Staffing and budget cuts at federal land management agencies aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet, writes Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society. They indicate empty ranger stations and wildfire teams stretched so thin they can’t keep up.
Though people of all backgrounds celebrated when we stopped Congress from selling off our public lands earlier this summer, she warns, a clear pattern is emerging: Shrink these agencies until they cannot function, then claim that selling off or industrializing our public lands is the only solution. Stone-Manning asks people who care about public lands to demand full funding of national parks and forests and to stand together in defense of the places that belong to all of us.