SocraticGadfly: The National Park Service REALLY can't be trusted

October 01, 2021

The National Park Service REALLY can't be trusted

The history of Olympic National Park and the National Park Service not wanting to run that park (and instead the Forest Service keeping it, as it already ran Olympic National Monument, the precursor), then not wanting a "big Olympic," then letting logging continue in the park for more than a decade after being forced to accept a big Olympic, all documented by Carsten Lien, per my extended review of "Olympic Battleground," has shown that, in the past, the National Park Service can't really be trusted to be an environmental-minded agency, and only looks well within the federal government when compared to the Forest Service, BLM, and Fish and Wildlife.

Well, past is prologue.

And, as shown at Point Reyes, with the Park Service breaking the original agreement, and extending the leases to cow-shitting, cow-farting, climate change inducing, tule elk harassing (and possibly killing) and indirectly, plover-killing ranches inside the national seashore, shows that with the NPS, the past is prologue to a possibly even more corrupt present.

And, since the NPS has no director at this time, though Sleepy Joe Biden had nominated an acting director before this deal with the devil was made, this means that NPS career staff (and by silence, at a minimum, Point Reyes staff) made this deal, not some political flunky.

Speaking of political flunkies? Pseudo-environmental Congresscritter Jared Huffman has his fingerprints all over this, even to the point of bamboozling Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, possibly, unless she was a willing self-gaslighter.

It's people like him, and the lauding he gets from mainstream environmental groups, that disgust me about today's Democratic Party and its mainstream environmentalist apparatchiks. The California and Bay Area Sierra Clubs, for example, say NOTHING about getting people to comment on Interior's comment process, which ended Sept. 13, per that link above. They say NOTHING bad about Huffman.

And, I have personal experience, at least possibly, with this issue.

I may have almost hit a tule (if it wasn't a blacktail) two months ago on vacation, in that very area. It was dark, the last full day of vacation, and I was cutting over from Point Reyes back to the 101 at Olema ... just west of Fairfax, either a tule or a blacktail jumped out and crossed the road. It was really too dark for me to tell for sure, moonless night, and the relative closeness of it, plus me in a rental after driving the Surfside Highway a full day, had my nerves a bit jangled. 

If it WAS a tule, I blame the Park Service and or the ranchers for hazing it as part of why it jumped in front of me.

I also, per point 7 of the leases link, saw the beaches closed or restricted in access to protect snowy plover habitat; as Counterpunch notes, the cows attract ravens, which feed on plover eggs when not feeding on anything cow-associated.

So, fuck Jared Huffman in his hypocritical ass and the same for the Sierra Club.

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