Frederick Joseph, On Trump’s National Park Layoffs and the Erosion of America’s Public Land: “…The national parks, they tell us, were created to preserve America’s most beautiful places. This is the story, the myth of preservation, the thing Ken Burns made into poetry. But what they do not tell you—at least, not loudly—is that these places were not empty when the first park signs were hammered into the ground. They do not tell you that Yellowstone was cleared of the tribes who had lived there for thousands of years, that the Blackfeet were forced from Glacier, that the Yosemite Valley had been home to the Ahwahneechee long before John Muir ever waxed poetic about its cliffs. The creation of the parks was not merely conservation; it was erasure, another line in the long ledger of displacement, another way the government turned its sins into monuments. And yet. And yet. Despite this history, despite the brutal contradictions, the land remains. And for all its exclusions, for all its violences, the parks have become a place where people go to feel small, to remember that they are not the first nor the last, that there is something older than us and beyond us, something not yet ruined. Even those who have never stepped foot in these places—those who have only seen the photographs, the sweeping cinematography of a PBS documentary—can understand the loss that would come with their absence…The numbers are precise, bureaucratic, devoid of poetry: 1,000 National Park Service employees gone, 3,400 from the U.S. Forest Service dismissed. The kind of cuts that are passed off as efficiency, as a trimming of the fat. Trump’s people say it is necessary, that the government is bloated, that the country must learn to live lean. Elon Musk, who now largely oversees such things, as a non-elected official, calls it “streamlining.” The headlines call it a “reduction in force.” A thousand rangers is not a reduction—it is a gutting…”