Ensuring access to the people’s lands

Outdoors people — those who enjoy their nature live and in situ rather than televised — are second to none in their appreciation for what rangers and other government workers do to keep our nation’s wildlands pristine.

That doesn’t mean they mistake the feds, or the state employees, or the county, or the city, with the wonders of the natural world itself.

It’s not theirs. It’s ours. The fields and streams were there for millennia before the government worker in a uniform. Smokey Bear’s ancestors, while not saved from a fire by a New Mexico ranger in the Lincoln National Forest, also were not exhibited in the National Zoo for the rest of their days.

So there is wildland and then there is bureaucracy. It is good, for the protections of the nation’s and world’s remaining un-urban areas, that the twain have met. Rangers and their kin provide forest management, keep the waters clean by stopping those who would pollute, rescue the lost, hand out maps.

But in times of government shutdown, such as the partial one bedeviling Washington, D.C., the wildlands do not disappear, and neither should citizens’ ability to visit them.

At gorgeous Joshua Tree National Park, during the nearly three weeks of shutdown, a skeleton crew of rangers and at first citizen volunteers patrolled the vast acreage and emptied the trash. But now the toilets are overflowing, fourwheelers are driving where they shouldn’t and damage has been done to the park’s namesake plants, so this week the park will entirely shut down for lack of staffing.

The government impasse in Washington, D.C. aside, there’s no real reason for that. Visitors, many who have come from afar, are left wanting. Dozens of desert businesses that rely on tourism are hurting. Because of the vagaries of government funding, these situations will arise in the future.

Every national park — state and local ones, too — should have a volunteer brigade available to do the plumbing, pick up the litter, hand out the maps and, yes, perhaps through some kind of certification process, be on standby to protect nature and people. Neighbors of these parks who love them would be available around the country. Let’s deputize them so that the failures of government don’t stop access to the people’s land.

It’s not theirs. It’s ours. The fields and streams were there for millennia before the government worker in a uniform.