Dear HCN,
Living
in Yellowstone National Park, I wanted to get a first-hand opinion
on the snowmobile debate. I’d read reports from the EPA, the
snowmobile industry, experts on flora and fauna and everything
else, but I hadn’t heard the voice that I felt knew the most: the
park rangers.
So I asked some park rangers how
they felt, and, to my shock, they refused to tell me, because as
government employees they’re forbidden to publicly express their
opinions.
This left me utterly dumbfounded. How
can we decide this issue without the input of the park rangers?
These are the people who are on the front lines of the snowmobile
debate, who put up with the noise, suck in the fumes, and whose
eyes tear up from the smog. They’re the ones who chase after
snowmobilers who speed and go off-trail, and they know first-hand
the stresses snowmobiles put on wildlife. Yet they’re not allowed
to give their opinion.
Is this really considered
democracy? I believe that if the snowmobile ban does not pass, it
is for one reason: that park rangers have been bound and gagged. It
should be an embarrassment to the Park Service, the federal
government, and the freedoms we value as Americans that such a
policy is upheld.
And perhaps it’s not my place,
as an employee of a concessionaire and not the Park Service, but
I’ll say it anyway: Park rangers should speak. If they know in
their hearts what is right, they should speak what is in their
hearts. As Gandhi said, “When a law fosters untruth, it becomes a
duty to disobey it.”
The role of park rangers is
to be good stewards for the parks; if they are fired for attempting
to be good stewards, the Park Service will simply be advertising
its hypocrisy.
Ray Sikorski,
Mammoth Station,
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Yellowstone rangers bound and gagged.
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