this is gonna get long and wordy, because i kind of have a lot of FEELINGS wrt the nps.
i grew up surrounded by nps employees, because after earning his masters in forestry, my dad spent his entire professional career working for the nps.
you do not join the nps to make a lot of money. you do not join the nps if you want easy career advancement. especially if both you and your spouse/partner want to work outside the home. or if you and your spouse/partner both work for the nps. because the unofficial motto of the nps is āto move up, you have to move on.ā itās like the army, but for liberal, tree hugging hippie types. and they donāt usually just transfer you - you have to apply for positions you want.
my dad wanted to advance, so we moved every 2-3 years when i was growing up. as his first nps mentor told him, āthis job is hard on families.ā
so you have a bunch of people who have built a career in which they could be earning much more with their qualifications in the private sector and for which they are literally willing to uproot themselves every few years and move.
might be across the country. might be from urban to rural, or vice a versa. if you start out as a temp/seasonal employee, which is usually how you get your foot in the door, you usually have to make a āsacrifice moveā - i.e. apply to a position in a park that you know will be under-applied for, because nobody wants to go there. we lived in corpus cristi, tx for 18 months as a result of this. before that, we had lived inside of mt. rainier national park. it was like moving to an entirely different country.
maybe your spouse gets tired of moving every few years. maybe they get tired of their own career having to be on the back burner, or sacrificed completely, so you can move on to the next advancement, at the next park.
maybe they donāt want to live in a remote area, or an urban area. maybe your kids are tired of leaving their friends and their schools at short notice.
why the hell would anyone willingly choose this career, when they know what kinds of financial hardships it will bring? when they know how hard it will be on their families and their interpersonal relationships? on themselves?
most of them do it because they genuinely, passionately believe in preservation. because they believe in the mission of the nps:Ā ā The National Park Service preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.ā
and motherfuckers, you had best believe they are relying on ~*~actual science~*~ to carry out that mission.
they have been fighting the good fight for decades in a myriad of ways, both local and national. i have watched my dad prepare for local city council meetings, in which he had to tell a group of enraged and concerned townspeople that, no, they could not MOVE THE RIVER BACK after it changed course following spring floods, to flow through an older channel. didnāt matter that your pappy and your grandpappy had always been able to see if from a certain bend in the road, and now you canāt. nature is taking its course, literally, and the nps is not gonna intervene in that, no matter how much you fuss.
i have watched him celebrate small victories, like the time he wrote a funding proposal for a national project that was so fucking convincing he got $2million more than he asked for - under the fucking gwb administration.Ā
and, like, do not get me wrong, i have had me some issues with my dad over the years. i was not always super psyched to lose friends and have to make new ones every time we moved, or about the damage to my motherās career some of these moves caused. not to mention their eventual divorce.
but i have never doubted, not for one fucking second, that my dad did what he did in his career because he genuinely believed he could make a difference. because he genuinely believed in the preservation of our natural resources for his children, and his childrenās children, and everyone fucking else in this country. because he believed in protecting our environment and our history from those who would destroy it for their own short term financial gain.
the nps is made up of thousands of employees like him.
they have been relying on science to protect the resources under their administration for a long time.
they have been resisting those who would have them ignore scientific evidence for a long time.
youāre goddamned right theyāre gonna resist this bullshit thatās going on now.
gracieabrams
areudirty
2087
kianamaiart
amandla
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