The Volunteers Cleaning Our Parks During the Shutdown
When the partial government shutdown took effect 22 days ago, Seth Zaharias walked into a Walmart and bought $100 worth of toilet paper to stock the bathrooms at Joshua Tree National Park, in anticipation of the flood of holiday tourists who would descend with only a skeleton staff left to manage them. That first purchase quickly grew into a grassroots effort to keep the beloved desertscape pristine in the face of the National Park Service furloughs. “It was the best hundred dollars I’ll ever spend on toilet paper,” Zaharias says.
Zaharias and his wife, Sabra Purdy, who together own the Joshua Tree climbing company Cliffhanger Guides, teamed up with nonprofit Friends of Joshua Tree National Park to spearhead a campaign to prevent destruction. Soon, they had recruited enough volunteers to clean all of the park’s 80-odd accessible toilets almost every day of the shutdown and haul out thousands of pounds of trash. The volunteers come from all over the state and country—one of Cliffhanger’s clients from New York spent his extra days of vacation taking in the scenery while sweeping out pit toilets and emptying dumpsters.
“I feel pretty good about what’s going on in the park and the state of it now,” Zaharias says. “They only have between five to seven regular maintenance staff. On a big day, we had just shy of a hundred people come out. Our park was ours again.”
What’s happening at Joshua Tree isn’t an anomaly. Across the country, a rag-tag group of volunteers have banded together to take the reins from furloughed NPS employees. Since the shutdown, there have been dozens of headlines (including ones on Outside) about damaged parks overflowing with human waste and trash, though some local volunteers insist the more apocalyptic stories are overblown. “There has been some resource damage, but nowhere near to the level that the media is reporting,” Zaharias says. “The ratio of good people to bad has been incredibly low.” (He notes that the overwhelming majority of the trash they cleared out was in dumpsters or bins.) Still, Zaharias and others saw the need to spring into action. “I’m not going to let D.C. wreck my spiritual connection to this place and my economic backbone,” he says.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2382021/government-shutdown-national-parks-vandalism?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WYM-Saturday-01192019&utm_content=WYM-Saturday-01192019+CID_d0ce54acf72bd13928ddbcc7954a49ed&utm_source=campaignmonitor%20outsidemagazine&utm_term=bought%20100%20worth%20of%20toilet%20paper%20to%20stock%20the%20bathrooms%20at%20Joshua%20Tree%20National%20Park
