National parks face years of damage from government shutdown | Hacker News Reader

National parks face years of damage from government shutdown

nationalgeographic.com

12 pointsngmc15 comments

Really sad. I would think if there is no one to take care of the parks then it's only common sense to have them closed to tourists.

In Canada we have a good parks system and yet I must admit that the US park system is phenomenally well run and contains so much diversity. I suspect that us visitors take for granted how much work is involved in maintaining the cleanliness and illusion of untouched solitude. We are so fortunate to be able to enjoy it and I hope any shutdown damages are minimal.

I bridle at any article that makes claims like this. if a few weeks of shut down causes years of damage and you aren't a nuclear power plant, I call BS. people's critical thinking skills go out the window when it's politically convenient to believe garbage.

TFA clearly states the ways in which this shutdown could lead to lasting damage. I would encourage you to think critically about the effect of widespread litter or sewage spills or off-trail hiking in a national park setting. Additionally think of facilities in inhospitable conditions.

The comparison to nuclear reactors is odd. It suggests to me you think National Parks are a more trivial operation than a power plant. I think they are far too different to make this comparison.

A pet goldfish is not as complicated to keep alive as a power plant but if you don’t feed it then it dies.

Are you actually bothered by widespread litter or sewage spills or off-trail hiking, or is that just something convenient for a political fight? Actual concern would mean you want to save Organ Pipe National Monument and Big Bend National Park by building a wall to protect those fragile desert ecosystems. The shutdown, assuming it results in a wall, would prevent lots of lasting damage.

So, damaging 57 other national parks to save 1. It doesn't seem to me a sound/common-sense trade-off even if your claims are true.

I do care about off trail hiking in all national parks because of the obvious damage that causes. I also care about preventing littering everywhere. Including national parks. My concern for these topics is unrelated to my stance on a border wall.

I don’t appreciate your unfounded implication that my concern for national parks is somehow politically motivated or excludes specific parks.

I also don’t appreciate your attempts to drag this conversation off topic. The article is about lasting damage to national parks due to a government shutdown. The article is not about a wall or the border.

Superficially, the article is about lasting damage to national parks due to a government shutdown.

Ask yourself why the article was written. Pay attention to the fact that the damage is blown all out of proportion. The article lists things that aren't long-term (unclean toilets and unemptied trash) and other things (walking off trails) that are a normal occurrence during non-shutdown times.

There is no question in my mind that this article was not written with any legitimate concern for national parks getting damaged. The most generous assumption would be ordinary fearmongering because a writer needs to catch eyeballs.

The most generous assumption is that the article was written in good faith and that the government shutdown has a material effect on the parks as described.

That is nothing compared to the damage happening at the border. There are piles of trash, unauthorized trails carved through fragile ecosystems, fires, and human bodies. This shutdown is part of a fight over a wall that would protect several national parks and national monuments from this massive ongoing ecological damage.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/park-service-illegals-des...

https://www.desertinvasion.us/

The border is not a national park. Your whataboutism is not compelling.

Big Bend National Park is on the border. BTW, it is a UNESCO designated Biosphere Reserve.

Organ Pipe National Monument is on the border.

They are being destroyed. The rest of the ecosystem, outside of those, is also worth protecting.

The border is not a park but there are parks on the border. Some parks are on the border but not all of them. Similarly squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are square.

Clearly the border is worth protecting and so are parks. I don’t see anyone disputing that in this context. You seem to be arguing against a straw man.

Your original comment dismissed concerns about protecting parks off the border by changing the subject to border conditions. This is whataboutism and is a logical fallacy.

The non-border parks aren't suffering much unusual damage. That is alarmist nonsense. Toilets may overflow, and piles of trash will form around the trash cans, but this is pretty easy to fix.

The bit in the article about walking off of trails is particularly silly. People will do that or not, unaffected by the shutdown. Nothing will change. Meanwhile, that is actually a serious problem for the border parks. There we have all sorts of unauthorized trails crudely carved through fragile ecosystems.

It is perfectly legitimate to point out hypocrisy and insane priorities, and slapping a silly label like "whataboutism" on it does nothing to change that. I swear, there is something like Godwin's law for "whataboutism".

TFA clearly explains the ways in which parks are experiencing lasting damage due to the shutdown. This is happening regardless of their location relative to the border.

Please refute the claims in the article directly instead of dismissing them out of hand.

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