The gutting of our national park system

Imagine a million-acre wilderness: Mountain peaks. Rushing rivers. Bears and wolves. Now imagine a city the size of, say, Chicago.

In my corner of Montana every summer, those two things merge. Montana is home to Glacier National Park, and 30 years ago, the park had about a million visitors a year. Nowadays, the park attracts more than 3 million people a year.

It’s like a major city teleported to the spine of the Rockies. Those visitors have needs—food, restrooms, parking lots and trails. They deserve to be safe. They expect to have fun. That’s why we have park rangers, along with road crews, fire crews, wildlife managers and a myriad of other folks who keep the park functioning.

But today, when they should be planning for the next busy season, our public land managers and stewards find themselves knee-capped by a zealous, unelected budget slasher who wields not a red pen, but a chainsaw.

For no reason except the desire to cut the federal budget by eliminating as many staff members as possible, a team recruited by Elon Musk (under orders from President Trump) has slashed the workforces of our public land agencies.

Musk and crew suggest they are just getting started. Their excuses are specious. The idea that they are going to balance the budget on the backs of park rangers and trail crews is like saying they’re going to dam the Colorado River with a few shovelfuls of gravel. Perhaps their long game is to so incapacitate management of national parks that privatization is the answer—selling off parks and other public lands.

Chicago serves its 3.5 million people on an annual operations budget of $17 billion. Glacier Park’s annual operations budget is 1,000 times less, about $15 million. And Glacier Park is an enormous cash cow. Visitors from around the world are in the mood to eat, drink and spend in the local economy, to the tune of $350 million annually. From that perspective alone, Glacier Park is one of the greatest bargains in government.

Glacier Park is not alone. It is surrounded by the Kootenai and Flathead national forests and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. Public land that belongs to you and me. Here and across the West, our public lands provide the setting for a way of life that attracts investment and newcomers.

Just as you can’t run a ranch without ranch hands, you can’t run public lands without land managers and staffers. They tend to be dedicated to the public good, almost always working for a modest salary, the love of the mission and the chance to work outdoors.

This problem goes beyond my community in Montana. The same deep cuts are happening across the Western public land states. It impacts every American who appreciates our public estate for its clean water, wildlife and world-class recreation.

Either Musk doesn’t get this or doesn’t care. A man wealthy enough for his own space program doesn’t have to share public lands with the riffraff.

But Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Montana, should understand. He is paid to care. In the last Trump Administration, he was the Secretary of the Interior. Now, he represents the western district of Montana in Congress, a district that contains both Glacier National Park and at least 10 million acres of National Forest.

I once ran across Rep. Zinke at a Montana saloon. Our conversation drifted to national forest management. While we disagreed on some things, I appreciated this parting comment.

“Remember,” he said, “this can all be fixed.”

Maybe, but it can’t be fixed without good people.

Westerners who depend on public lands for our way of life and our livelihoods know that these lands need and deserve good stewardship. For that, you need stewards. Not a gutted, demoralized workforce that is forced to look over its shoulder for the next axe to fall.

The Republicans are in charge in Washington D.C. There is no other party to blame for bad decisions. It’s past time for Zinke and others to bring some sense to the anti-government fever that is gripping the nation.

Our public lands are both economic assets and a patriotic point of pride. It’s time our elected officials (and their unelected minions) act like it.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conservation about the West. He is a writer and conservationist based in Kalispell, Montana.

Glacier Park Logan Creek, by Ben Long