Cuts to national parks: “worst idea we ever had”

In 1983, author and historian Wallace Stegner wrote, “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”

Efforts are underway in our government to destroy our system of national parks.

This is the worst idea imaginable.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is proposing a reduction in the park operating budget of $900 million. Current funding for the National Park Service stands at $3.1 billion. The effects of such a reduction would be catastrophic.

To address the effect of such a reduction, the secretary is proposing some parks be categorized and managed as state parks.

Staffing reductions have been made. Some 1,700 of the more than 20,000 employees have been removed with some 1,500 more possibly to be cut under the provisions of a reduction in force expected to be announced this month.

Such actions cannot be absorbed by the National Park Service without a dramatic effect. The National Park Service, as we know it now, will be decimated.

More than 300 million people visited the national parks in 2024. Visitor spending in communities near national parks provides a benefit of more than $55 billion to the nation’s economy and supports over 415,000 jobs.

Why destroy an agency that provides such a benefit to our economy, to say nothing of the value it brings in preserving our nation’s heritage?

We cannot let America’s best idea be replaced with America’s worst idea!

— Donald Falvey, Lakewood

Editor’s note: Falvey has served as the superintendent of Zion and Badlands national parks and in various positions at the Denver Service Center in Lakewood for several years, beginning in 1972.

Sell-off of public lands would set the stage for sweetheart deals

Re: “GOP pushes to sell off public land,” May 8 news story, and “Congress almost sold off 500,000 acres of western public land,” May 23 news story

In the late of night, Republican corporate cronies in the U.S. House of Representatives added a public lands giveaway provision to their sweeping tax cut package for the rich. It would have mandated the sale of thousands of acres of our public lands to big business. Make no mistake; this would just have set the stage for future mass sweetheart deals to sell off huge tracts of our national forests, wildlife refuges, and national monuments to mining, drilling, logging and wealthy land developers.

Donald Trump and his cowardly cronies in Congress are doing all they can to hand over our public lands with little oversight. These lands belong to all of us and should not be given away to pad corporate bottom lines.

This scheme follows up on Trump’s recent horrendous order to eliminate environmental safeguards on more than half of the nation’s national forests, opening up 59% of our forests for clear-cutting and logging.

MAGA Republicans proclaim they are conservatives. Conservative of what? Certainly not our environment, public lands, wildlife and clean air and water. They are clearly more concerned about conserving huge profits for greedy corporations and the wealthy.

— Jessica Talbot, Arvada