The ongoing effort to rid national park sites of certain interpretive signage stems from an executive order Trump signed in March, which tasked the Interior Department with removing items that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed up with his own secretarial order in May, ordering agencies within Interior to remove any content that "inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” or “emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur” of a natural feature.
Over the summer, the agency went as far as to put up new signs calling on members of the public to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”
More than 100 organizations, including Friends of Acadia, signed on to a letter late last month that implored Burgum to rescind his order, which they argue “undermines the Department of the Interior’s responsibility to steward not only the landscapes we all share but also the layered histories embedded within them.” (Friends of Acadia partnered with the National Park Service and other organizations to erect the interpretive signs.)
At other sites around the country, the National Park Service has removed information related to slavery, the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and conflicts with Native Americans, The Washington Post reported last week.
Todd Martin, northeast senior program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association, told The Maine Monitor that when people visit a national park, they deserve to see uncensored information about that place and its history — the good and the bad.
“That’s exactly what these signs at Acadia were trying to do,” he said. “We have decades of scientific research that demonstrate the impact of climate change on Maine and Acadia National Park — longer droughts, more intense precipitation events, more intense coastal storms, sea level rise. We have the science to back that up. It’s science, it’s not politics.”
“The signs coming down at Acadia is just another example of erasure and censure that we’ve seen at our parks in recent weeks and months,” he added.
For now, the public can learn more about those impacts on Acadia National Park’s website, which features a comprehensive climate change page.
Among other things, the website notes that a record-breaking storm in June of 2021 dumped 5 inches of rain in less than three hours, damaging trails and the park’s 45-mile historic carriage road system. And it warns that “without a significant reduction in greenhouse emissions, there is a chance that some of [the park’s] fragile pieces could be lost forever.”
Whether the webpage survives Trump’s second term remains to be seen.
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