This summer, employees and visitors to the National Park were invited to do something very unusual: report all the panels that have not made superb America. The effort, resulting from a decree of President Donald Trump, has already led to the suppression of signs on the horrors of slavery, the massacres of indigenous peoples and the threat of climate change, even on land directly in danger.
Consider Acadia National Park in Maine. More intense storms and rising seas accelerate erosion and kill native plants along its emblematic coast. The warmer temperatures help the spread of an invasive insect that has completely destroyed the park’s red pines. And yet, last month, the park employees deleted several signs explaining how climate change contributed to these changes.
“Access to this information when you are right, there is a way to see your own eyes what is happening,” said Chellie Pingree, a Democrat representative of Maine. The deleted panels have not only educated visitors to environmental problems – they also described the steps that visitors could take to reduce their carbon emissions, such as taking a shuttle bus instead of a personal vehicle to visit popular park sites.
Trump’s decree in March ordered the interior department to remove descriptions that “inappropriately disparaged past or living Americans” and rather focus on “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people”. The directive also required the emphasis on “beauty, abundance and grandeur of the American landscape”. Even the articles in the gift stores of the National Park were subject to an exam.
Win McNamee / Getty images
This is not the first obstacle that the Parc service endured under Trump’s second term. Due to federal cuts, the National Park Service has lost a quarter of its permanent staff, many of which have worked to preserve species and natural characteristics in long -term parks. Acadia employees are very thin, with more than 60 vacancies on staff all year round, according to Todd Martin, principal program director for the Northeast for the National Parks Conservation Association. The administration also proposed to reduce the park service budget for $ 1.2 billion.
Evicing these resources, in particular at a time when climate change changes national parks, means that the very beauty that Trump wants to highlight is at risk of disappearing.
The national parks have warned at double the rate of the rest of the country, according to research by Patrick Gonzalez, former scientist of climate change of the National Park Service. “A more severe heating occurs in national parks because the vast areas of the national park system are located in extreme environments-in the Arctic, with strong altitudes and in the arid southwest,” he said.
Some of the homonymous features of the parks could be lost: the glaciers of the Montana Glaciers National Park could disappear in the decades, Joshua trees could possibly disappear in Joshua Tree National Park in California, and more serious forest fires have already withdrawn a fifth of the famous California sequoias. Warming temperatures could harm Yellowstone’s bison population, and the elevation of sea level reduces the habitat of the Panther of Florida in the Everglades.
“As a country, we care to lose these spectacular resources, and people want to know what the service of the park does to keep them alive and make sure they survive this generation,” said Kristen Brengel, vice-president of government affairs of the National Parks Conservation Association. “Hiding this information from the public is simply not what the Park service is.”
Certain signs explaining environmental threats came out of the strategy of response to climate change of the Park Service created under President Barack Obama in 2010, which emphasized the communication of the risks of global warming – and what could be done on this subject – to the public. The signs of interpretation were carefully verified by scientists and other experts to ensure that they were correct before their increase, according to Gonzalez.
We do not know how many of these signs will be deleted following Trump’s decree, but many were brought to the attention of the administration. Managers of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Park, on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, reported a plate explaining how fossil fuels cause air pollution that harms plants and animals. In the Everglades National Park, an employee noted that signs on agriculture and urban development damaging the land “could be conceived as derogating the development of industrial America”. Meanwhile, at Cape Hatteras National Seashore on the external banks of North Carolina, an employee wondered if a sign on the elevation of sea level threatening the habitat of ocracoke ponies “reduces the accent on grandeur, beauty and abundance”.
Other environmental information has already disappeared from the panel panels. In July, the national monument of Muir Woods in northern California removed its exhibition “History Instruction” which added a historical and cultural context to its existing signaling. The new information had included explanations on how the peoples Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo maintained land for centuries through cultural burns, as well as to inform visitors that the conservationist Gifford Pinchot, who worked to preserve Muir Woods, also favored eugenics.
Jace Ritchey / National Park Service
Park service staff told Brengel that being invited to report and censor their own signs had been a morale killer. “They are devastated,” she said. She heard that some parks were invited not to remove more panels because of “bad advertising”, but also that many parks west of Mississippi were invited to continue to mark signs to comply with the directive.
“It’s not over,” said Brengel. “They plan to censor more parks. It is only a matter of time at this stage. ”
None of the national parks, Grist has commented on the signs related to the environment that have been deleted or reported for examination, by postponing the Interior Department or the National Park Service. (National parks employees were invited not to speak to journalists, sources told Grist.)
“Thanks to President Donald Trump, the interior ensures that the American people no longer feed on the lies of the new delusional green scam,” said Aubrie Spady, assistant press secretary, in a statement. “The content has been deleted because this administration believes in just the administration of facts based on real science to the American public, and not the brainless rhetoric which is repercussions without brain used to steal taxpayers.”
Elizabeth Peace, spokesperson for the National Park Service, expressed his more neutral way: “The president ordered the federal agencies to examine interpretation documents to guarantee accuracy, honesty and alignment with shared national values.”
Signs moves are part of a wider model to hide information on climate change in public view. During his second term, Trump launched an assault on climate sciences, removing historical climate reports, reduced funding for climate research and ending a program that followed the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. The language on the evolution of the climate has disappeared from federal websites, including entire pages on this subject on the Park Service website.
In response, scientists, academics and other volunteers worked to save lost data and try to make it available so that the public can find.
The erasure of “negative” stories in national parks stimulated another initiative of this type, entitled “Save Our Signs”. The objective is to crowdsource photos of panels of the National Park Service sites across the country to create a collection accessible to the public. So far, Save our signs has received more than 10,000 photos from hundreds of sites, said Jenny McBurney, government librarian who has helped start the project.
Politicians also grow back. Last week, Pingree and dozens of representatives signed a letter to the Director of the Jessica Bowron National Park Service, condemning the deletion of historic panels and requesting detailed information on all the panels that had been reported for violations, modified or deleted.
McBurney said that the Save Our Signs project still accepted the photos, even if it has already seen a wave of support. “You can just say that people really care about our parks, and they want to make sure that this important information is preserved.”
