Politics

"The private park concessionaire executive, Socha, has zero experience in public service or conservation,” Jayson O’Neill, spokesperson for the Save Our Parks campaign, told SFGate. “Instead, he’s made a career out of extracting maximum profit from our national parks, not protecting them, making it abundantly clear he’ll be doing the bidding of special interests and corporate interests.”

An August investigation by the New York Times found that at least a fifth of the country’s 433 national parks had been significantly strained due to Trump-related cuts. I spoke with former National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis in May about the cascading impacts the job cuts could have on the country’s public lands. Another former director, Charles F. Sams III, echoed these concerns, along with other former park staff and recreation experts, as Blaine Harden reported for ICN in January.

Meanwhile, US Customs and Border Protection intends to build border barriers throughout the Big Bend region of southwest Texas, which plans show will cut through part of the popular Big Bend National Park, as my colleague Martha Pskowski reported. Scientists and conservationists have condemned the project.