystems and historic resources at Cape Lookout National Seashore on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A new study by the U.S. Geological Survey takes a close look at these threats and predicts how they will impact the national seashore over the coming years.
Climate change impacts are happening across the country, reaching into most, if not all, units of the National Park System. Sea level rise is particularly concerning because you just can’t up and move a park, and if that park is on an island, well, high water is coming.
This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks with Cape Lookout Superintendent Jeff West and authors of the USGS study about the challenges the National Park Service faces in creating sustainable coastal management practices for Cape Lookout. -
Here we are, a week into the second administration of President Donald Trump. It’s certainly a time of change, some of which is expected, and some perhaps not. Do we really need to rename North America’s tallest mountain, Denali in Denali National Park and Preserve?
There is much going on in the federal government, and not all is good. Hiring freezes are underway. There’s much talk about reducing the federal budget, which requires cutting agency funding.
To try to gain some clarity on what’s beginning to go on and what impacts it might have on the National Park System and the National Park Service, we’re joined today by Kristen Brengel, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association.
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There are sounds that wake you up out of a deep sleep, only to be dismissed as you fall back to sleep. And then there are sounds that rivet you, make you sit bolt upright.
That was the type of sound that woke us while we were deep in the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park. Sunrise hadn’t yet come, yet we were wide awake, listening to one of the most mesmerizing sounds you can encounter in the wilds: The melodious rising and falling howl of a wolf.
It was late summer in 2008 when two friends and I were lucky enough to catch that howling. Had it been 20 years earlier, there would have been an audible hole in the park sky because there were no wolves in Yellowstone in 1988.
It was an effort launched early in the 1990s that returned the predators to the park in January 12, 1995 – 30 years ago – when 14 wolves trapped in Canada were brought into Yellowstone to kick off an audacious effort to see healthy wolf packs loping through the park.
How have they done? To find out, our guest today is Eric Clewis, the Northern Rockies senior representative for Defenders of Wildlife.
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We’re five days into 2025, and already there’s a lot of news concerning national parks and the National Park Service. Traveler Editor-in-Chief Kurt Repanshek is joined today by Contributing Editor Kim O’Connell to discuss the Traveler’s 4th Annual Threatened and Endangered Park Series and other recent park-related news.
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