Megan Brown
Staff writer
The National Park Service no longer has 24% of its permanent staff — a decrease occurring since the Trump administration entered the White House in January.
At 12:30 p.m. today in Smith Wilkes Hall, Shawn Norton will discuss “Climate Leadership in the National Parks: What Does the Future Hold?” for the Chautauqua Climate Change Initiative. Before he retired this spring, Norton had a decades-long career with the National Park Service and championed their climate and sustainability program as sustainability coordinator.
The National Park Service plays a critical role in sustainability and climate change, and Norton will discuss how the National Park Service is responding to climate change and adapting to the challenges it brings, such as higher water levels or extreme wildfires.
With his name connected to climate literacy projects and greenhouse gas emission, Norton also worked with the “Don’t Feed the Landfills” initiative which worked to reduce the amount of waste that national parks sent to landfills.
“This throw-away world that we’ve become, this disposable society, is really enabling climate change emissions where they don’t need to be,” Norton said. “When we push things into landfills instead of recycling them, instead of reusing them, those things stay in the ground and create a very potent form of greenhouse gas called methane.”
While some may believe methane gas reduction might not be as important as the greenhouse gases emitted by our cars or from our electrical use, Norton finds that reducing methane is certainly key, as “methane, when it is admitted into the atmosphere, is 100 times more powerful than CO2 or carbon dioxide. As a result, it stays in the atmosphere a lot longer, and it’s really harder to get out.”
For Norton, the “Don’t Feed the Landfills” initiative also provides people tangible actions to take and is something they can do in their own home outside of national parks.
Although Norton sees the immediate impact of the Trump administration and Congress’ cuts to the National Park Service, he noted that this has been a trend with Republican administrations over the last decade, as they held the goal of sequestering the parks. While there have been significant cuts recently, Norton strongly believes in the people working for the National Park Service.
“The good news is that the park service employees are some of the most dedicated people and staff you’ll find in the world,” Norton said. “They are people that when the going gets tough, they get going. They are supremely talented. They are supremely committed to the mission, which is stewardship. They’ve got that going for them.”
However, as the number of people visiting the parks grows yearly, staff and funding cuts are going to be noticeable.
“At some point, you will reach a threshold in any organization, and this one is especially important because it’s providing oversight and stewardship to some of the most iconic places in the world,” he said. “You can reach a threshold where even at that level of commitment (from NPS employees), you can’t meet the challenge, and we are approaching over 300 million visitors a year now in our parks, growing since COVID. It’s really hard to meet that challenge.”
