A Love Worth Fighting For: Speaking Up For Our Public Lands

National Park After Dark

Danielle LaRock & Cassandra Yahnian

True Crime, Places & Travel, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 5.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2025

⏱️ 118 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On Valentine’s Day 2025 4,400 Public Land workers were abruptly and illegally terminated from their positions and since then, news of executive orders threatening to exploit our public lands for their natural resources have been flooding headlines.To better understand the gravity of this situation and to hear straight from those most directly effected we are joined by Yosemite and Devils Postpile Ranger Alex Wild, Liz Crandall a field ranger in Deschutes National Forest, and Morgan Smith a Biological Science Technician for the US Forest Service. All three were recently terminated from their jobs due to the recent federal budget cuts.They share their love of the outdoors, explain the importance of their jobs, and speak to the dangerous repercussions our public lands will experience as a result of these terminations and extreme staffing shortages.PROTECT OUR PARKS MERCH! - 100% of our proceeds will be donated to and evenly allocated between The National Park Foundation and The National Forest Foundation.Sign petitions and write to your reps! Tell Congress to Protect National Park Service Staff Tell Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to protect national monuments from oil, gas, and mining Tell Congress national parks are worth fighting for Tell Congress to fund historic and cultural sites nationwide Tell Congress to protect wildlife in national parks Whitehouse resources:Unleashing American EnergyUnleashing Alaska’s Resource PotentialImmediate Expansion of Logging Timber (including BLM land, National Forests, and National Parks)For the latest NPAD updates, group travel details, merch and more, follow us on npadpodcast.com and our socials:Instagram: @‌nationalparkafterdarkTikTok: @‌nationalparkafterdarkSupport the show by becoming an Outsider and receive ad free listening, bonus content and more on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Want to see our faces? Catch full episodes on our YouTube Page!Thank you to this week’s partners!IQBAR: Text PARK to 64000 to get 20% off all IQBAR products and free shipping.AG1: AG1 is offering new subscribers a FREE $76 gift when you sign up. You’ll get a Welcome Kit, a bottle of D3K2 AND 5 free travel packs in your first box. So make sure to check out DrinkAG1.com/npad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone. Welcome back to National Park After Dark. I'm Danielle and I'm Cassie.
0:23.6	And today we have a different episode, but one that I think that is really needed for today.
0:30.6	And I know a lot of you have been reaching out to us and we've posted a lot on social media about what is going on right now with our public lands.
0:40.1	And there's a lot of questions in the air. There's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of anger.
0:43.7	There's a lot of sadness. A lot of people, thousands of public land workers were removed from
0:48.2	their jobs on Valentine's Day. And people are questioning why, how, what is happening? And a lot of people are really worried
0:57.3	about our landscapes, our public lands, which we think is totally warranted and we hear you. And
1:03.5	today we really wanted to address that. One, by taking the time to really answer some questions
1:09.9	that a lot of you have. and we've been doing a lot
1:12.0	of research on this ourselves, but also we've decided to have some people on that were terminated
1:18.2	from their positions in the public land service who can tell their stories as well. Yeah, we figured
1:23.6	that the time is now to get this episode out. But thank you for your patience. We've been
1:28.5	hearing everyone say, you should do an episode on this. We've been, you know, taking the time to go
1:32.4	through hundreds of people who have responded to us that have been affected and wanted to share
1:37.3	their stories. And so thank you to everyone who sent something in. It's very appreciated. But like
1:42.7	Cassie said, we do have three people that are going
1:45.5	to be included in this episode that we'll talk to in just a bit. But let's kind of lay the framework
1:49.9	here and the groundwork of what is going on. So we can kind of all go into these interviews with
1:56.3	a collective understanding. Because like Cassie just mentioned, there's a lot of questions circulating
2:01.9	and a lot of confusion about different things. So the question we've received countless times
2:07.1	is why are so many people who work for public lands being fired? Today, we want to help answer that
2:12.6	question by explaining the new executive orders from the Trump administration and how many people that,
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