It's the day before Christmas, and if you're a certain kind of person, you are celebrating by going outside.

Jonathan Jarvis is that kind of person.

Well, one of my wife and I's favorite parks is Point Reyes.

This is not surprising, since Jonathan is also the former head of the National Park Service.

There'll be pelicans, you know, soaring on the waves, you know, lots of sea ducks, elephant seals.

It just gives you a sense of what this country was to 300 years ago, that there is still places that you can feel like maybe you're

the first to see.

This year has been a rough one at the parks. Between mass firings and resignations, the National

Parks workforce has shrunk by a quarter since January.

During the shutdown, most parks just were not staffed.

There was a fire in Joshua Tree left by a camper.

That was a historic wall knocked over in Gettysburg.

You know, if you go on vacation, you don't leave your house open and let people just sort of wander through it, right?

The situation has gotten so bad that two dozen parks are now trying to unionize.

Park service employees are upset. They're very, very, they're depressed.

They're feeling disrespected. They're feeling that the mission of the park service is being disrespected.

And they're very worried about their own future, of course, in the agency.

And they worry about the parks themselves.

The national parks were supposed to be a bipartisan issue.

So how do we protect the creatures and landscapes that can't protect themselves?

These places were preserved so that anyone can go and have that experience and feel the patriotic pride of it and at the same time have that sense of awe,

that incredible sort of sense of the wind in your hair and the sea foam at your feet and be rejuvenated.

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