We Must Reform Natural Resource Management

A Plea for Sanity

“There is nothing so American as our national parks.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt¹

The current state of our National Parks is a disgrace. I do not mean in terms of upkeep, as from my observation the rangers and administrators do a capable job. What I mean is that these parks, nearly every one of them, is chock-full of foreigners and aliens, eager to get some good Instagram photos, chattering quickly in other languages and moving as a throng.

Our National Parks are full, and this should not be so. National Parks are not meant to be giant Disney experiences for the foreign masses, but a unique experience of spiritual refreshment, a breath of crisp, free air, to give life to the Americans.

The National Park Service was founded for a version of America quite different from the one that currently prevails. Industrialization’s ravenous appetite had been whetted, and Americans realized very quickly that the great wilderness we had bought and won would quickly disappear without concerted efforts to protect it. The conservation movement that would gain momentum at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th would go on to preserve an incredible wealth of the American landscape, for future generations to experience as their fathers had.

But the threats from a century ago pale in comparison to a new proposal from the Department of the Interior.

This address should make any American Patriot’s blood boil. The language of “under-utilized” is exactly the sort of managerial spreadsheet garbage that has justified the defrauding of the American people via both immigration and trade.

“Affordable housing,” to the degree it is even tenable, would be desirable only in large metro areas which are teeming with people and which are already bearing the load of that population size save for their accommodation. Even this is arguably objectionable, but it represents a difference in kind from drafting the natural beauty of the United States into hosting the cheapest, least sustainable form of housing we can possibly construct.

The American Right has a longstanding custody of the actual conservationist movement, save for the New Left’s capture of it in the ’70s, which is reflected in those institutions today. Some thirty years ago, the Sierra Club took thirty pieces of silver (in the form of a $100 million donation from David Gelbaum)² and has remained silent not only on immigration but on other pressing environmental issues which fly too close to protecting the inheritance of the Americans.

Conservation is a keystone of a return of Americanness on the American Right. We must take up this issue, because if we do not, no one will. Make no mistake: this is a liquidation of inheritance far more harmful than any Boomer retiree spending his millions on cruises. President Trump was elected on a platform of returning America to the Americans, and this policy from Secretaries Burgum and Turner represents an open, naked betrayal of that promise.

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Radio Address from Two Medicine Chalet, Glacier National Park,” August 5, 1934.

2. Reece Jones, White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021), p. 538.