One thing I find fascinating about bears is the complexity of their behaviors. Bears are intelligent and mentally flexible. They understand who can be friendly and who is not. They recognize each other as individuals and, despite their asocial reputation, bears can also be quite social when the right mood and circumstances strike.
In 2022, I, along with millions of bearcam viewers, watched two sister bears, each with their own cub, form their own version of a bonded, extended family.
Although this was not unprecedented among brown bears, the bonding between bears 909, 910, and their cubs was something that I had never seen before. I was fascinated by the story—so much so that I wrote a paper for the peer-review journal Ursus. Please head over to explore.org’s blog to read more and check out the paper in Ursus.
Bears 909 and 910 sit next to Brooks River in 2019, which was their second year of independence.
One of the difficulties that the NPS, among many federal agencies, is facing is the presidential administration’s freezing of funding that Congress has already appropriated. This is on top of the loss of thousands of employees already this year due to (often coerced) resignations and unjust firings. None of those actions were approved by Congress. Congressman Jared Golden, who represents my congressional district, has recently introduced the Protect our Parks Act of 2025 which would require the Secretary of the Interior to use funds that were already appropriated to complete NPS projects and fully staff national parks and reinstate employees that were unjustifiably fired. It is good legislation. A stop gap, for sure, but worth urging your member of Congress to vote for.
North America was once home to the world’s most abundant wild bird. Although passenger pigeons could be found anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains, they concentrated their abundance between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, especially from the Great Lakes to the Mid Atlantic and east to Massachusetts. No one knows how many passenger pigeons roamed North America a mere two hundred years ago, but credible estimates suggest three to five billion—a population size that may have exceeded that of any population for any other bird species on Earth. Flocks of pigeons could be so numerous and so dense as to block the light of the sun “as by an eclipse” as John James Audubon experienced in 1813.
Passenger pigeons were also intensely social. Their roosts were communal. So many birds could alight on a tree that branches and sometimes whole trees broke under their collective weight. Their guano collected on the ground like snow. Successful reproduction hinged on a critical mass of birds finding suitable food. They were omnivores, yet fruits and seeds formed the bulk of their diet even when nesting. Masting species such as beech and oaks were preferred. A year with a good acorn crop could sustain breeding flocks that included tens of millions of individuals.
When men arrived with firearms, the pigeon’s sociability and flocking behavior proved to be their Achilles heel. Passenger pigeons lived a nomadic lifestyle—moving between areas with enough food to support their prodigious numbers—but when they settled in an area to breed, people flocked to them like the birds flocked to acorns. Hunters shot into flying flocks and as they roosted in trees, often killing and maiming dozens at a time. Nets and traps were designed to capture hundreds of birds at once. Nestlings, known as squabs, were knocked out of their nests with poles before they could fly or the trees with squabs were cut down or burned. Barrels of dead birds were shipped away and sold in city markets. They were often captured and used for target practice and shooting competitions. “Clay” pigeons in modern shooting sports are replacements for shooting live pigeons, including passenger pigeons.
The human toll was so intense that passenger pigeons went from the planet’s most numerous bird to extinct within one human lifetime.1 We’ll never experience them again. Martha, the last remaining passenger pigeon, died on September 1, 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Martha, that last surviving passenger pigeon, photographed in 1912. Few photographic subjects are as sad as a photo of the last surviving member of its species.
Uncontrolled, unregulated hunting was the ultimate cause of the passenger pigeon’s extinction, although their demise coincided with intense deforestation across the majority of their range. By the late 1800s, all but shreds of forest were removed from the pigeon’s range. They faced unrelenting human pressure on two fronts: direct killing and habitat loss. I wonder if passenger pigeons could have survived the slaughter if enough undisturbed forest remained for them to find refuge and raise their young until market hunting was outlawed in the U.S. and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 provided formal protection.
All this makes a proposed regulatory change to the Endangered Species Act2 (ESA) all the more asinine. Segments of our society and culture have yet to understand the necessity of habitat in preventing extinction or realize the immorality of extinction.
Since its passage, the ESA has been the most powerful and impactful regulatory tool in preventing extinction in the United States. The ESA is not perfect, but it has helped prevent the extinction of more than 99 precent of threatened and endangered species under the act’s protection. It works well largely because the ESA includes habitat loss alongside hurting/killing of threatened or endangered individual organisms in its definition of “harm.” If, for example, an endangered plant lives in a wetland then you couldn’t excavate a ditch to drain the wetland. That would prevent the plant from surviving and reproducing. Draining the wetland alters the plant’s habitat negatively when the plant needs the wetland’s hydrology intact to survive. Current federal ESA regulations would consider such a scenario as “take” because draining the wetland would caused clear harm to the endangered plants. The ESA would prohibit altering the wetland even if no person went into the wetland to kill or damage the plants.
For wildlife and plants, habitat is equivalent to home. Protecting habitat is a logical and necessary step to prevent extinction. Often, it is the first step.
Yet the federal government proposes to redefine “harm” as it relates to the ESA so that habitat loss and destruction are not sources of harm for threatened or endangered species. The summary for the rule change states, “The existing regulatory definition of ‘harm,’ which includes habitat modification, runs contrary to the best meaning of the statutory term ‘take.’” In other words, harm to an organism’s home is not equivalent to harm to individuals. (The background and summary info then attempt to justify this point by arguing the ESA was never really meant to protect habitat, and “harm” should be limited to killing, capturing, or injuring. It cites Supreme Court cases and dissents about what “take” means. I’m not a lawyer or legal scholar so I won’t attempt to weigh an opinion on whether the cases are applicable to the ESA but, frankly, if there is any ambiguity then Congress should amend the ESA so that habitat destruction is “take” and “harm.” That’s an unrealistic dream in today’s political climate, I know.)
Limiting the ESA’s definition of harm to only killing and hurting individual organisms is a vastly unscientific and illogical decision. The consequences of the proposed change could be catastrophic for endangered species. It would allow the federal government to ignore the importance of habitat when evaluating development and other activities on threatened and endangered species. Building a dam that blocks endangered salmon from migrating would not be “harm” because the dam didn’t outright kill salmon returning to spawn; they just couldn’t spawn. Cutting down a condor’s nesting tree wouldn’t be “harm” as long the condors weren’t injured when the tree fell. Draining an endemic salamander’s stream wouldn’t be “harm” because you didn’t kill or capture any salamanders; they simply lost their home and food. Building an oil rig in a polar bear maternal denning area wouldn’t be “harm” if the mother polar bears aren’t in the dens; it wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t find denning habitat elsewhere. Building a parking lot on a sage grouse lek wouldn’t be “harm” because the grouse didn’t die during construction; they simply couldn’t court and reproduce. Polluting a river so that sea grass beds die wouldn’t be “harm;” it didn’t directly poison any manatees to death, just led to their slow starvation.
Perhaps with adequate habitat protections in place, passenger pigeons could still be part of our shared landscape. We’ll never know.
Since Martha’s death, extinction rates have accelerated due to human pressure. Market hunting may be a thing of the past in the United States at least, but habitat loss is not. A 2022 study found that habitat destruction was the main threat of extinction for 71 percent of endangered species worldwide. (Overexploitation, which is another way of stating human hunting/harvest was the main factor for 7.4 percent of endangered species.) The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists 28 percent of all assessed species as threatened with extinction. Humans and our livestock and pets outweigh wild vertebrates globally. Vertebrate animals populations have declined more than 70 percent worldwide since the 1970s. In North America alone, bird populations are reduced 3 billion compared to the 1970s—a stat that doesn’t include the loss of passenger pigeons. Most fish populations are overexploited and many are near collapse. We’re poised to mine the deep sea even though we have seen almost none of the life that exists there. All this has happened within my lifetime, and while people in our government argue with a straight face that habitat considerations should not be included in ESA’s regulations. The ultimate legacy of my generation and my parents’ generation may be to leave behind an ecologically impoverished planet. It is a moral failing.
I recently read Apocalypse Never, a book that, through a great deal of cherry-picked data, contends (unsuccessfully IMO) that climate change and biodiversity loss aren’t big deals. At the end of the book, the author Michael Shellenberger writes, “Scientists have long named self-interest as the reason for why humans should care about endangered species like the mountain gorilla. But if the mountain gorillas were ever to go extinct, humankind would become spiritually, not materially, poorer.”
In our short time on Earth, segments of humanity have been insulated from the material costs of extinction, largely because the nature supporting different groups of people wasn’t directly tied to the survival of any one species. When the last mammoth died, were people in Australia or Africa affected? When Steller’s sea cow vanished, did the farmer watching pigeons in Pennsylvania notice? When the last passenger pigeon died, did people in Japan or Bangladesh or Sweden mourn?
Yet extinction is an impoverishing event. We don’t know, and can’t know, how we’d value passenger pigeons today. We know that we are materially poorer because we’ve been denied the opportunity to integrate passenger pigeons into a possible sustainable economy—which, yes, could include hunting. Culturally and spiritually, we’ll never experience the joy and awe that some people must have felt as they watched pigeons blot out the sun like an eclipse. We don’t know what else they might have offered. We cannot truly understand or evaluate the possible effects that billions of pigeons had on temperate forests in eastern North America. We were denied the opportunity to know. Likewise, the extinction of mountain gorillas would affect communities in parts of Central Africa. What’s the value—materially, culturally, spiritually—of a gorilla? It is not our place to decide. It is our place to give future generations the opportunity to discover.
When sitting in a comfortable chair surrounded by material wealth it is easy to shrug your shoulders when a species winks out of existence, but allowing extinction is an immoral act. We should know better. Leopold in Sand County Almanac and Kimmerer in The Serviceberry have envisioned better futures. I’m not sure that we are wise enough to heed their advice.
It is immoral to deny future generations the wealth—however you define it—that non-human organisms provide. Moreover, humanity doesn’t own Earth or the organisms we share the planet with. Governments and corporations don’t either. Our non-human neighbors belong to themselves and the future. Morality compels that we don’t arbitrate whether a species is worthy of existence.3 We can continue to be complicit in extinction by allowing governments and corporations to sacrifice species for material wealth or we can build a sustainable future.
Nature is life. Earth is the Ark. We can be its caretakers or simply its takers.
The public comment period for the proposed regulatory change closed on May 19, before I published this post. ↩︎
This isn’t an absolute. We can defend ourselves from organisms that cause us harm such as the Guinea worm or the protozoan that causes malaria. It is ethical to remedy the suffering certain organisms cause us. These are decisions to make on a case-by-case basis. ↩︎
I want to write about people if you’ll indulge me. This is a topic that I almost never delve into, since I find the human realm less interesting than the non-human and the overall behavior of my fellow humans to be disappointing. (“Hey let’s start another war.” “Hey, I don’t care if the climate gets warmer.” “The suffering of others isn’t something that affects me.” etc.) I’ll touch on politics too, which I loathe. Not that I don’t remain engaged on issues that matter, and I always vote, but I find politics exhausting. The rhetoric from elected leaders and pundits is often disingenuous at best and too often purposefully deceitful. Our media industry, especially social media platforms, uses it to monetize outrage and divisiveness. I want to avoid adding to the cycle that got us here if that is at all possible.
But to be blunt, we’re experiencing a purge of national park staff that threatens the stability of parks.
I worked in nine U.S. national parks, mostly as an interpretive ranger. Those are the rangers that lead programs, staff the visitor centers, and generally try to give people meaningful experiences. Although I no longer work for the National Park Service (NPS), I maintain close ties to parks across the country through family, friends, colleagues, the Katmai Conservancy, and my work for explore.org. Parks survive as places of significance through the support of the public and the work of NPS employees. The ability, however, of the NPS and other federal agencies to manage our public lands is facing a demanding, unnecessary challenge that will cause harm to these irreplaceable spaces.
By now, you’ve likely heard of the Fork in the Road, an attempt led by Elon Musk at the behest of the President to reduce the size of the U.S. federal workforce. Almost all federal civilian employees were offered a deferred resignation. Setting aside the confusion it sowed, its uncertain legality, and its ignorance of established regulations, the Fork was a not-so-subtle attempt to strong-arm employees into making a hasty decision about their careers. Those who didn’t take the offer were in no small way threatened that their jobs were not secure. “We cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency,” as the Fork in the Road email stated in reference to those who do not accept the resignation offer.
The total number of employees who took the offer hasn’t been fully tallied, but it is likely that a few tens of thousands of people did resign across the entire federal government. As part of his justification, Musk argues that unelected bureaucrats have too much power, even as he fails to understand that he is now the quintessential example of an unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat. It is the Spiderman meme for real.
The Fork in the Road window is over, so to further reduce the federal workforce the administration is firing thousands of employees who were within a probationary period—a generally 1 – 2 year window that acts as an employment trial. Here is a good primer if you’re interested. During that time, your supervisor can decide whether your performance is acceptable. If it is, then great. Good work. Continue. We’re glad to have you. If it isn’t, then you could be fired due to poor performance. At least that is how it is supposed to work.
On February 14, about 1000 people lost their jobs in the National Park Service. That number could grow. Other land management agencies are targeted too such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (which manages wildlife refuges and endangered species), the U.S. Forest Service (which manages national forests and employs the nation’s largest wildfire fighting force), and the Bureau of Land Management (which manages large swaths of public lands that aren’t refuges, parks, or national forests).
The Fork in the Road and mass firings are different from Bill Clinton’s methods to reduce the federal workforce in the 1990s. Namely, Clinton’s plan was approved by Congress and implemented over three years. The current administration’s plan is not Congressionally approved. Its tactics are different too. Probationary employees are being fired en masse without consideration of the value of their job, the benefits they provide to the public, the skills they possess, or their work performance. The justification for the firings is nothing more than “not in the public interest” according to the emails they’ve received. That’s not a rational justification. It is pure ideological fervor that harms real people.
How does this affect the national park that I am most connected with, Katmai? Although I’m hopeful that many of Katmai’s probationary staff may be exempted from the firings, a loss of just a few staff members at Katmai will have a disproportionately large negative impact. Katmai’s year-round staff includes perhaps 30 people. In contrast, Yellowstone has closer to 750 year-round staff. Absorbing staffing cuts is generally easier for parks with a larger staff. Additionally, the administration has implemented a hiring freeze for most seasonal positions. Reports indicate that the NPS is allowed to hire 5,000 seasonal staff, but the park staff that I’ve talked to remain unsure if they will be able to hire all the staff they need. Five thousand seasonal employees is well short of the typical 7,000 to 8,000 that are usually hired annually.
The delay jeopardizes the ability of supervisors to hire, train, and get seasonal rangers in parks for the busiest time of the year. Katmai and most national parks cannot function properly without their seasonal workforce.
The NPS at Katmai employs about 12 seasonal interpretive rangers for Brooks Camp. These rangers provide mandatory bear safety talks, manage access to the extremely popular Brooks Falls wildlife-viewing platform, help in bear management situations, operate the visitor center, and lead programs. Most of the maintenance, law enforcement, and bear technicians (rangers that manage bear and human conflict) are also seasonal employees. The federal hiring freeze has created extraordinary uncertainty regarding the NPS’s ability to hire seasonal staff and get them ready to run Brooks Camp. The purge of probationary employees may also lead to the loss of some supervisors for the seasonal staff. Due to the administration’s actions, we’re likely at a breaking point where park staff will not be able to keep up with the workload that already exists.
For decades, the National Park Service has coped with too few employees for the work. Congress also saddles the NPS with perpetual budget deficits. I don’t think I ever had a supervisor in the nine parks that I worked at who wasn’t nearly or actually overwhelmed with work. Both Republicans and Democrats are at fault for this.
I wonder if you visited a park site if you would have noticed, because the NPS is really good at doing more with less. The NPS hides the stress and low morale felt by their employees and crumbling infrastructure behind smiling rangers wearing flat hats. Most people who aren’t employees don’t see the struggle to keep parks functional, the efforts made to ensure that people have good experiences despite ever increasing visitation, the knowledge and commitment necessary to study and protect ecosystems, or feel the day to day stress that comes with never being able to keep up. This spring and summer are likely to be some of the most challenging seasons that NPS employees have ever faced. People will still want to visit parks. They’ll still go to parks, but the NPS will lack the staff to provide for the best, safest experience.
The NPS shouldn’t hide the ramifications of mass firings and the seasonal job hiring freeze.
Layoffs don’t make the work of rangers go away. The public will see the results in the form of shuttered visitor centers, damage to park infrastructure, vandalism, increased emergency response time, wildlife harassment, poaching, road damage, campground closures, overflowing parking areas, and unclean bathrooms. Those things are difficult enough to address when parks are fully staffed. It is easier, cheaper, and more efficient to prevent those issues from occurring than to deal with the aftermath, just like it is easier to prevent infection through proper hygiene than to clean a wound of gangrene. Neglecting public lands now is a tax on the future.
“Where is the money supposed to come from?” you might ask. “After all, the national debt keeps going up and up and up.” If economics matter to you, then please consider that national park tourism generates more revenue than it costs the parks to operate and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide outside of the NPS. The requested NPS budget in 2023, for example, was $4.75 billion, while the 2023 economic output of national parks was more than $55 billion. For every dollar invested in national parks, taxpayers get much more in return. I bet our Congress and President find money for more bombs in the midst of all this. There always seems to be money for more bombs. They might also fight to provide more tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy because the rich always seem to need more money to feed their greed. So let’s not pretend that firing hardworking and dedicated NPS employees is a true means to reduce debt or taxpayer burden or make government more efficient. It is driven by an ideological agenda.
Our public lands are the nation’s most cherished spaces. The tech billionaires and politicians want you to think that it is GDP, stock values, Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook. In reality it is our shared democratic spaces such as parks, wildlife refuges, and national forests.
Most everyone can agree that the U.S. government can spend its money more wisely and efficiently. I favor that. I would question the rationality of anyone who thinks otherwise. Scapegoating federal employees as the problem, however, isn’t a solution. The goal of elected leaders should be to make government work better, not break it. But here we are.
If you’ve read this far, you’re likely a Brooks River bearcam watcher. It remains to be seen how firings will ultimately affect the operation of Brooks Camp this summer. Yet more people than ever before visited Brooks Camp in 2024 (about 19,000 according to park statistics provided to me). Even if visitation declines overall, the nature of the Brooks Camp experience means that it will remain an intensely managed place. Katmai will be especially challenged to ensure that bears and people are safe at the park’s most visited site. The bearcams on explore.org will not be affected, thankfully, but that is of little solace to me knowing that friends and colleagues may be fired solely for ideology. It is not ethical. It is not in the best interest of the taxpayer. It is cruel.
Finally, there’s been a lot of talk of loyalty from the administration. Federal workers need to be loyal, etc. Loyalty for NPS employees doesn’t mean capitulating to a presidential administration’s ideology, which comes and goes on the will of voters. Loyalty for NPS employees means staying loyal to the NPS mission and purpose, which was established by Congressional law in 1916. It is in the U.S. Code. NPS employees cannot escape it nor should they.
The NPS mission is somewhat contradictory and often frustrating to fulfill. I lived the contradiction as a ranger when struggling to determine how to best provide for enjoyment without impairing the things that make parks special. Ensuring that parks meet their Congressional mandates is where the loyalty of NPS employees truly rests. That’s how it is supposed to work. It safeguards parks against the whims of politicians.
I would still consider the current methods to purge the government workforce as wrong even if it were applied to areas of government that I disagree with on principle. Don’t hand the reins of power to an unelected billionaire bureaucrat. Consider how you’d react if you are on the other end of overreaching, unchecked presidential powers in the future. If you don’t like the way that the NPS operates, then work through Congress to change it.
If this is an issue that matters to you and you haven’t contacted your congressional representatives about it, please do. Calling might be better than writing, but this template has some good starting points to communicate. There are a lot of other reasons to write to them as well like their efforts to erase the existence of Trans people. We can get through this but not without holding elected and unelected people accountable, and not without reining in the powers of the presidency.
In Maine, Atlantic salmon are highly endangered. Prior to European colonization and, later, industrialization of the landscape’s rivers, hundreds of thousands of salmon returned to spawn in Maine every spring. Now, however, a so-called good year includes the return of 1,500 fish to the Penobscot River, which is Maine’s most productive salmon river, and maybe 2,000 fish total statewide. Maine is also the only state with runs of wild Atlantic salmon.
Kennebec River used to be one of Maine’s great salmon rivers, but its Atlantic salmon are nearly extinct. The recent 10-year average (from 2014-2023) of annual returning adult salmon at the Lockwood fish lift in Waterville, Maine is a mere 51 fish. Salmon fare so poorly in the Kennebec because they encounter four impassible dams between Waterville and Skowhegan. Even so, there’s an opportunity to save the Kennebec’s salmon run if we act now.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is considering relicensing operations on four hydropower dams on the Kennebec River. For decades, these dams have lacked any effective fish passage for salmon and have prevented salmon from reaching upstream spawning areas. If the dams are kept in place, even with improved fish passage efforts, we can expect the dams to continue to harm salmon and heighten their risk of extinction.
Unfortunately, FERC’s draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the dams calls for relicensing the facilities at the expense of salmon. At the end of this post, you’ll find the comments that I submitted to FERC about its DEIS. I found reason for extraordinary concern in FERC’s conclusions.
We know that dam removal works to restore fish runs. One of the first and best examples was on the Kennebec in Augusta. The 1999 removal of the Edwards Dam led to a great resurgence of shad, sturgeon, striped bass, river herring, and alewives to the lower Kennebec. Elsewhere in Maine, many people and organizations have worked diligently over the last few decades to restore Atlantic salmon with the largest success occurring on the Penobscot River. (This short podcast explores current efforts to restore sea-run fish in the Penobscot.) On the West Coast, the removal of dams on Washington State’s Elwah River allowed salmon to return in numbers not seen there in 100 years. In California right now, efforts are underway to remove large dams on the Klamath River to open hundreds of miles of river to Chinook and other salmon. In Washington and Idaho there is a growing chorus of support to remove impassible dams on the Snake River for the benefit of salmon and the species (including people) who depend on them.
The upper Kennebec River, though, remains imperiled because four dams block passage of sea-run fish. The few salmon that attempt to return to the upper Kennebec must be captured and transported by truck around the dams to reach any spawning habitat.
In its DEIS, FERC proposes to relicense the dams of the Shawmet Project on the Kennebec. This seems to be another example of conservation minimalism, which was defined in a 2023 paper as “Any minimal standard [that] inevitably excludes some worthwhile conservation targets—values, obligations, and principles that ought to be upheld, or specific ecosystems and species that ought to be protected—by factoring them out as irrelevant to the specified minimum.” That is, humans taking everything but the bare minimum. We allow a species to persist only in greatly restricted ranges or low overall numbers or both. Regarding salmon, the cost-benefit analysis of dams are too often viewed through a lens that obscures the ecological and cultural benefits of fully restored salmon runs. That viewpoint does not allow for the restoration and maintenance of salmon at their fully realized ecologic potential.
Too often, “balancing” the wants of people and needs of wildlife, including fish such as salmon, has meant a cumulative degradation and loss of wildlife habitat. Therefore, the so-called balance is not a compromise with wildlife but harm forced on wildlife and their habitats. These decisions eat away at our natural heritage, piece by piece, leaving each successive human generation with a more impoverished environment than the last. FERC is on the cusp of repeating that mistake on the Kennebec unless the FERC requires stronger, more effective fish passage structures for the Shawmut Project beyond what is already proposed in the DEIS or the dams are removed. These dams are not worth more than salmon. Extinction cannot be an option.
Please comment on the DEIS (docket 2322) if you can (which is not a simple process so see these instructions). But I realize this is a last minute request since the comment period closes today (June 4), and most people don’t have time to wade into a 400-page environmental impact statement. So if you can’t comment this time, then I ask you to keep salmon and other sea-run fish in mind when you make your daily decisions. Vote for people who support wild, sustainable populations of fish and will work to improve protections for salmon, which includes tackling climate change ASAP. Don’t eat farmed salmon, as farmed salmon are one of the greatest threats to the viability of Atlantic salmon in North America, especially in Maritime Canada. Finally, please share the amazing journeys of salmon with people you know. The more people who appreciate the remarkable lives of salmon the better.
Thanks for reading and for your support of wild salmon. Below are my comments on the Shawmut Hydroelectric Project. (FERC restricts comments to 6000 characters, which is quite limiting considering that the documents about relicensing dams often run for hundreds of pages. Nevertheless, I tried my best with the character limit.)
I’m writing to urge FERC to recommend the decommissioning of the Shawmut Hydroelectric Project No. 2322 (Shawmut Project) on the Kennebec river. The fish passage measures outlined in the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) are inadequate and will likely prevent the restoration of self-sustaining runs of sea-run fish, especially Atlantic salmon. FERC should recommend the Shawmut Project’s dams be removed on the Kennebec River.
We lack the necessary skill and knowledge to engineer fish passage that allows all migratory fish species to overcome the challenges created by dams. On the Kennebec River, it is particularly difficult to provide adequate fish passage around dams because the river is home to at least ten diadromous species that migrate at different times of day, different times of the year, and under different hydrologic conditions.
Of utmost concern is the Kennebec’s run of Atlantic salmon, a distinct population that is highly endangered. Their recovery is doubtful as long as dams exist on the Kennebec. The DEIS contains no substantive evidence that adding additional fish passage to the four dams on the lower Kennebec will favor Atlantic salmon and enhance their recovery to a point where the population is no longer endangered.
I’m greatly concerned that Brookfield’s proposed fish passage measures will not provide salmon with the opportunity to migrate rapidly upstream or downstream. For example, page xx of the draft EIS states,
“Brookfield also intends to achieve an adult salmon upstream passage effectiveness standard of 96% within 48 hours of a fish approaching each project, in order to achieve a cumulative upstream effectiveness standard of 84.9% through all four projects within 192 hours.”
“Resident time” is double speak for substantial, harmful migration delays imposed on salmon. A 192-hour delay is an 8-day delay for a salmon to travel about 18 river miles between the lowermost and uppermost dam of the Shawmut Project. Since Atlantic salmon are reliant on stored body fat and protein to fuel upstream migration, this will cost adult salmon vital energy reserves as they attempt to find a way past the dams with negative consequences on their reproductive survival.
Dams make river water warmer and slow its flow. Under future climate conditions, the Kennebec may become warmer during salmon migration periods. Warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen and increases the metabolism of salmon. Therefore, the effects of an 8-day delay will decrease salmon survival and reproduction upstream, regardless of the modeled 84.9% effectiveness.
Pages 55-57 of the DEIS explore the risks of such a delay on salmon, yet somehow the significant, cumulative, and negative consequences of delays due to the dams are deemed acceptable by FERC. Pg 57 of the DEIS states, “Brookfield’s proposal to test the fishway effectiveness and implement additional adaptive management measures … is a reasonable approach.”
However, FERC’s conclusions on page 57 are not consistent with the science cited in the DEIS. For example, page 56 of the DEIS includes the remarkable statistic that under a four dam scenario on the Kennebec 37.4% of the run would die before spawning. As the Kennebec Atlantic salmon population is close to extinction–the recent 10-year average (from 2014-2023) of annual adults returns at the Lockwood fish lift is a mere 51 fish (DEIS page 44)–then a nearly 40% mortality due to dam-caused migration delays is completely unacceptable.
Additionally, on page 52 of the DEIS notes that Brookfield “would modify or construct additional fishways only if needed after its proposed fishways are complete and have been tested for effectiveness.” This position also risks further harm to salmon. If new fish passage structures are ineffective, then the Kennebec’s salmon may already be faring worse than now. The most parsimonious and beneficial strategy for Atlantic salmon would be to require, beyond doubt, reasonable and effective fish passage as part of the relicensing process or decommission the dams. Based on the best scientific evidence, FERC’s position is neither reasonable or scientifically justifiable.
Additionally, the reasons why certain species of fish do not take to artificial fish passageways is sometimes unknown. Rivers are complex systems and artificial fish passageways only grossly approximate the conditions the fish would experience in the absence of dams.
A free-flowing Kennebec River and naturally self sustaining runs of diadromous fish are worth more—economically, ecologically, and culturally—than anything the Shawmut Hydroelectric Project can provide.
Maine’s rivers likely never supported tens of millions of salmon, but they could and should support hundreds of thousands of salmon and tens of millions of sea-run fish collectively. Instead, status quo industrialization threatens to keep our watersheds impoverished. It is difficult to imagine the richness of a river full of salmon in Maine because that phenomenon hasn’t been experienced here in many generations. We suffer from a multi-generational amnesia that has us collectively accepting the near or complete absence of salmon and other sea-run in our rivers when their absence is not at all normal. The DEIS somehow tries, and fails, to justify that the current status quo is okay when it is not.
The electricity generated by the dams can be replaced easily by wind and solar installations. Energy conservation measures across the state could also be implemented to mitigate the loss of the hydropower. As long as these dams exist, the Kennebec’s Atlantic salmon are likely to remain endangered or, at best, exist only as a remnant population, while people and the ecosystem will never experience the full benefits of healthy runs of Atlantic salmon and other diadromous fish. Do not relicense the dams. It is the wrong decision and guarantees, with near certainty, that Atlantic salmon will remain endangered for the foreseeable future.
As is tradition—going way back to the before times (2017)—I’ve endorsed a bear for Fat Bear Week. This year’s bracket might be difficult to predict, but with voting commencing today at 12 p.m. Eastern and continuing through October 11, it’s time to throw my weight behind a Fat Bear Week contender.
I’d let him speak for himself but his mouth is usually too full of salmon.
Friends, humans, and ursids, let us stand in awe of a true competitor. A candidate with conviction. A candidate with strength. A candidate that stands up for what he believes. A candidate the size of a double-wide refrigerator. This Fat Bear Week vote for the mighty 747.
747 returns to Brooks River every summer as a giant and just keeps getting bigger.
Perhaps you don’t want to listen to me. After all, I’ve endorsed 747 before and it hasn’t usually led to his victory. Our culture is celebrity obsessed, though, so maybe you’ll listen the expert opinions of these randos.
Homer remarked that 747 is the only other individual whose blubber flies like his.
Dr. Evil threatened world destruction if 747 fails to win.
I spoke with the President too, believe it or not. (He seems to clear his schedule when you have something to say about Fat Bear Week.) Joe Biden noted that 747 grew proportionally faster than this year’s inflation rate.
747’s summer was one of competition and success. In June and July, he yielded space to bear 856. By August, however, 747 turned the tables. He frequently challenged and displaced his long-time rival.
It’s hard work staying dominant and getting fat too. Bears as large as 747 tend to overheat easily, and while their limb bones are built to support their great mass sometimes climbing those hills is a struggle.
Name another bear who struggles uphill with such finesse. Here's a full minute of 747 riding a leisurely struggle bus. pic.twitter.com/mUoM4JxbbK
You also can’t get that fat without eating a lot of food, and 747 excels in this life goal. Although we don’t know exactly how many fish 747 ate this year, a study about brown bears on Kodiak Island may provide some insight.
Brown bears shed their fur once per year in early to mid summer. Since new fur grows during a bear’s active season, it contains a record of what the bear ate during that time. Studies of captive bears had previously determined the relationship between the mercury content in food and the mercury content in hair. To apply this to bears on Kodiak, researchers first determined how much mercury is found in the Pacific salmon that spawn on Kodiak. They then analyzed the mercury content found in the bears’ hair to gain an estimate of salmon consumption. Large adult males, on average, ate 6,146 pounds (2,788 kg) per bear per year! Some adult males ate a lot more, though, as much as 10,000 pounds of salmon. Since 747 fished at Brooks Falls almost every day between late June and mid September this summer, then his total salmon consumption may likely have been near the upper end of that spectrum.
For fisheries managers and biologists, these statistics are more than pieces of trivia. They are necessary to help inform decisions about salmon escapement goals, so that salmon runs are sustainable for people and the wildlife who depend on them. The aforementioned Kodiak study found that “the estimated population of 2,300 subadult and adult bears [on Kodiak] consumed 3.77 million kg of salmon annually, a mass equal to ~6 percent of the combined escapement and commercial [salmon] harvest (57.6 million kg).” Katmai National Park’s bear population is about as large as Kodiak’s, and when we work to sustain salmon runs we’re also celebrating the life they provide to many other species and individuals, such as bear 747.
Bears get fat to survive winter hibernation, and Katmai National Park’s Fat Bear Week bears are well positioned to weather the oncoming famine. But there’s candidate who eclipses the rest. Your bear might be a 10 but 747 is 1,400 pounds. I’m voting for 747, are you?
Download your bracket from FatBearWeek.org and go there to vote in each Fat Bear Week match from October 5 to 11.
THE THING ABOUT BEARS IS THAT A LOT OF THEM ARE BIG. BUT LIKE HAVE YOU SEEN 747?? HE’S SO BIG. A GIANT, REALLY. HE JUST SITS THERE AND FISHES LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW. I MEAN HE HARDLY LEFT THE FALLS ALL SUMMER. DOESN’T MATTER HOW COLD THE WATER IS OR WHICH OTHER BEARS ARE THERE….
Brooks Falls is, without question, the most famous place in Katmai National Park and one of the most famous wildlife-watching destinations in North America. Even if you can’t place it on a map, you’ve likely seen it in a wildlife film, in a photograph, or on TV. Search “bear catching salmon,” for example, and nearly all of the first 50 photos are of a bear standing on the lip of Brooks Falls.
On a sunny, warm morning in mid July 2021, I arrive at the boardwalk leading to the falls after hiking the short trail through the surrounding spruce forest. It’s a promising time to visit. The early summer sockeye salmon migration is in full swing and hungry bears are eager to catch them. But about halfway along the boardwalk, I realize the chances of reaching the falls in a timely manner are slim. At a covered platform nicknamed the Treehouse, where the boardwalk forks and leads to different viewpoints of the river, there’s a wall of people.
Under the Treehouse roof, about 25 people surround a frazzled park ranger who clutches a metal clipboard. The clipboard and the scribble of names he places on it are the ranger’s only lifeline to a semblance of order—it’s the waitlist for the groups wanting to gain access to the platform overlooking the falls. Like a restaurant maître d’, the ranger greets new arrivals, take their names, and asks others to wait their turn when people fill the Falls platform to its 40-person capacity. He also imposes a one-hour time limit for people at the Falls so that those who are waiting have a chance to go there.
Few people normally hang out at the Treehouse voluntarily, since if offers no lines of sight to the river and its bears. Therefore, the crowd at the Treehouse this morning indicates that the wait time to access the falls is substantial. Having staffed the platforms as a ranger in the past, I don’t wish to add to this ranger’s workload or anyone’s wait time this morning. Instead, I look for space at the adjacent Riffles Platform where rangers don’t manage a specific capacity.
I don’t find much space there either. About 20 people occupy it already. Even more fill in gaps within a few minutes of my arrival as the queue for the Falls platform grows larger. With 40 people at the falls, 25 in the treehouse, 30 or more at the nearby Riffles platform, and surely more to come, I leave for a a less crowded space.
The lower fourth of Brooks River meanders through seasonally flooded marshes and gravel bars before spilling into the glacially-fed and turquoise-colored Naknek Lake, the largest lake wholly contained within any U.S. national park. The lower river offers space and safety for mother bears and their cubs who choose to avoid the risks posed by the larger males fishing at the falls. Young, recently weaned bears also use the area as a place to socialize and graze on tender grass with less risk of encountering a larger, more dominant competitor. It’s also the most ecologically diverse place along the river so even if there are no bears in sight, there’s usually something to catch your eye.
About 20 minutes after leaving the falls boardwalk I arrive at the lower river and station myself on a platform adjacent to the long footbridge that leads to Brooks Lodge and the park visitor center. The perch allows me to see most of the river mouth as well as the meandering reverse S-curve upstream. Few bears use the lower river as I sit, although the vicinity remains filled with activity. A near continuous high-decibel, high-pitched whine fills the air as float planes arrive and taxi to the lakeshore. They disgorge their passengers out of my line of sight, but each plane must’ve been filled to capacity. Over the next hour, I count more than 200 people crossing the bridge toward the falls. Almost none walk in the opposite direction. I sympathize mentally with the Treehouse ranger who is likely clutching his clipboard even more tightly.
Later in the day, another ranger reports to me that the wait to reach the Falls platform exceeded two hours at its peak. In total more than 350 people arrived at Brooks Camp this day, which doesn’t seem like much, but that’s on top of the pilots and guides who brought people here, the 30 people who stayed in the campground, the 50-60 people who stayed in the lodge, the 30 concession employees, and the 20 park staff. Even with my conservative math, about 500 people occupied Brooks Camp, all attempting to share a 1.5 mile-long river corridor with two to three dozen brown bears.
By the end of summer 2021 more than 15,000 people visited Brooks Camp—most of whom arrived in July and all of whom used infrastructure largely designed in the 1980s and 1990s to accommodate about half to two-thirds as much at most. It’s double the visitation of 2007, the first year I worked as a ranger at Brooks Camp.
The popularity of national parks is a welcome sign that these spaces are important and meaningful to broad swaths of the public. It wasn’t that long ago, that a National Park Service director wondered aloud whether parks were losing their relevancy. However, at the same time that our national parks experience record high visitation many more people encounter significant barriers that inhibit them from experiencing these places. I might’ve been sharing Brooks River with 500 people that day last July, but millions more are denied the opportunity. In an era of great crowding in our national parks, I wonder, do we have the determination to make parks accessible to everyone?
⚠️Wednesday, Mar. 23 9:20am: The park is currently full, and we are temporarily delaying entries into the park. Vehicles attempting to enter the park should return in 3-5 hours.
Consider visiting nearby attractions. Check this account for updates before returning.
The first national parks in the United States were protected for their scenic splendor, unique features, and wildlife. Nothing compares to Yellowstone’s geyser basins, Yosemite’s towering granitic cliffs, or Sequoia’s majestic trees. However, broad public support for these areas in the late 1800s was lacking. Yellowstone, Sequoia, Yosemite and Mount Rainier—the first four national parks created by Congress—were remote and difficult to access. Upon their establishment, they lacked the facilities and basic infrastructure necessary to accommodate large numbers of people. Even so, the park boosters, advocates, and visitors who had experienced these landscapes understood they were special places.
To build a constituency for parks and facilitate a national park experience for more people, the earliest park managers built roads, trails, campgrounds, and visitor centers. They hired rangers. They allowed concessioners to build and operate hotels, lodges, restaurants, and trinket shops. After Congress established the National Park Service (NPS) in 1916, the fledging agency doubled down on infrastructure development. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration constructed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles of trails and roads within park boundaries. Soon after, a post-WWII travel boom highlighted a need to modernize parks and accommodate a tsunami of people (visitation to all national parks combined increased from about 3.5 million to almost 30 million between 1931 and 1948). The effort was sanctioned by Congress in 1956 through the Mission 66 program, a 10-year-long and billion-dollar plan to expand and modernize facilities and infrastructure in national parks.
Making parks physically accessible to greater numbers of travelers established the experiential paradigm that national parks function within today. Namely, a physical visit to a park inspires people and leads them to become park stewards and supporters.
The effort, it can be convincingly argued, worked. More people visited. More people had great experiences. More people cared for parks. It helped fuel a burgeoning environmental awareness and protection movement. The paradigm, it seemed, had created more stewards than ever before. But not everyone was pleased with the trajectory of tourism in national parks.
In Desert Solitaire, one of Ed Abbey’s most well known essays is “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and National Parks.” Much of the book and “Polemic,” especially, is based on Abbey’s experience working as a ranger at then Arches National Monument in the 1950s, a time before pavement bisected the little visited park in southeast Utah.
Abbey seemed to enjoy his job. He muses something that probably every ranger, including me, has thought at one time or another: “On the rare occasions when I peer into the future more than a few days I can foresee myself returning here for season after season, year after year, indefinitely. What better sinecure could a man with small needs, infinite desires, and philosophic pretensions ask for?”
But, as Abbey saw it, not all was rosy at Arches. He writes, “For there is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its name is Progress.” Under the direction of the National Park Service, Arches soon transitioned from an off-the-beaten-path retreat to a major tourist destination.
Abbey experienced Arches as the NPS implemented its Mission 66 plan. He worried and warned that national parks were threatened by “industrial tourism” whose “chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks.”
Abbey’s “Polemic,” true to the title word’s meaning, is a scathing criticism of development in national parks and the NPS’s efforts to expand it. “Where once a few adventurous people came on weekends to camp for a night or two and enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out, all through the spring and summer, in numbers that would have seemed fantastic when I worked there: from 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 per year.” *
*Abbey might have exaggerated the numbers here, although visitation did increase substantially between the time Abbey last worked at Arches in 1957 when, according to National Park Service statistics, annual visitation was 25,400 to 135,000 visitors in 1968 when Desert Solitaire was published. In 2021, visitation exceeded 1.7 million.*
Abbey outlined several ways to alleviate crowding and further development such as an end to road building in parks, putting more rangers into the field, and banning cars from parks. “No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk,” he writes. “The automotive combine has almost succeeded in strangling our cities; we need not let it also destroy our national parks.”
If Abbey was angry then, he might feel a rage today. More than 297 million people visited national parks in 2021during a pandemic. More than 327 million people visited national park areas in 2019. Record high visitation stresses the already expansive and often underfunded infrastructure of parks. Parking lots are consistently full; excess cars line the road or their drivers shove their vehicles onto narrow shoulders. Some areas, such as Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain that you need a permit to get in the park parking lot. Herds of us overwhelm trails and overlooks too. Climbing Yosemite’s Half Dome requires a permit awarded through lottery as does Zion’s Angels Landing. You now need a “timed entry permit” to enter Rocky Mountain National Park and drive Glacier National Park’s iconic Going-to-the-Sun Road. Remote hiking areas, where Abbey’s preferred visitors go, are often filled too. When I worked as a backcountry ranger at North Cascades in summer 2017, most every backcountry campsite filled during summer weekends. The overflow spilled into the surrounding national forests, public lands with significantly fewer rangers than national parks.
Clearly, the industry of tourism has grown substantially during the last several decades. Although the implications of this reality is not something I wish to tackle in this essay, our national parks are at a tipping point beyond which I worry the experience of visiting them as well as its wildlife, plants, and scenery will suffer. While I support rethinking how we use cars in national parks and we certainly should not be building new roads, denigrating those who experience parks by car is not the answer. I now see Abbey’s objections to visiting parks by car as ableist.
As an aside, I should note how far my thinking has evolved on this issue. Starting my career twenty years ago, I agreed with Abbey’s no-cars-in-parks stance. Cars are a menace, I thought. (And to be honest, that remains true in many ways. Automobiles kill tens of thousands of people and hundreds of millions of vertebrate animals in the U.S. each year. Transportation also accounts for about 30% of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions. Driving less would do our world a lot of good.)
Fresh out of college and equipped with good health, I privately sneered at those who drove through parks without riding a bicycle or spending time on the trail. Like Abbey, I wondered, are you really having valid national park experience if you don’t risk hypothermia or sunburn? Yet, most of the time I drove into parks, parked my car and then rode my bike or hiked. I was, hypocritically, dependent on the car and, more importantly, I didn’t consider that the experience of those visiting parks primarily by car as equally valid an experience as my own. Of equal or perhaps even more concern was my rejection of the needs of people who couldn’t visit. “Oh, you can’t come,” I thought, “That sucks but what am I supposed to do about it?” Nature deficit disorder is real, but let’s not pretend that experiencing a national park by car is a cause. There are other much more systemic issues at heart.
When we’ve traditionally explored how to address crowding in national parks, most of the ideas, especially those that have emerged out of the NPS bureaucracy, center around encouraging people to visit less crowded parks, to use shuttles where available like at Zion and Acadia, to visit during less crowded times and seasons, and to encourage people to do more planning or plan like like ranger. Comparatively little thought has been given toward efforts designed to connect parks with people who experience barriers that hinder them from visiting.
With these barriers in place, focusing primarily on congestion in parks is like rearranging chairs in a crowded room, while ignoring everyone that can’t even get in the building.
No panacea exists to solve accessibility issues in our parks. And, thankfully, a growing number of organizations are working toward solutions such as Brown People Camping, Disabled Hikers, Latino Outdoors, National Ability Center, Outdoor Afro, Unlikely Hikers, and Wilderness Inquiry to name a few. There’s one way, however, that the NPS can break the prevailing paradigm almost immediately to provide people from all backgrounds with meaningful national park experiences, and with little more than an internet connection, which brings me back to Katmai.
While at Brooks River, I don’t share the river with only the few hundred people on the ground with me. I share every moment with many thousands of people watching from around the world. In 2012, Katmai National Park partnered with explore.org to host streaming webcams at Brooks River. Several webcams (collectively and affectionately known as the bearcams) stream live footage of Brooks River each summer and fall, allowing anyone with an internet connection the opportunity to watch bears fishing for salmon.
Each year, the bearcams receive millions of views. During 2021, for example, the bearcams saw 16.5 million page views on explore.org. People also watched from 110 countries and all 50 states. The programs that rangers and I host on the bearcams reached hundreds of thousands of people collectively. These numbers are several orders of magnitude larger than even the record setting visitation experienced at Brooks River during the same year.
Although the bearcam experience lacks the immersiveness of an on-site visit, its depth far surpasses anything you’d typically get in person. A webcam experience isn’t limited by flight schedules, vacation days, outdoor skills, fitness, or wellness. It lasts as long as you want. It is accessible whenever you want. Through the bearcams, we watch bears not for a hurried few hours. We watch across weeks, seasons, and years. We see bears return to the river every year of their lives. We watch mother bears rear multiple litters of cubs, and those cubs, in turn, mature through sub-adulthood and adulthood. We discern the breadth of each bear’s individuality as it decides how to make a living. We witness the ebb and flow of the largest salmon runs left on the planet, how the fish underpin Katmai’s ecosystem, and how their year-to-year variability influences the behavior of bears and other wildlife. There’s no wildlife-watching experience quite like it.
If you haven’t experienced a national park through a webcam, then it might be difficult to envision that watching a park through a webcam can be meaningful. But, friends, it is true. A study comparing and contrasting on-site (i.e. in-person) and online (webcam) visitors to Brooks River found that webcam viewers emotionally connected with bears at higher levels than on-site visitors. The same study found that webcam viewers also support protections for bears at higher levels than people who visit in-person. In fact, support for bears and national parks among webcam viewers equalled or exceeded those reported by on-site visitors on almost all metrics evaluated in the study. Subsequent research has found that the bearcams provide mental health benefits and that people greatly value the individual animals that they see through webcams. To expand these lines of research, I’m collaborating with Dr. Lynne Lewis from Bates College, Dr. Leslie Richardson from the NPS and Dr. Jeffrey Skibins from East Carolina University to conduct and analyze more on-site and online surveys of Katmai’s visitors. Our analyses of online surveys from 2019 and 2020, for example, have confirmed previous results and have even underscored the importance of individual, easily recognized bears in people’s experience.
As the aforementioned crowding issues demonstrate, providing space for everyone who wants to visit parks in-person isn’t feasible or sustainable for Katmai or any other national park. It is feasible, however, to provide meaningful, memorable wildlife and nature-based experiences through the democratizing and stewardship-raising force of webcams. (And if you don’t believe me after all this, please go to the bearcams and ask for yourself in the comments.) It’s long past time for more national parks to utilize webcams to bridge barriers that hinder people from finding meaning and value in national parks and other wild spaces.
I’ll be the first to admit that the bearcam experience is different than visiting Katmai in-person, and my advocacy for the use of webcams does not mean I believe webcams can or should replace the in-person park experience. Nothing that a computer screen provides can truly replicate the wellspring of awe that I feel while standing at Brooks Falls and seeing a dozen bears compete for fishing spots. But, for almost everyone except very fortunate individuals like me, the in-person bear watching experience is ephemeral. Only a tiny fraction of Brooks Camp’s visitors return more than once, according to the two most recent in-depth visitor surveys (2006 and 2014). It’s a once-in-a-lifetime trip for many. For others, it’s not feasible at all.
We can’t build our way out of crowding and access issues like we did after the post-WWII tourism boom or try to shove people into parks during increasingly crowded “non-peak hours” or “shoulder” seasons, not if we want to ensure a high-quality experience, the integrity of park ecosystems, or address the systemic barriers that prevent many people from visiting parks. In contrast, webcams in national parks can provide a form of nature-based equity. They create life-long and devoted stewards among those who may never visit in-person. They help our nature-starved societies find connections with the non-human realm. They heal people.
National parks rank among the nation’s most revered landscapes, and their place within American culture is no accident. In the 150 years since Yellowstone National Park’s establishment, the national park idea has evolved. Yellowstone and other parks are much more than places “set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” We value parks for the solace they give us, the fun we experience in them, the wonder and awe they inspire, the opportunity to consider our shared history, and, of course, for the plants, animals, and natural processes that parks harbor. I cherish my time in parks. Everyone deserves access to similar opportunities.
In the United States at least, many of us are eager to return to some semblance of normalcy in a COVID-positive world. Our governments and public discourse are a hot mess of arguments about how to best achieve this. In the context of national parks, other public lands, and wild areas, however, “normal” does not equate universal access. It never has. This upcoming spring and summer, national parks will once again be overwhelmed with people. Rangers will do their best to cope, but without more rangers and the regulatory and policy tools to address congestion, the NPS will go back to its default mode: put out active fires, ignore the tinder, and hope the flames don’t spread.
Katmai National Park existed within the standard visitation paradigm for decades. For those who visit to watch bears in-person, it is an amazing and profound experience. When I worked there as an interpretive ranger, when I’ve visited during my free time, and when I’ve returned as a fellow with explore.org, those moments when I watched bears expressing their survival instincts are experiences more meaningful and memorable than almost any thing else I’ve done in my life thus far.
I last worked as a ranger in Katmai in 2016 though. Without webcams Brooks River would be a fading memory by now, no matter how many photos I took or journal pages I wrote. With the bearcams I, along with anyone else with an internet connection, can return at any time to find inspiration in the beauty of our world as well as the tenacity and intelligence of wild animals. Watching bears, whether in-person on online, creates life-long memories and inspires stewardship. Are national parks truly spaces for everyone? Not yet, but if more parks use webcams as a tool to reach people there’s no reason they can’t be.
Wandering at Large 