“We forget that these parks, these natural areas, they don’t manage themselves,” he said. “Sometimes, intervention is necessary.”
At the Channel Islands, that means 40 years of data monitoring the health of the kelp forest or local populations of pinnipeds will now have a shutdown-sized hole — along with monitoring of fish populations to help inform fishing policy.
“All those programs get shut down, and so we no longer have that canary in the coal mine that’s giving us an indicator of the health of not just the park, not just the ecosystem, but the place we live,” Galipeau said.
Galipeau said he was especially worried about smaller or less-visited parks like Manzanar National Historic Site — concerns echoed by that park’s former superintendent, Bernadette Johnson. Manzanar’s remote location in the Eastern Sierra doesn’t have onsite worker housing, and the park was already only open four days a week due to lack of staffing and budget.
“Small parks like Manzanar really can’t afford to lose any other bodies at all,” Johnson said. “It’s already been bare bones.”
She noted that it’s not just the parks that will lose income, including entrance fees, during the shutdown: Bookstores, coffee shops, and even nearby towns will all lose out on dollars while parks are closed. But Galipeau said that the current shutdown plan, which prioritizes keeping parks that can collect entrance fees open, is a dangerous game, too. “Now all of a sudden, we’re letting money drive everything,” he said.
Under President Donald Trump’s second administration, Galipeau said, it’s been especially hard to find out what the plans for national parks are — and what the future might hold. “In the past, you could talk to people more openly,” he said. “You could understand what their shutdown plans were.”
“It’s very hard to get anybody to talk to us,” he said. “Because they don’t know what’s going to happen to them if they’ll be perceived as non-loyalists.”
This story contains reporting by KQED’s Keith Mizuguchi and Carly Severn
