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National Parks Face Years of Damage From Government Shutdown (nationalgeographic.com)
When the government eventually reopens, park experts warn reversing damage won't be as easy as throwing out the trash. From a report: National parks are America's public lands, but right now they're America's trashcans. That's because the U.S. federal government, embattled over funding for a border wall, has shut down, leaving national parks open and largely unattended. Since the shutdown began, brimming trashcans, overflowing toilets, and trespassing has been reported at many parks locations. "Never before have I seen the federal government tempt fate in national parks the way we are today," says Diane Regas, president of the Trust for Public Land. "It's not about what has happened already. It's about what could happen if you don't have the appropriate staffing."
According to the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), staffing varies by park, but some 16,000 parks service employees are furloughed, leaving a small number active for policing and security. The government shut down three times in 2018, but only three days last January and less than a day that following February. As of Friday, the government had been partially shut down for 13 days. Further reading: Government Shutdown is Putting a Damper on Science in Seattle and Elsewhere.
According to the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), staffing varies by park, but some 16,000 parks service employees are furloughed, leaving a small number active for policing and security. The government shut down three times in 2018, but only three days last January and less than a day that following February. As of Friday, the government had been partially shut down for 13 days. Further reading: Government Shutdown is Putting a Damper on Science in Seattle and Elsewhere.
I'd expect something like this out of a third-world nation, not a world-leader.
How quickly you've fallen from your world power high in the mid 1970s.
SAD. But a few Boomers got rich so FUCK YEAH!!!
Like Roosevelt did, create a new CCC, or you could use community service sentences to do the work.
If there are arrests for trespassing... sentence them to work in the parks.
The historic tower in the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC is a national landmark. It's under the control of the park service. There are still National Park Rangers there keeping the tower open. Total coincidence they found money to do that, based no doubt on a dispassionate assessment of needs.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Unstaffed national parks are great. I brought a chainsaw and now I have the makings of a dozen giant redwood tables. It would have cost more than my house to buy them from a legit wood shop.
Thanks to Trump, national parks are free of job killing regulations being enforced by the fascist fat car park rangers. I'll go out this week and get a giant slab of oak with the flatbed too.
Fun for the kids too, they can use the four wheelers and carve donuts on the worthless alpine prairie moss instead of gunking up the engine like when they do it on the dunes.
from what I remember trump promised the US would not be paying for that wall as Mexico would.
Yeah, but we're not talking about Washington D.C., we're talking about national parks.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
So let me get this straight... you're miffed that people didn't take YOUR feelings into account while you don't care for the feelings of others on this matter whom you'd be disturbing.
Yeah, I have a hard time feeling sorry for you.
makes me sad that a great piece of nature can't stay clean for a few days unless there are paid people who clean up after the visitors - the real trash are the humans leaving their trash behind.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Well a lot of the existing border fencing does need repairs/upgrades so it would be an infrastructure project.
And the Dems are offering $1.5 billion for upgrades to border security and infrastructure. But Trump has to have his Great Wall of Trump. All this shut down is going to do is cost us more money. All the people who worked during the shutdown will still get paid. All the people who didn't work over the shutdown will get paid (there's no way Congress will let hundreds of thousands of government workers go a month without pay). And then we will have to pay for the overtime for every department to clear weeks worth of backlogs.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Most of the national parks used to be free. There are tollgates now and they do charge except right now during the shutdown because there is nobody to collect the tolls. OOTH I am not at all sure why they don't leave the honor boxes used at lots of less popular locations open. My guess is a lot of patrons would happy continue to pay.
That said I don't agree with a lot of what the Park Service and the USFS do with our parks and public lands. The USFS still does all kinds of agricultural experiments in places that are supposed to be public land. Frankly commercial enterprise should be paying for that and doing it on already private property. Same thing with a lot of our parks. Most (not all) have dual purpose to act both as wilderness preserves and as recreational spaces for people. The thing is large unbroken areas of back country and critical to life cycles of lots of the creatures we are trying to protect. This is incompatible with paved auto trails, and large campsites. Its also not fair I don't think to other Americans to ask them subsides the businesses around these parks.
I was reading an article about how snowmobiles in the western parks and how private enterprise is keeping the trails groomed. That's fine, but why is the Park Service nominally maintaining snowmobile trains anyway? Again I get there has to be some push pull to accommodate the dual use mandate but honestly, the Park Service should probably identify some lower impact areas for things like powered vehicle trails and tell the business look these areas its okay to clear some trails thru if you want to do so and maintain them at your cost. Sell permits (at administrative cost if you want to) just so that we can attach a number to operators and hold them accountable for keeping to the permitted areas and enforce other likely needed restrictions. But but but.. "Bobby's Snow Tours" isnt going to do the work when "Wild Bills Tours" can just sponge off his efforts. BS - I say. Firstly the shutdown is proving that isn't true, and second Bobby still gets to profit of what is public land so I don't feel to sorry for him.
Beyond this I would say the park service ought to engage in the minimal expense of putting in wilderness trails for individuals and (non-commercial) small groups to use for hiking/backpacking because putting in trails and asking even those low impact users to stay on them reduces total impact. It also make search and rescue somewhat possible where as if you just turn people loose in a few million acres good luck finding anyone and good luck with any sort of extraction if that is required. Otherwise they should really let nature have run of the parks, and that includes wildfires (provided we believe they were sparked by natural causes).
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Over the past decade, Democrats have supported billions of dollars in funding for physical barriers. In 2006, the Secure Fence Act passed with bipartisan support requiring the construction of physical barriers along 700 miles of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. Sixty-four Democrats voted the measure in the House and 26 in the Senate.
The current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted for it, so did Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama praised the bill in a floor speech saying it would "certainly do some good" and "help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country."
In 2013, all Senate Democrats and most House Democrats backed comprehensive immigration reform legislation, the so-called Gang of Eight bill. It included $46 billion for border security and around $8 billion to repair or reinforce barriers along the 700 miles of the border as required under the Secure Fence Act.
Yeah but there are already walls and fencing where they're needed, just buy some surveillance drones to patrol the rest of the border and you're done. A Great Wall is dumb.
Maybe that's because they perceived this as a sufficient and adequate response. Maybe the ROI on continuing to invest in walls and fencing has reached the point of ridiculousness. Maybe America doesn't actually have an immigration crisis, and justifying continued investment in fencing to filter out hypothetical Mexican rapists is an immoral act of unfounded prejudice.
Your entire model of hypocrisy leaves out of the possibility that the previous response was a proportional response, and the proposed response is a disproportionate response. There's no two ways about this: Americans want to buy Californian fruit at a price you can only have if the fruit is picked by undocumented immigrants, without actually having the immigrants.
So you disparage the immigrants so that they have no rights whatsoever in the country where the work and reside, until you've got a de facto caste society.
Once upon a time, India did not have a caste society as rigid as the one they have now. But for some reason, there caste system solidified. Was it the people on the bottom who wanted to become permanently consigned to an underclass? Or was it the people at the top, who wanted something akin to slavery (all the benefits, few of the costs) without turning people into actual property (which is problematic, and always has been).
America's Deep South has never quite forgotten the wonderful heroine hit of being a gentrified ruling class, where you can sit in your drawing rooms and perfect your manners (and mannerisms), while some other group of people is baking in the hot sun for long hours doing the scut work. Gosh, what if you could have that without slavery? What if you could hem and howl until the immigrants had a status below dirt, and do everything conceivable to pretend to stop this, while actually still providing the immigrants with all the same work opportunities? (All the better to sate one's enormous appetite on cheap, local fruit.)
The wall then becomes a permanent monument to the notion, "well, we did what we could" and the immigrants are still showing up to do the same nasty jobs as the same low, low wages (with few benefits), well that just proves that they're lowly and incorrigible and deserve what they get.
Voila: caste system. All of the benefits, few of the costs.
I'll gladly believe otherwise once there's a vigorous enforcement effort to arrest businessmen who routinely look the other way over worker documentation (with the prospect of serious jail time for repeat offenses). Rounding up the first 1000 would be like gathering windblown apples off the ground. That would slow undocumented immigration down to a trickle at way less cost than Trump's giant monument to caste-society lust.
Problem: a sudden wave of orchard bankruptcies among hard-working, tax-paying Californian orchard owners (mostly white) would shine a harsh spotlight in the evening news cycle for many months on the actual hypocrisy here. We wants them in one way (cheap prices), but we don't wants them in the other way (affording them dignity and civil rights).
A hugely expensive wall (that still won't actually work) is just a giant branding exercise in justifying this extremely un-American division between labour and civil rights. This is not so different from the extremely un-American division between taxation and representation that once lead to a giant tea party.
But times change, and tea party rebrand themselves. Now we're more like the British society from which we once sought refuge, than we are like our forefathers (and foremothers) who bravely endured the back-breaking labour of setting up shop in a giant land of opportunity, theirs for the taking.
Yes, illegal immigration costs money. Provably so. I guess if you think otherwise, you'll willingly let anyone who desires to move in with you for free, you can feed, clothe, educate, protect, and provide healthcare for them, and their services as an occasional maid or cook would more than offset the costs?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Because previously the parks locked the gates during shutdowns. They left them open to avoid the bad image of locked gates, this is the side effect of that stupid decision.
The conservative Cato Institute published a response to that FAIR report.
Key quote: