Public Lands Article: Exploring Our National Monuments and Parks
A requirement for graduating from Tahoe Expedition Academy, my high school, is designing and completing a Senior Intensive. This is similar to a thesis, where students must choose one particular topic we are interested in and find a problem and work towards a solution. We must immerse ourselves in this subject by interviewing experts, planning and executing a trip involved with our intensive, and finally end with a final project. For my senior intensive, I set out to learn about public lands and the problems that arise within them. My final project was an article discussing my discoveries, which you can read here.
When I was first brainstorming ideas of what to study for my senior intensive, I had a few things I knew I wanted to include; I wanted something that would tie in with climate activism and I wanted to learn about something new. I thought back to all of the expeditions I had been on with TEA, and one specifically stood out to me.
In the spring of my freshman year at TEA, my class traveled to Bears Ears National Monument to learn about the debate happening there. Spending two weeks hearing different perspectives of stakeholder groups and adventuring through canyonlands, this was definitely my favorite TEA trip. At the end of the Bears Ears expedition, my class still hadn’t found a concrete answer to the question we were trying to solve, thus, I realized I could spend my senior intensive diving back into this issue while also tying in other public lands and how they are effected by climate change.
I decided to start by speaking with a variety of experts, hoping a larger question would be raised that I could explore. Initially, I hoped to do a few case studies with specific national parks, but this quickly changed and I ended up focusing on Bears Ears National Monument and Sequoia National Park.
While looking back into the Bears Ears debate, I got to connect with many of the experts I talked to three years ago.
In December of 2017, the Obama administration created Bears Ears National Monument, in southeast Utah. Then, in 2018, just months later, the Trump administration shrunk the monument by over 85%. My class explored why Trump did this and the varying opinions from stakeholder groups in the area. For my intensive, I was able to speak with three of these experts again.
Firstly, I spoke with Sarah Burak, from Friends Of Cedar Mesa. This organization is in unison and support with the tribal groups in the area. The tribal groups believe that this was originally their land, so they should have the say in what happens with the land. It has many sacred and historical aspects that need to be protected. Sarah was pleased with the Obama administration when he made the monument, but upset when Trump shrunk it. She said that she does not believe that what President Trump did was constitutionally right, because while presidents have the power to create monuments, only congress has the power to shrink them.
In the future, she expects the Biden administration to expand the monument back to the originally proposed boundaries.
Next, I spoke with Logan Shumway, from the White Mesa Uranium Mill.
Logan believes that making the monument was disingenuous, shutting down industry to people living around the monument. With the debate happening over the monument it highlighted the negative effects of the uranium mill, which before people didn’t have a problem with. It makes the employees of the uranium mill look like the bad guys, while they are actually the majority of the population in that area, just making a normal living. Logan hopes that a conclusion can be found where all of the stakeholder groups are represented.
Lastly, I talked to Brett Sutteer from Moab Cliffs and Canyons Adventure Guide Tours. Brett focused on talking about the need to preserve the organic Bears Ears land.
He talked about how on one hand, he wished it hadn’t become a monument at all. Four years ago, before the land was protected by Obama, it was sort of a special, secret place that only locals knew about. As a national monument, it has become a popular destination spot for people to visit. There’s been a huge increase in UTV traffic, and more destruction from vehicle access. A lot of the accessible artifact sites have been picked away by tourists as people are taking pottery shards home as souvenirs.
Brett’s central point was that we cannot make any more red rock country, that this is it. Human’s sheer presence is erasing the area and we cannot do enough to protect it. He hopes that the administrative protections through making the monument will keep this land pristine.
I wanted to do fieldwork for my senior intensive within a public land management office, so I reached out to national parks throughout California as well as the state forest department in Tahoe. Jenny Kirk, the volunteer coordinator at Sequoia National Park invited me to shadow rangers at their park, and I was fortunate enough to spend a week exploring and learning there.
In sequoia national park, I learned about getting more diversity in the park, how the tribal groups play a role on this land, and how climate change and forest fires are threatening the park.
The first person I shadowed at Sequoia National Park was Christina Martinez, an interpretive ranger at the Visitor Center. She educates the public about the park and encourages visitors to take action to protect these natural lands.
During our time together, Christina and I discussed how in the past, minority groups of people have felt discouraged to visit national parks since the park rangers working there didn’t look like them. It was, and often still is, a majority of older, white guys working as park rangers. Now, the park system is encouraging a more diverse community of people to work in the parks in hopes that this will encourage a more diverse demographic to come visit the parks.
Sintia Kawasaki Yee, the Management Analyst and Public Information Officer at the park, also explained how the park is incorporating more diversity.
Sintia gets the local community involved through working with schools. She said that they often find that there are students living just 45 minutes away, yet have no idea that Sequoia National Park exists. To change this, they send rangers down into the school and hold programs to get students into the parks.
To focus on how tribal groups are working in Sequoia National Park, I talked to Jane Allen, who works with Tribal Relations and Cultural Resources within the park.
She has a lot of roles to fill within her job, so unfortunatley only has a very small amount of time to consult directly with the tribal groups. She believes that there needs to be a stand alone position as a tribal liaison, but there is not enough money in their budget to hire another person.
Moreover, there is no equity for this aspect in the park system. Yosemite has one person as the tribal liaison for the three tribes involved in their park, but in Sequpia and Kings Canyon National Parks, there are 14 tribes and only the partial position of the tribal liaison. Jane hopes that the newly appointed Secretary of the Interior, Debra Halland, can take action on this before the next administration.
Mike Thuene, the Fire Information Officer of Sequoia National Park, took me on a day-long tour around the park and taught me all there is to know about sequoia trees and fire.
On our journey through Sequoia National Park, I learned that forest fire is a needed element for sequoia trees to survive. In order to open up and release seeds to plant new saplings, the sequoia cones need heat from fire. Also, forest fires clear dead branches and allow sunlight to pass through sequoia groves to reach the ground to sprout new baby trees.
However, since the early 20th century, wildfire has been seen as a bad thing. Consequently, when native tribal groups were found setting fire to the forests, they were immediately stopped. Once these cultural burns stopped, the wildfires in Sequoia National Park also slowed.
A change in the natural land wasn’t evident until a century later, in the late 1980s, when scientists started to realize that sequoia saplings trees weren’t sprouting back like they should be.
These scientists realized that it had been these seasonal wildfires that had helped sprout new sequoias. Since, firefighters in the park perform seasonal prescribed fires to mitigate the balance between too much fire and just enough fire.
All of the experts I spoke with at Sequoia National Park raised climate change as one of the most prominent issues they are currently facing. Particularly in the last few years, scientists at the park have seen a noticeable increase in sequoia tree deaths. This has been extremely concerning, as sequoia trees are known to never die, or at least live for two to three thousand years.
During this intensive I learned the complex management system and the complicated issues that can be associated with the national parks and monuments. I learned that the tribal groups' stories with this land goes back thousands of years, whereas the park system has only been around for about a century.
For my final product of my senior intensive, I wrote an article with all that I learned about and my opinions on this. I am sending it to the wonderful experts I talked with in Sequoia National Park in hopes that they can share it out to their community.
What can you do to help National Parks? While the park system is not under an immediate threat of going away, we need to keep voting for the right legislation to continue to protect these parks far into the future. Simply advocating for climate action is one of the biggest things to do. With the right funding, the parks could spend time finding real, tangible solutions.