National Parks Traveler Podcast

For 21 years, the National Parks Traveler has taken you around the National Park System and kept you informed on how the National Park Service and Congress have managed your national parks. We've gone underground to describe for you the wonders of Wind Cave, Jewel Cave and Mammoth Cave, hiked into cypress domes at Everglades National Park to marvel at the park's flora and fauna, and bucked the rapids of the Colorado and Green Rivers through Canyonlands National Park and Dinosaur National Monument.   We've also followed the political and governmental contortions that have impacted the parks, along with the hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and climate change. In short, the Traveler has worked to be your window into all things national parks, serving both as your daily parks newspaper and feature-length magazine. This is our last episode. To look back at 21 years of Traveler, Kurt Repanshek invited Associate Editor Rita Beamish and Contributing Editor Kim O'Connell to join him for a conversation.

Across the United States, from Alaska to Puerto Rico, there are about 112 million acres of officially designated wilderness. That amounts to about 5 percent of the country's land mass. It might appear to be even smaller when you consider that more than half of those 112 million acres protected as wilderness are in Alaska. To say that wilderness is at risk from the human imprint isn't hyperbole. While there are millions of acres of proposed, recommended, and potential wilderness across the country, Congress acts extremely slowly on these matters. Indeed, it was back in 1989 when America's Red Rock Wilderness Act was first proposed in Congress to protect 8 million acres in Utah as official wilderness. The clock continues to tick on that proposal. Without official designation as wilderness, lands can be impacted by motorized and mechanized activities, from logging and mining and energy development to off-road-vehicle recreation. But the threats to both unofficial and official wilderness might be growing, as the Trump administration has called for a review of wilderness management on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and even the National Park Service. To explore what's at stake with wilderness in America under these proposals, we have Kevin Proescholdt, the conservation director for Wilderness Watch, a nonprofit advocacy organization, and Bob Krumenaker, chairman of Keep Big Bend Wild, a nonprofit advocating for official wilderness designation in Big Bend National Park and a long-time National Park Service manager joining us today. Public comment on the Interior secretary's directives is being taken through mid-August. Here are links to the public comment pages: BLM https://www.regulations.gov/document/BLM-2026-0034-0001 https://www.regulations.gov/docket/BLM-2026-0068 https://www.regulations.gov/docket/BLM-2026-0069 https://www.regulations.gov/docket/BLM-2026-0067 NPS regulations.gov - NPS 2026-0101 regulations.gov - NPS 2026-0100 FWS Wilderness Administration and Resource Stewardship; Managing Climbing Activities in Wilderness https://www.regulations.gov/document/FWS-HQ-NWRS-2026-1618-0001

It was a little more than a year ago when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asked  the public to help him identify interpretive materials in the National Park System that disparaged Americans past or living or which contained content that detracts from viewpoints of scenic grandeur. Well, it appears that the public didn't share his concerns. Recent Freedom of Information Act requests have turned up nearly 36,000 comments in response to Secretary Burgum's mission "to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing." The folks at the Center for Western Priorities recently filtered through the nearly 36,000 comments that were received by Interior, and found that just 47 – that's right, only 47 comments – called for a sign to be removed or supported Burgum's request to tidy up history. Our guests today are Kate Groetzinger and Lilly Bock-Brownstein from the Center for Western Priorities, and they'll explain how they filtered those comments and what they found.

Since this past December here at the Traveler we've been bringing you a series of stories on the Endangered Species Act and the threatened and endangered species it's intended to keep from going extinct. For me, it's been an eye-opening series because of what our editors and writers have learned about threatened and endangered species — from birds to trees and even to grasses — and the work being done to help them recover. It's certainly not an easy task, and one that often takes decades before you can see progress. In today's podcast, I sit down again with Jake Li, the vice president for conservation policy at Defenders of Wildlife, to get his take on efforts in Congress to rewrite the Endangered Species Act in ways that might not be so beneficial for threatened and endangered species. I think you'll find it to be a very insightful conversation. We recorded this conversation in mid-May, right before Endangered Species Day.

Public lands stewardship has most definitely changed under the second presidential administration of Donald Trump. Land-management agencies such as the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management have lost thousands of employees, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is on a mission to turn the country's public lands into a cash cow of sorts. As the political tenure in Washington D.C., swings wildly back and forth like a massive pendulum when it comes to our public lands, there is an effort under way to provide a roadmap for public lands stewardship in the United States that stretches far into the future.    Ground Shift is a new nonprofit organization working to, as they put it, "develop creative, durable, and transformative ideas to shape the next century of public land and water stewardship in the United States." To better understand this organization and its goals, our guests today are Lynn Scarlett, who was a deputy Interior secretary during the administration of President George Bush, and Tracy Stone-Manning, who directed the Bureau of Land Management under President Joe Biden.