Roger Benham with Susan Zakin
I laid my tarp and sleeping bag between an ocotillo and the dried husk of a tarantula exoskeleton. As the sun slid away beyond El Paso, I crept to the cliff edge, gazing down at the shriveled remains of candellia plants. Decades before, someone had harvested that candelilla (euphorba antisyphillitica). The desiccated remains cast aside near a long-dead fire. The sky darkened, and the stars blazed out.
As I drifted into sleep, I heard the yipping of a coyote and the hoot of a great horned owl. I dreamed of Jumano peoples passing in the valley below, of rangers and cowpokes, of young goatherds passing along the abandoned trail. Camels had plodded along there, too, their drovers recruited far away, in Ottoman Syria for the U.S. military. Perhaps one man had done the Hajj before trekking across Texas. The starlit rocks had echoed voices, spooking roadrunners in Apache, Comanche, Spanish, English, and Arabic.
I thought of that long-gone Mexican or Texican at the boiling vat, processing the candellilla into wax that would be shipped north and become records, inscribed with Jimmie Rodgers’ yodelling, Enrico Caruso’s arias, the voices of presidents and kings. Played on Victrolas they had reached across the airwaves, into Appalachian shacks and Lower East Side tenements. Candellila wax, before fossil fuels’ ready availability, made records of fleeting performances or declarations, records for the future.
This was a quarter of a century ago now. I was on a backcountry patrol on the Mesa de Aguila, in the southwest corner of Big Bend National Park, along the Rio Grande. It was the winter before 9/11, eight years before the 2008 financial meltdown, two decades before the plague that hammered the most recent blow against our myth of exceptionalism, our sense of safety. I was an unpaid Student Conservation Association intern working for the National Park Service.
During our two-week orientation at the beginning of that February, the park’s chief of interpretive services had taken us out to a desert plain where he read part of the 1964 Wilderness Act that governed large sections of the park. Looking up at the Chisos Mountains, he said: “We are the Ents.”
Thanks to Peter Jackson’s trilogy, no one has to read J.R.R. Tolkien now to know who the Ents were. Slow moving, wooden sentient beings, they were shepherds of the forests in the mythical Middle Earth. The Ents preserved the long memory of things which couldn’t speak for themselves.
Long memory courses through my family’s bloodstream. In the 1950s, my uncle was a park ranger busting alligator poachers in Everglades National Park when a young man named Edward Abbey came to work for him. Years later, he told me that this Abbey guy was some kind of a writer. I realized he was talking about the patron saint of American wilderness, a man many consider the greatest nature writer since Thoreau, minus the self-seriousness.
Abbey would break through as a writer with 1968's Desert Solitaire, a collection of essays about working at Arches National Park in Utah. It was a portrait of life in a national park that inspired countless footloose Americans to head west, and many to stay there, dedicating their existence to preserving wild country.
“I like my job,” Abbey would write years later, looking back at his stint at Arches. “The pay is generous; I might even say munificent: $1.95 per hour, earned or not, backed solidly by the world’s most powerful Air Force, biggest national debt, and grossest national product. The fringe benefits are priceless: clean air to breathe (after the spring sand-storms); stillness, solitude and space; an unobstructed view every day and every night of sun, sky, stars, clouds, mountains, moon, cliffrock and canyons; a sense of time enough to let thought and feeling range from here to the end of the world and back; the discovery of something intimate — though impossible to name — in the remote.”
Abbey was not a woo-woo nature writer. His father, Paul Revere Abbey, belonged to the Wobblies, the union that could roughly be described as the Occupy movement of its day. So his son understood, and often wrote, that the country’s public lands are that rare phenomenon: a sublime luxury that working men and women can afford.
The Trump administration’s assault on the public lands promises dramatic environmental consequences. But this intangible and unquantifiable luxury afforded to Americans who aren’t in the 1 percent is too often overlooked. Added to that is the scientific research - the long memory of things - interrupted by mass layoffs. The word iconoclast has a positive connotation in our world, but I've had occasion to remember that the term came from those who destroyed religious art.
It might not sound like much. In February, Elon Musk’s Orwellian-named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fired 1,000 National Park employees and rescinded job offers for 5,000 seasonal workers, numbers that don't sound dramatic compared to the Internal Revenue Service (18,000); the U.S. Postal Service (10,000); the Pentagon's civilian workforce (50,000-60,000 estimated).
And yet. At the U.S. Forest Service, tasked with fighting increasingly damaging Western wildfires, 3,400 employees have been fired. Tom Schultz, Trump's appointee to head the Forest Service, has a warm, fuzzy statement on the Forest Service website, but he's spent much of his career lobbying for the forest products industry in Idaho. On March 1, Trump signed an executive order directing the Forest Service and the BLM to ramp up logging.
It's a one-two punch. Reduce staff and rev up resource extraction. As with so many of the Trump administration's radical moves, it's unclear how much of the agenda will go through. As of this writing, the government reversed course on temporary employees, and last week a federal judge ordered the reinstatement of all fired national park employees. But the uncertainty appears to have crippled many parks, which are struggling to fill the seasonal positions that have kept the cash-strapped agency operating over the past twenty years.
On March 23, for example, Ed Abbey's old haunt, Arches National Park, was forced to close off the Fiery Furnace trail, one of the park’s most iconic and popular hikes, because of staffing shortages. Without adequate staffing, Fiery Furnace could live up to its hellish-sounding name. The trail leads across slickrock and through canyons where it can be difficult to see a path. There simply aren’t enough staff to conduct search and rescue if a visitor gets lost.
You can hear similar stories across the country, not just in familiar places like Yellowstone and Yosemite, but at historic sites, battlefields, military parks, seashores, lakeshores, wild and scenic rivers...
Of course, this was predictable when Trump got back into office. Perry Pendley led the Project 2025 team on the environment. If you're not steeped in the history of U.S. conservation, Pendley fits all the Trump criteria, including corruption and anti-immigrant racism. Pendley worked at the U.S. Department of Interior under the notorious James Watt during the Reagan administration until he was forced from office when a judge found that he'd given a sweetheart deal to coal companies in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. A walking, talking compendium of good old boy anti-environmental rhetoric, he calls climate change “junk science” and has joked about killing endangered species. He once wrote that illegal immigration is spreading “like a cancer.” Pendley did a stint in the first Trump administration, but Senate confirmation proved to be out of reach, in part because of his many conflicts of interest.
Never let it be said that Trump and MAGA lack a sense of history. The shocker is that this scandal-ridden figure from the Reagan years is still alive, and even more surprising that he's still in the political mix. Needless to say, Pendley's section of Project 2025 calls for ramping up oil and gas drilling on the federal lands. Pendley is even more extreme: for decades, he has advocated selling off federal lands. This is a longstanding hobbyhorse of right-wing Western radicals who want to turn the clock back, not to the 1950s, but to the 1840s, when gold miners and loggers ran amok on the Western frontier. The destruction caused by that Gold Rush-era free-for-all was the reason that the federal government established national parks and forests in the first place.
Since Pendley’s Reagan-era stint, both the U.S. Forest Service, which administers 193 million acres and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) at 247 million acres, have undergone significant reforms. After decades with the Park Service, my uncle finished his career in the BLM. Back in his day, environmental wags called the BLM “the Bureau of Livestock and Mining” because of the agency’s tilt toward resource extraction. In 2024 the BLM revised its mission to include the need to keep the land under its administration in good condition, calling the general rubric "land health." Here’s the red flag to the Trump administration: This included addressing the impacts of oil, gas, and mining development, as well as cattle grazing.
Now, of course, that’s all being dialed back. Recently, Trump appointed oil industry lobbyist and Project 2025 co-author Kathleen Sgamma to head the BLM. Perhaps in 2025 it looked better to choose someone with a less-known record of depredation, minus the unappealing facial hair. And a woman, of course.
Joe Biden never sounded quite convincing, or convinced, when he talked about the soul of America. But if anything represents America’s soul it is the landscape. The frontier. This is the country's real riches, the staggering beauty that we have inherited. Stolen from the first peoples, yes, but they, too, were immigrants. Before they crossed the Bering land bridge, this continent was inhabited only by wild creatures: Short-faced Bears, American Mammoths, Dire Wolves, Sabre-tooth Cats. All extinct now.
Working for the national parks is a calling, attracting those who prize the remnants of that earlier world: misfits, poets, scientists, and regular people who simply love snakes and bison. Many are men and women of quiet rectitude. People like the interpretive chief in Big Bend, talking about thinking like Ents and shepherding the deserts and the mountains. So when the Trump administration went after the parks, I wasn’t surprised that an anonymous group called Alt National Park Service became the ablest source of information and resistance. They have often been the first to tell us about the latest cuts. Their dispatches are invariably short, sharp and deadly accurate.
National Park visits were tallied at 331,863,358 visits last year, the most since record-keeping began in 1904. While nothing will hit harder than cuts to Social Security, which is tantamount to survival for many Americans, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who hails from the Dakotas and made his millions in software, has a passing acquaintance with the Western landscape. That didn’t prevent him from sounding just a little like Marie Antoinette.
Just days after firing employees and imposing a hiring freeze, announced that the Park Service would rehire thousands of workers, albeit as temporary, summer positions.
“Go apply. Apply for a job,” Mr. Burgum said on Fox News. “We want to make sure that we’re giving a great experience for citizens at our national park system.”
Kristen Brengel, the senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, told the New York Times that agency leaders were “kidding themselves” if they believed they could rehire those and thousands more seasonal workers in time for the busy season, adding that the agency had also reduced the human resources staff that is responsible for making new hires.
In 1968, Edward Abbey wrote this in Desert Solitaire:
“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
That is what public lands workers like my uncle and Abbey himself have done for a century: they hold in trust the remembrance of our heritage, for future generations and uses as yet unknown. They preserve records, those inscribed by humans and those made by trees, the life cycles of animals, the ebb and flow of rivers and oceanic tides, strata of geological processes, of the soils and rocks themselves. What the Trump administration has done is interrupt that scroll, that book in which large-hearted Americans have traced the health of Arctic walruses, of white oak used by Southern distilleries, the way candellaria was once used for records. These are not abstractions. These are what connects us to meaning.
Someplace in a file in Big Bend National Park are my own very short records, backcountry reports after my hikes. Written accounts of animal tracks and scat, landslides, the traces of human footprints and horses up an arroyo or across some remote river crossing, an aging barbed wire fence half-buried in sand, the skull of a javelina washed down into an eroded pueblo abandoned a century ago. Those records belong to all of us, and the unbroken chain of them may be of some unforeseen use to someone who is yet unborn. The keeping of those records is not done only by seasonal workers like I was, but by longtime workers with who keep the institutional memory.
Public lands workers, the records they create, and the records held in the lands themselves, are more important than anything else to the memory of democracy. Like those candellia recorded disks, stowed away in some libraries or museums, to one day be excavated and listened to again, from a solitary person under a starlit sky, and those whose trust whose is to remember them. They’re now getting smashed over the knees of people of have no idea of what they could say.
I once slept above a cliff gazing at Mars, from a place preserved by people who kept records. Records of humanity and all of this precious Earth. So that others could one day do the same.
Roger Benham is a hiker and amateur naturalist with a long involvement with environmental activism. He is a recent law school graduate and lives in rural Vermont.
Susan Zakin is the Journal's editor and the author of Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement.
Top photo by Ansel Adams. Edward Abbey photo by Terrence Moore.