Extinctions on the Horizon
Republicans want to raise the debt ceiling by $4 Trillion whilst their Henchman pretends to save the country by firing thousands of federal workers at the same time. What could go wrong?
“The national parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” - Wallace Stegner
It’s been a rough four years four weeks. And we certainly aren’t at our best. Unfortunately most of the general public is just now beginning to find out about some of the chaotic things that have happened the last several weeks and it will still take months for the rest of them to even realize what is happening. Egg prices are incredibly high right now, the purported reason we re-elected Donald Trump in the first case was because of egg prices and he was supposed to bring those down on day one. Instead, we have a raging bird flu that is starting to really cross over into various mammalian species, including cats, with a high likelihood that the virus will end up jumping human to human at some point in the near future. The bird flu is, of course, the reason egg prices are so high and the reason my breakfast tacos at the corner gas station cost $0.50 cents more right now. I don’t care about the price of eggs so much, I used to buy yard eggs for $5/dozen frequently—to be honest, we should have a real conversation about factory farming and the cost of that sometime. Pair this with a significant increase in planes falling out of the sky in the last month plus the brute-force dismantling of our federal agencies and we have a real crisis at hand.
We all have our pet worries and projects, the agencies or topics that maybe define who we are to an extent. To some, the dissolution of USAID is their hill to die on. For others, it is the our federal judicial system or maybe you really love tax law and the IRS. For me, of course, it’s all of our environmental agencies.
I think for many of us nature lovers as we’re growing up and come to realize we love the outdoors, that love is likely to culminate in attending college/university to obtain some form of a natural resources or biological degree, and many of us will aspire to work for some kind of state, federal, or even local agency beyond that. Generally we’ve had an experience through camping or hiking, or perhaps an educational day camp or even an encounter with a weekend program at a state park that has enticed us to delve into the natural world, to study it and/or to protect it.
It didn’t take long after I graduated from college to realize how underpaid many of these positions actually were and or how competitive they were. Everyone wants the cool field job in the backcountry surveying for *insert endangered species here* or the awesome park ranger job managing a unit of a national wildlife refuge. And then you realize how underfunded and understaffed for support all of these agencies are and are overcome with the depth and breadth of blatant neglect by the legislature some sectors have faced over the decades. I mean, I’ve written about Texas state parks and how chronically underfunded those have been for decades and yet we keep just throwing tiny morsels at it, hoping it will hang on by a few threads, and some volunteers and those still pulling a state paycheck will be able to keep it all together.
It has always bothered me when people complain generally about bureaucracy or “The Government”. It’s just humans behind it all. Secretaries, biologists, researchers, wildland firefighters, infectious disease experts, water quality enforcers, and on and on. They all make whatever GS level they are deemed to make for their qualifications and tenure during each paycheck and go home to families and friends and hobbies and life. They get up and do the same thing everyone in the private sector does except they are representing the government as a whole.
Not to start relating to monarchies here, because, um, well…but there are scenes in The Crown where Queen Elizabeth II is struggling between being defined as herself but also being defined as the Crown itself. There’s conflict with the massive, often unbearable, weight of representing one-thousand years of monarchy and institutional ideals while also having opinions and thoughts of her own that frequently went against those ideals, sometimes causing significant strife for her family and her country. Countering that with the US, a similar situation applies for our public servants, except they are generally nameless and faceless to all of us unless we know someone personally or interact with those folks on a daily basis in some capacity. These same people are upholding the Constitution, the goals of their agencies, and at the same time are also unique individuals, though they tend to be ridiculed and othered by non-public servants if things aren’t run the way the general public thinks they should go. And so it becomes easy to blame some amorphous blob for things when in reality that amorphous blob is what that keeps the country functioning in the capacity it does. If you want to tinker with how that amorphous blob functions, you realize it is something made of intensely fine-tuned parts that require delicate tools and inputs/outputs to change to make it function better. You don’t take a hammer and break it into thousands of parts, hoping it will put itself together again or grow a new, better tail all together. But if you cut off the tail and no vital organs are attached to the piece, that piece is going to die.
However, as authoritarian scholar Sarah Kendzior has said for a decade now, the hammer is the point.
This crisis is not a matter of Democrats versus Republicans, or “red” versus “blue.” The crisis is a matter of people who seek to protect the United states versus elite operatives who want to destroy it. The latter are stripping down the country and selling it for parts and trying to convince ordinary Americans that it was their own idea. - The Knew by
(2022)
I think what hurts the most is many of us knew this would happen. And few people listened or took us seriously.
By now, I’m sure you’ve seen many social media posts from folks who were fired from what were, in most cases, dream jobs over the last week or so. More have happened in other science and environmental agencies this week—and it certainly isn’t going to end there. I’m going to close out here, first with screenshots from Matt Buckingham, who is probably one of the best naturalists and biologists in east Texas right now. I’ve been following Matt’s photography and work since I found him on Flickr more than a decade ago and then followed his blog and now Instagram. Matt was working with a state agency before moving to USFWS last year. When I heard about the firings last week I had a worrying sense he was impacted but wasn’t completely sure because I didn’t know when his hire date was. His words on how he was fired are solemn but direct. And the second item will be a quote and a link to a Substack by Jamie Tommins who is a former USFS employee describing the utter loss we’re facing on our public lands right now.
Lastly, I’ll refer you back to the first image I posted from Nate Swick. Our environmental crisis is only going to get worse and we’re going to lose species and habitat much more rapidly now.
Whether you were a trail worker, a wilderness ranger, a forestry or wildlife technician, or any of the number of honest, important, fulfilling jobs that once made up our public lands agencies, what you have lost is a career that may have seemed to defy the cruel logic of American work. Everywhere you look in America today, everyday people are overworked and underpaid, precarious, underinsured, living paycheck to paycheck. True, all of these were a feature of most of our agency jobs as well. But in the agencies, we had this difference: what we did was undeniably, unimpeachably useful. We were public servants—not a title that most workers can claim. We went to work every day not to turn a profit for ourselves or (more likely) somebody else, but simply to serve the people. - Jamie Tommins via
Postscript: I, and others I’ve spoken with, have really noticed that across social media it has been mostly women (of all demographics) urging people to call or write their legislators or posting items of action. If you are a white man and don’t agree with what is going on with our country, we need you to be doing the same. We need you to be talking to friends and family. Your involvement matters. It’s easy to sit back and not worry/do anything productive because y’all typically are the least affected by any social or political changes *spreads historical records across the metaphorical table to prove my point* but we need your support. Fascism comes for us all if we don’t fight it together.
Misti, thank you for writing such an elegant post and for reminding us of two important things:
1) there are people's lives and careers at stake here, not just some red vs. blue entries on a spreadsheet;
2) one of the things our park rangers, wildlife biologists, water quality enforcers, and so on do is protect our common heritage as a species on this earth. Because of our abilities, we are the stewards of the planet's resources, and of life itself. We should protect that inheritance, not squander it.
Love you Misti for reporting on what you see and being there for us not just in Texas, but everywhere!!!! You are the goods!!! :-)