Budget cutbacks affecting backpackers

[Terran Terran]

Every pain is a financial setback for families as well as missed opportunities for their children to enjoy the outdoors. This in turn will affect their children. Every tree cut will take generations to grow back. Some trash will decompose, not all. The wildlands will be gone. What is the benefit for future generations? Better TV’s?

[Matthew / BPL]

Dan said

Please stick to the topic, this isn’t a discussion about generic political beliefs. If you believe the changes are currently benefitting backpackers, please give a specific example like the others in the thread, so we can judge if your comments have merit.

Thank you for saying this.

BPL’s purpose is to help people to thrive outdoors. Political conversations here should relate to the outdoors and stay away from more generalized statements about beliefs. There are other places on the internet to do that. Please keep it away from BPL. Thanks, everyone!

[Alex Wallace]

So, your solution is… what? Just let everything fall apart? The idea that National Parks and Forests don’t need funding because “you can just walk around the gate” is a selfish and short-sighted take.

You talk a big game about being self-sufficient, but do you know who actually maintains the trails you hike, the bridges you cross, and the roads you drive to get there? It’s not magic—it’s the result of federal funding, park rangers, and conservation programs.

No funding = no access. No maintained trails, no emergency services when you break an ankle, no firefighters stopping wildfires before they burn entire forests down. And guess what? When trails and roads don’t get maintained, they close entirely. You’re not some rebel for sneaking past a locked gate—you’re just walking into a place that’s deteriorating because people like you think it should run on good vibes alone.

And this idea that public lands aren’t “ours” because there’s an entrance fee? That’s nonsense. The alternative is privatization. You don’t like a $10 park fee? Try paying a corporation $50 just to step onto what was once free land. Or worse, imagine it’s closed forever because it’s been sold off for mining, drilling, or logging.

National Parks pay for themselves through tourism and protect access for future generations. Cutting funding doesn’t make people “more free”—it just ensures that only the wealthy or corporations control what was once for everyone.

And as for “big government” being the problem—tell that to the farmers getting subsidies, veterans getting VA benefits, or hunters enjoying lands conserved by federal funding. You might not realize it, but a whole lot of what conservatives value is backed by government programs they claim to oppose.

Nobody’s forcing you to take a bus or use a flush toilet. But pretending that defunding public lands will make them more “free” is naive at best—and destructive at worst.

[jscott]

+1 to Alex above.

There’s an analogy, perhaps, with polio here. Very few are old enough to have experienced polio. It devastated millions, including FDR, depriving him of his ability to walk. The vaccine required federal funding.  It eradicated the disease. Today, people assume that’s just how things are and ever have been. they don’t know the real history. Polio was rampant a mere 60 years ago.

what’s the analogy? Before the National Parks, all those lands were up for grabs to the highest bidder,  and would have been devastated by drilling, mining, logging, etc. Same thing today. There are plenty of people who want to open parks to mining, for example. the return of polio to the places we love.

As the song says, “you don’t miss your water/’til the well runs dry.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/7ysi8z/an_actual_photo_of_theodore_roosevelt_and_john/

[Dan]

The vaccine required federal funding.

Thread drift warning … While I STRONGLY agree with the spirit of your post, and there are innumerable examples of things that the federal government has funded for the common good, the polio vaccine is not the best example. Jonas Salk’s research (and Sabin’s competing research) was primarily (maybe completely) funded by a private foundation, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later called the March of Dimes). Federal funding of research was at its infancy at that time.

It’s actually a wonderful and dramatic historical story, to read about how Salk overcame restrictions due to anti-Semitism, developed a novel safe vaccine on an unprecedented timeline, and pushed to forgo a patent on the oral vaccine so that it could be more widely distributed. Apologies for the thread-drift, but I have always admired Jonas Salk and the public movement that supported him.

[Terran Terran]

+2

We’re so focused on personal liberties that many forget personal responsibility. Duty to preserve for future generations. We’re trading ‘ purple mountain majesty” for “golden escalators”  We cant blame our neighbors for they flow of drugs, while promoting an artificial world.  The polar vortex’s are shifting. We  seem to be doing everything backwards.

[Paul Wagner]

+3. Part of living in a society is cooperating with others. And the wilderness needs all the protection it can get.

[AK Granola]

I have zero optimism right now about our planet, and our country, so the budget cuts, while dire, seem to pale by comparison to the really big issues. I asked a good friend, outdoorsperson, and birder, how he maintained his equilibrium. He took an even larger view – that our mean monkey species will go extinct and the amazing beauty of our world and biological evolution will continue in one form or another. I am too in the now – I want to go backpacking on our beautiful public lands, and have everyone else enjoy and love them too! So I’ll keep fighting for funds for our federal land managers.  And against rolling back ALL environmental protections as my Senator literally said today they’re going to do so they can extract as many resources as possible without roadblocks to slow them down. All agencies are to stand down, while extractive industries have their way all over Alaska!

[jscott]

“While I STRONGLY agree with the spirit of your post…” ???

Allow me to elaborate on what my obscure analogy: without National Parks, with all their faults, the lands they encompass would have been open to devastation from private interests. Now, with the threat of exploitation of park lands by private profiteers once more coning to the fore…I compared that to a return to recent history, when polio was rampant. In other words, had the vaccine not been developed–and there are those in power today who who wish that were the case–then we’d still be devastated with polio society wide. Similarly, had the parks not been accomplished, then Yosemite valley and and all the rest would be devastated by mining and lumber interests.

In my defense, and the in the spirit of my post, we seem as a society to have gotten along quite well without clear cutting the remaining Sequoia groves in Kings Canyon.

there are those who wish to go back to the days before measles and smallpox and polio vaccines. Similarly, there are those who wish to go back before the days of federally protected lands–Parks, in other words. Yeah, maybe this isn’t the best analogy. I take your point.

[Terran Terran]

I don’t know the exact history of polio, though I believe it is correct to credit Salk as noted. Much credit to the match of Dimes, if not at first, eventually the government can be credited with much of the distribution. I believe I got my inoculation at school. Worldwide distribution prevented it from reentering our country by immigration and travel.

My hope for Alaska is economic avoidance due to an unstable political scene. The fear of backlash from the next administration. They must be convinced that any money infested in today’s freefall will be lost four years from now. The same with the forests. You can cut the trees, but the mills aren’t in place to produce the lumber. While a lot of damage can be done in a very short time, the longer it can be delayed, the less economically viable it becomes. The current policy is to move as fast as possible to inflict the most damage. While we may not stop it, we can slow it down while resisting dependence job wise and resource wise. They must be convinced that it’s a poor investment.

[Terran Terran]

Underutilized Public Land. HUD

Proposal to sell off public land for low cost housing. I know of some federal land inside the city limits in Palm Springs. Most is out in the desert away from available work and services. Also the golf course at  Desert Falls Country Club in Palm Desert, once home to Jim  and Tammy Bakker, was built with HUD money. While it sounds good in principle, like many of the proposals from the current administration, I fear it’s just another scam meant to deprive us of public access.

[Terran Terran]

Resistance Rangers

[jscott]

Nice find, Terran!!! thanks for the alert.

[Paul Wagner]

If you want to know what Yosemite would look like without its protections, visit Niagara Falls.

[Terran Terran]

^^^Or most any campground in southern Cal after a holiday. Group think. Shamed for doing the right thing. The book “Lord of the Flies” comes to mind.

[Terran Terran]

[Jerry Adams]

Good video.  Yeah, they start with the claim that the government is bureaucratic, bloated, and incompetent, then they fire a bunch of people which will cause the agencies to function less well and appear to be bureaucratic, bloated, and incompetent.  Self fulfilled prophecy.

[Terran Terran]

I believe you’re right

The Federal government does have 341,513,466 clients. One might expect a little bureaucracy.

USA population as of  March 23, 2025 was: 341,513,466.

https://www.census.gov/popclock/

[Roger Caffin]

Ah, but does the current administration see the American public as clients?

[Jerry Adams]

yeah

if by the american public you mean wealthy people and corporations

I was just reading about how in China, companies are controlled by the government.  If company leaders get too upity they’re taken down.  If they then behave maybe they can be rehabilitated.

In the U.S. it’s the opposite, the government is controlled by companies.  If politicians get too upity they’re taken down.

[Jerry Adams]

damn it, you got me posting on the internet about politics.  : )

[Roger Caffin]

Sorry about that. :)

Many years ago, here in Oz, there was a bit of a kerfuffle over a large area of wilderness ‘we’ wanted preserved; some corporate others wanted to exploit it, quite destructively.

The State Premier (= State Governor) was known to do a bit of walking. So a very well-known walker/greeny took the Premier walking in that area for a few days, to show him the sights. On their return to ‘civilisation’, the State Premier announced that the whole area would be a National Park. Full Stop, end of discussion.

Anyone want to take Trump or Vance walking?

Cheers

[jscott]

“Anyone want to take Trump or Vance walking?”

Ummmm….what a joyful experience that would be!….(or not.)

I think the Outback would be the perfect environment for either one of these gentlemen, all alone with only the empty night sky and open landscape to greet them.

I understand that sometimes people go mad in these conditions. I understand that some are mad already going into these conditions.

 

[Roger Caffin]

Mind you, could be a wee problem for the golf buggy here

Cheers

 

[AK Granola]

This thread is now hilarious. Just imagining our elected – and unelected – officials wandering through the talus makes me chuckle. It would improve all our lives if everyone sat down around a campfire sharing tea and stories for a while. Bring back some humanity. Good dream anyway!

[Author]

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