Parks and Devastation: How wokeness is destroying America’s national parks.

I was at Glacier National Park, in the farthest reaches of Montana where I live, when it hit me how deep and comprehensive the woke takeover of environmental policy has become. I had driven for some backcountry hiking to a ranger station, one that can only be reached by going 27 miles down a rough gravel road.

On the signboard at the station, one side displayed some limited information on open trails and road conditions. The other had (out-of-date) news from the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Parks inter alia and which, under President Trump, I helped oversee as deputy assistant secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.

Here was the department news that Glacier wished to highlight:

• First, an article about Secretary Deb Haaland (the first Native American to run the department, which also is in charge of Indian Affairs) announcing a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. This will examine the history of Native American boarding schools in the U.S. While generally well-intentioned these are, to put it politely, out of fashion by modern standards. Doubtless, the call for reparations is just months away.

• Then an article about the Interior Department transferring the National Bison Range Lands to the Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

• Third, an article celebrating the brand-new federal holiday of Juneteenth (Which 60% of Americans knew little or nothing about when it became a federal holiday) and focusing on how the Department of the Interior protects major sites having to do with emancipation from slavery.

• Fourth, an introduction to a series of articles on disability history.

• Fifth, a consultation with Hawaiians to discuss updates to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

• Sixth, an article celebrating Latino Conservation Week.

• And finally, a picture of a Tweet from Haaland, raising the “Progress Pride” flag (this is the freaky new one with the weird triangles that look like they are sexually assaulting a Rainbow Pride flag) for the first time over the Department of the Interior. Of note, Haaland’s only child, daughter Somah (whom she raised without a father, natch) identifies as “non-binary” and is a radical political activist.

In and of themselves some of these initiatives might be praiseworthy or at least not particularly objectionable. But taken as the core front-door priorities of an agency that oversees 1/5 of America’s total land area, helps regulate and authorize much of our oil and minerals exploration, maintains our relationships with Native American tribes, and supervises all of our Fish and Wildlife Refuges and National Parks, it shows a profound loss of focus.

It shows a government agency obsessed with every aspect of identify politics at the expense of its core mission. Literally the entire message board was devoted to one form or another of minority activism, whether for Hispanics, African Americans, Hawaiians, Native Americans, LGBT, or the disabled. Any notion that the Department of the Interior had a core mission to serve the entire American people was lost completely.