What Next | Gutting Our National Parks

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4.2 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, and places in between like Yellowstone and the site of the Battle of Gettysburg, the National Park Service has been a point of American pride since its inception. And with a small budget and actually generating revenue, even fiscal hawks had no reason to complain. So why is the Trump administration cutting their budget? Guests: Jon B. Jarvis,18th director of the National Parks and executive director for the Institute for Parks, People and Biodiversity at UC Berkeley. Kevin Heatley, former superintendent of Crater Lake National Park, Oregon. Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen. Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode goes out to all the people out there on summer vacation.
0:11.0	Doesn't it feel like everybody's away right now?
0:15.0	Mary's out, so is a pretty big chunk of the staff here at Slate.
0:19.0	I am not on vacation, but in my head, I am somewhere outside.
0:26.9	Nature, trees, birds and squirrels and stuff.
0:33.6	I am mentally right there with the upwards of 330 million annual visitors to the U.S.
0:40.6	national parks.
0:42.6	Somewhere epic, definitely out west.
0:48.8	Crater Lake is an iconic park in the national park system.
0:53.2	It was the fifth national park added to the system.
0:56.8	It was added by Teddy Roosevelt.
1:00.1	And it's one of the deepest lakes and one of the clearest lakes in the world.
1:05.5	So it's a spectacular place, inspirational.
1:16.4	This is Kevin Heatley.
1:21.5	This past January, Kevin got a job in Oregon as the park's superintendent.
1:24.0	Dare I say dream job?
1:29.3	People that work at the National Park Service, it is their dream job. It is the type of position that's difficult to get into. But Kevin wound up leaving his dream job
1:36.5	about half a year after he started. The public needs to be aware that when they look at
1:41.2	Crater Lake, their children or grandchildren may not see what they're
1:46.0	looking at today. See, Kevin started his job just as Donald Trump and Elon Musk rolled into
1:52.0	Washington with one thing in their mind, dismantling as much of the federal bureaucracy as they
1:58.1	could get their hands on. So within a period of just a few weeks,
	...

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