March 7, 2025
By Brie Choate
My phone chimed early Friday afternoon on February 28th. It was a text message from my friend sharing Patti Gonia’s call for action to stand against the slash and burn firings of our park rangers and other essential staff within our National Park system. The call for action by the drag queen environmentalist extraordinaire was posted on Thursday and the date for action was set for March 1st, less than 24 hours later. My friend’s text included a spreadsheet listing all of the nation’s peaceful demonstrations and our state of New Hampshire was marked as “TBA” on the list. I sprang into action.
New Hampshire only has Saint Gaudens National Historical Park in tiny, off-the-beaten-path Cornish, NH as an official part of the park system. Being pressed for time and having never organized a demonstration before, I decided the busy Kancamagus Highway by the Lincoln Woods Trailhead was better suited for our event. Even if only three of us showed up, I figured passersby and day hikers using the large parking lot would give us visibility for our cause.
I screenshot an image posted by the Resistance Rangers, a resistance group of over 650 fired park rangers, added our local information and posted it to Reddit, Bluesky and Facebook. Without any idea of who would see the post on such short notice, I drew a protest sign and hoped for a handful of people to come out.
The speed of today’s information sharing will always astound me.
Promptly at our noon start time, nine folks joined me and within the hour we grew to 25-30 protesters with signs passionate about the protection of our National Parks and Forests by dedicated rangers. In our small but lively crowd, there were recently fired federal employees sharing the absurd details of the impersonal emails they’d received and the phone calls from senior staff having to terminate them, despite not wanting to, for untrue reasons like “inadequate performance”.
Over the course of our demonstration, we learned of this administration’s vile Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signing orders to “unleash American energy,” a series of orders that use grotesque euphemistic language to sell the idea that the working class will somehow be enriched by the drilling, fracking, clear-cutting and mining of our protected lands, ignoring the fragile lives of endangered species within these designated areas, by billionaires privatizing and destroying these special places we have protected and recreated on for decades. These are the lands we have collectively cared for with our tax dollars.
On March 1, 2025, at the entrances of National Parks across the country and with only 24-72 hours notice, thousands of protestors stood together against the callous and irrational “budget cuts” the unelected billionaire and allegedly drug-addled Elon Musk carried out against our parks, demanding rangers and staff be rehired and that our land not be sold off to billionaire-owned fossil fuel companies for their destruction. Our National Parks are irreplaceable and the idea behind them is beautiful in its simplicity– protect these expansive swaths of our magnificent country for generational enjoyment collectively, with the people’s tax dollars. Our money. These lands are your lands; these lands are our lands.
To be updated about actions in defense of the National Parks, follow @resistancerangers on Instagram or Bluesky. You can follow @pattiegonia on Instagram.
Brie, thank you for this great article, but more importantly thank you for taking action to save our parks! Please keep us posted on this effort. First and foremost I am an environment activist, and the preservation of our beautiful places is a hill I WILL DIE ON to protect!