Shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the official National Park Service (NPS) Twitter account was caught
retweeting crowd size photos that poked fun at Trump’s poorly attended
ceremony. Hours later, the Badlands National Park in western South
Dakota began tweeting out facts about human-induced climate change. Then
the Death Valley National Park posted tweets about the park’s history
as an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. The subsequent days brought more rumblings of dissent. Hundreds of
“alternative” NPS social media accounts began to appear, run by
anonymous NPS employees upset at the Trump administration’s attempt to
obstruct evidence of human-caused climate change. A Rogue EPA popped up,
followed by a Rogue NASA, USDA, Forest Service, and so on. Some tweeted
climate facts relevant to their particular agency or park. Others took
it a step further, highlighting the catastrophic ecological impacts of
Trump’s border wall and approval of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL
pipelines. Last weekend, in a front-page article, the New York Times
reported that its interviews with dozens of current and recently
departed federal employees “reveal a federal workforce that is more
fundamentally shaken than usual by the uncertainties that follow a
presidential transition from one party to another.” The subhead inside
put it even more starkly: “‘Sense of Dread’ Among Civil Servants Stirs
Talk of Resistance to Trump.” Ideologically fractured, divided, and contested, government agencies
in the age of Trump present themselves not just as sites of struggle but
as opportunities for real left advances — especially against a
president with little knowledge about the workings of the federal bureaucracy...
Read about these rogue agencies at JACOBIN, which bills itself as "a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture." The post covers several topics, including how Smokey Bear "has recently been taken up as a mascot of anti-Trump resistance." But about these federal agencies they conclude:
Over 1.4 million people now follow
the most popular Rogue NPS page. The page advocates resistance to
border walls, privatization of public lands, and suppression of science.
Stealing the NPS name and enlisting it in the growing resistance to
privatization, resource extraction, climate denial, and racism, the
Rogue NPS models a National Park Service that stands up for a concept of
nature as common. The Rogue NPS movement is more than cute memes captured in the
circuits of communicative capitalism. It marks a symbolic strike against
the Trump administration. It bites the hand that feeds it, refusing the
power of the powerful. It also tells us that there are people within
government agencies who are eager to fight Trump. For the Left, the rogue agencies challenge us to rethink our tactics
in this convulsive era. They remind us that the people who staff the
NPS, EPA, NPS, NOAA, and other public institutions are not merely state
functionaries. They are also producers of common knowledge, even
potential agents of subversion.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
2 comments:
you think someone should point out to the leftists that Smokey was a symbol of the USFS and not the National Park Service? Don't mean to confuse the issue with facts, but if you are going to adopt a symbol for resistance, make sure you have the right symbol.
LOL, they would be stuck with Yogi Bear and Jellystone Park. He was, after all, "smarter than your average bear."
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