In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon and told the country what to do with it. "Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. Keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you." This year, another Republican president went looking for a way around that.
Roosevelt saw the Canyon before it was a park, when railroads and mining companies were circling it like the rest of the West, and he refused to let it be carved up. He created five national parks, 150 national forests, 18 national monuments, and set aside around 230 million acres, more than Texas and California together, so the country after him would inherit it whole.
To lock it in, he signed the Antiquities Act of 1906, the law that let a president shield a place like the Canyon with a signature. It is why the overlook your family stood at on some summer trip was there to stand at.
The current president is testing what that signature can still hold.
Trump has moved to strip protections from more than 86 million acres of public land since returning to office. On July 14 he cut Utah's Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante to less than a tenth of their size, reopening canyon country to uranium and coal. But he is not only after the land. He is after the story told on it.🤬🤬🤬
As the Guardian reported this week, the administration ordered National Park rangers to flag and remove signs that "disparage Americans," and the signs started disappearing. At Fort Sumter, a panel explaining rising seas is now two bare hinges.
At the FDR Memorial, a sign about the discriminatory side of his policies was swapped for one about him designing his own wheelchair. At the George Mason Memorial, the line noting he enslaved 300 people and freed none of them was quietly deleted. 🤬🤬🤬
Here is what the erasers did not count on. A government librarian in Minnesota named Jenny McBurney started Save Our Signs, asking ordinary people to photograph park signs before they vanished. As of this month, volunteers have sent in more than 17,000 photos from nearly every park in the country.
One woman and her mother, who have visited 53 parks together, contributed over 2,000 of them. They now have "before" pictures of signs the administration later removed. The record exists because strangers went and stood at the overlook and hit the shutter.
Roosevelt did an enormous bit and handed it to you. Keeping it is turning out to take far less than he gave. As the writer Bridget Christie once put it, "if we all do a little bit, then together it's a big bit."
He said keep it for your children's children. Right now, a few thousand people with cameras are the last ones protecting it. ❤️❤️❤️
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