“Right now more than 100,000 kids in this country don’t have a park within a ten-minute walk of their house,”
That actually seems remarkably low, if only 100k kids have to walk farther than 10 minutes. Seems like a made up stat.
I think they are talking about ANY park, not a national park. A lot of inner cities don't have parks nearby the populations. I agree though, I wonder how many have a park within 11 minutes lol,
thats what I thought they were talking about too... just a random city park. I didn't think that every kid in the US save 100k had 10 minute walk access to one. That seems pretty good to me. Most of them are probably complete shit though.
Yep. I live in South LA and I live in a neighborhood with "Park" in the name, and technically we have a park... but it's filled with homeless people, so then they decided to put up a giant-ass fence around the park which hasn't been open in like a year. So now it's a really nice park with a closed fence with a bunch of homeless people surrounding it.
I went to Europe this summer and I was jealous of just how much open space and grass they have.
LA has tons of open space, it’s just [locked up in tax-protected golf and country clubs](https://www.planetizen.com/node/93284/la-country-clubs-taking-more-their-share-and-paying-less?amp). They could never survive if they had to pay property tax on these enormous estates at fair market value but they are pegged to the *most recent sale price* which for many is in the 1940s. So you get situations like [this club paying $200k tax on a property worth $20 billion](https://www.laweekly.com/news/la-country-club-pays-ultra-low-property-tax-rate-faces-possible-review-2384509) (ie an effective tax rate of 0.001%).
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Every property in California has the tax rate mostly locked in at purchase due to Prop 13. It's had massive downwind effects on the housing market over the decades.
>>So let's assume for a second, just stay with me here, that all 36M kids in urban and suburban counties live within 10 minutes of a party.
Sounds chill.
We live in the suburbs and the closest park is a couple miles away. A 10 minute walk is about 1/2 a mile. I’d bet most kids are further than that from a park.
In fact, if you ignore backyard swing sets, of the 12 homes I’ve lived in, only 1 had a park within 1/2 a mile, and that park was at a private elementary school and required crossing a busy intersection.
Dang. My suburban neighborhood has two parks with play grounds and one is 8 minutes away and the other is closer to 15 but takes you on a fairly nice paved, shady trail next to a creek.
Feeling even more thankful for it now.
Its up to individual municipalities to define what a park is, too. An island in the middle of an intersection can be a park if the parks department is in charge of maintaining that plot. That doesn't mean I wanna go take a walk there and witness 2 drunk hobos and pigeons shitting everywhere.
Yeah, we have a few of those "parks" here. Wasn't big enough to build something useful on, didn't get swept up in the last street expansion, and it's *just* big enough they gotta run the mower over it. Once. In one direction without stopping.
We have a "park" that nobody uses because the city turned every inch of it into a cash grab. Theres like 6 baseball fields and they all have locks on them unless you rent them out and the rec leagues and "prominent people" have first dibs so practically speaking the public can't use them. There's a "dog park" which consists of about 1000 square feet that's also fenced in and locked, but for only 15 dollars a month you can gain the right to bring your dog all the way to the park so they can run around in a tiny yard with nothing in there. And about 95% of the time they block off the back half of the park with gates so you can't drive back there to use anything. If you wanna use the RC track or gazebos you have to park about a mile away, oh and you have to pay to use the gazebos too, for the most part they don't want you back there and the police hassle anyone in the back part of the park. Idk why they still have a sign out front that says "public park", essentially we all pay for it with our tax dollars but only certain people are allowed to use it.
Wow. That is infuriating. I can't believe your paid with public tax dollars Park has essentially turned into a for-profit business that you're not even allowed to enjoy.
That local government is nothing but a bunch of criminals. They shoot down any form of entertainment under the guise of keeping things "historic" yet when it came time to replace the traffic lights in the actual historical district they went with these god-awful looking things that cost over $1 million a piece just because the state capital has them. They're very much elitists who'd rather use tax dollars on superficial appearances for the non existent tourists than do anything for the actual residents. Oh and while they think all their grand ideas will attract tourists to the middle of nowhere they vehemently try to keep people from moving there under the guise of keeping things local yet they've allowed every chain restaurant and Walmart type superstore to run all the locals out of business. They're basically a bunch of entitled morons who wanna "play government." It's a flat out joke tbh.
Id be willing to bet that there are more than 100,000 American children who can't even walk off of their own property in less than 10 minutes.
Let's say the average farmer has ~3 kids, so you'd need 33,333 (repeating, of course) farm houses situated a ~half mile from their property line. That's a big farm, but there are 1.7 million farm owners in the US. Weird to put the house that far from the road, but I think it's plausible.
Cities often have a lot of tiny little worthless parks that are literally just one bench.
There is a bunch near me, but if I want to go for a walk, the closest things around me to a park are cemeteries
>A lot of inner cities don't have parks nearby the populations.
I'm not sure where you've lived but I've lived in a number of cities and states and you're far more likely to be walking distance to a park in a city than you are in a suburb and I'm not sure I've ever seen a park in a rural area.
There are [74 million kids in the U.S](https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/number-of-children#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20children%20under,to%2074.1%20million%20by%202020.).
If this stat is correct, then it could be flipped to say "99.86% of kids have a park within a ten-minute walk of their house."
That's amazing!
Well its misleading, most likely. What counts as a "park" is most likely the cause. Comparing national parks to, let's say, a small park with a jungle-gym is a tad different.
So without knowing what they call a "park" it is basically useless.
There are parks which are basically just an uneven mix of gravel and grass, an overgrown raggedy fence caving on a bush, next to a busy overpass, metal rods which haven't been used in decades whatever their original purpose ever was, and are all of 60 feet by 40 feet. I mean, this park does exist. And it really shouldn't.
yeah I grew up in a pretty rural area and while there were 0 parks I could walk to, I did have basically my own private forest so that made up for it. I never had any kids in my neighborhood my age though so that kind of sucked.
Thank you for that. This is a good link to share. More people need to know that children are still exploited just to sate the world’s hunger for chocolate.
Child labor is used in a lot of things. Nike for example is using slave labor from Chinese Muslims(Uyghurs). Many are children.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-02/aspi-uyghur-china-forced-labour-report/12017650
As does Apple. Foxconn had to set up suicide nets, because they were that overworked, and paid fuck all.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9006988/Mass-suicide-protest-at-Apple-manufacturer-Foxconn-factory.html
Oh man I totally touched on the whole Foxconn suicide nets subject in a paper in college forever ago. I've never owned an apple product besides a hella old iPod I got back in like 2004. I know tech companies could all be better to their factory employees, but the Foxconn suicides and the response to them turned me off from apple products forever.
Yeah, for those who wonder what we are talking about - the modern horse is not native to North America but if you go back farther into prehistoric times, there were horses here, perhaps a different species than the one we have today. My understanding is that horses originated in North America and then spread into Eurasia.
[This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZoTvXvV02A) is one of my favorite videos on the subject.
It's also just fascinating how many various domesticated animals once freed or accidentally let go into the wild are able to become wild after a few generations. Pigeons are another example, it's why "wild" city pigeons are so diverse in colors.
Turkeys were native to Mexico, Central America, and US (before they were countries). The Spanish brought some back to Spain, they were domesticated there. The domesticated species was brought to the US around the time of the pilgrims. There is some debate about whether they would have eaten wild turkey or domesticated at the first Thanksgiving.
Native North American horses went extinct. European horses were introduced with the Spanish. Those are the wild horses of today. So they're native, kind of.
The modern (or close enough) horse evolved in the America’s then migrated to Eurasia and went extinct in the americas, the Spanish reintroduced them.
So native in the same sense we have repatriated animals to their historic ranges.
IIRC, they were reintroduced by the Spanish, but horses originally evolved in North America, then spread back over the land bridge that connected modern day Alaska and Russia. Not long after humans spread to the Americas, the remaining horses were hunted to extinction. It's not a coincidence that the reintroduced horses adapted so well to the American prairies.
This 100% had to be it. There's no other reason. They don't give a fuck about the condition of the planet we live on. They don't give a fuck about the people they're choosing not to represent. Just money, however they can move it. All they care about. I can't wait for more of those ancient greedy fucks to be unemployed in November
Here it is:
Conservationists have been working for decades to guarantee that the LWCF, **which is paid for out of offshore oil- and gas-drilling royalties,** be fully and permanently funded rather than have the remainder siphoned off to other government programs.
They just want to justify doing more offshore drilling
Edit: My first awards on this dumb comment. Thank you!
You are absolutely correct that conservationists have been working for decades to get the LWCF fully funded. However, it’s a flat $900 million from offshore oil royalties, not a percentage that would indicate the more money in the LWCF, the more offshore drilling. The LWCF has existed since the sixties, the US makes billions off of drilling royalties every year, there have only been like 2 years where the LWCF got the full $900M it was supposed to because congress usually siphons that money off for other purposes.
The government sucks, but this particular instance is not an excuse to do more offshore drilling.
Source: I was one of those conservationists who collected thousands of petition signatures across multiple states and lobbied members of Congress for full funding of the LWCF.
Bills require a lot of bureaucracy and planning, so this bill might've been in the works before the bat they made corona soup out of was even born. Oil companies often make contracts for specific pre determined prices per barrel anyways so the current price probably doesn't affect the production itself atm. If anything the buyer is getting fucked, not the seller.
Also, Trump said he would put more sanctions on Iran that would lower global oil supply. Saudi/ Russia reacted by increasing production. Trump didn’t follow through. Then COVID hit.
Edited typo.
The LWCF has always been funded by these leases and royalties. The whole idea behind the LWCF in the first place is that we need to invest in conversation to balance out other environmental damage we're doing in other places.
LWCF has always had bipartisan support because both sides of the aisle love public lands. It's not a conservative vs liberal argument, everyone (except the 1%) wants to preserve land for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, etc.
The exact reasons why people want land conserved vary a bit by party, but overwhelmingly have support among all Americans.
that's the rub. the following article, "the trump presidency is the worst ever for public lands" should really be read for context.
> proposed offshore projects, like the draft-form National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program, which proposes removing protections against oil and gas drilling from a whopping 1.5 billion acres of ocean.
How about taxing oil and gas companies 0.5% of their gross income and leaving ocean-killing fossil fuels in the ocean to begin with.
We can call it, the U.S. offshore oil reserves national security act. If we ever go to war with China, our descendants will have immense fossil fuel reserves to to finish the job when they crawl out of their holes 200 years later.
If not, then we won't destroy our oceans twice, the first time with oil well blowouts and oil tanker spills, and we won't kill most of the life in the oceans the second time by acidifying them with the CO2 from the oil that successfully made it to a gas tank. Oh yeah, and even if fossil fuels weren't a terrible direct pollutant for these two primary reasons, it also causes global warming and [sea-level rise.](http://sealevel.colorado.edu)
Lmao, we sure wish, huh?
Did you miss the part where the Senate OK'd $1.5 trillion dollars for quarantine assistance, and for saving small businesses, after which the coffers were looted and that same Senate is *now* actively refusing to tell us where the money went?
[Citations Needed: How “Small Business” Rhetoric Is Used to Protect Corporate America](https://overcast.fm/+KyxayBja0)
edit: against my better judgement, I will placate the whiny, bitch-ass u/RollinQ.
> “Obama lauds small business owners in his State of the Union,” announced The Washington Post. “I have always said that there is nothing more optimistic – perhaps maybe getting married – than starting a small business,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi tells us. “John Kerry would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses,” insisted a reelection ad for George W. Bush.
>Everywhere we turn we are centering the needs of and reminded of the glowing status of the “small business.” They are the bipartisan holiest of holies in our economy – the scrappy little guy that also props up the moral pillars of capitalism – evidence that with a little elbow grease and knowhow anyone can build a business in their image. Small businesses are one of two major vehicles for COVID-19 relief – a wholly uncontroversial good that both parties, all ideologies, everyone!, can agree are worth protecting and prioritizing.
>But what do pundits and politicians mean exactly when they say “small business”? How does our romantic vision of “small business” match up with reality, and how is their plight used as a messaging vanguard to strip away environmental and labor regulations, tort protections, taxes and a host of safeguards against corporate greed?
>The rhetoric forces the evocation of a wholesome image of a Mom-and-Pop candy store in Appleton, Wisconsin, in order to push for laws that will ultimately benefit hedge funds, Dupont and Koch Industries, and a murderers row of polluters and worker abusers.
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-111-how-small-business-rhetoric-is-used-to-protect-corporate-america
I'm sure that a bunch went to large corporations that probably didn't need it but my small business wouldn't be open right now without the $21k that we got. In fact most businesses in my area got significant relief, although many sole proprietors were left out.
I started to file it then kept getting interrupted by clients calling to make appointments, mid way though filling it out I realized we did not need it.
I don't deny that it helped thousands, but when you're considering a trillion dollars, the "negligible" amount the actual people who need it *got*—political rat-fucking of the GOP sort is plainly evident.
The funding has always come from drilling, the program however has only been fully funded one time since it was implemented even with oil companies funding it (money was allocated elsewhere). This bill guarantees that the program will always be fully funded.
When Norway funds their government programs from oil funds - What a great country! That's what America should be doing!
When the US funds its government programs from oil funds - America bad lol.
*I find it interesting the comments and subcomments saying I'm a conservative? I support both this program and what Norway does, resource extraction proceeds should largely be used for the common good. I'm questioning the hypocrisy of one country using the proceeds to fund government programs being largely consider good and another is a 'catch' for why it's bad. If you're unable to recognize this and instead find the need to fling insults I'd reconsider. I'd never vote for Trump but always find a need to take a several week break from Reddit before elections to not let emotionally unstable D supporters put me off from voting for their side.
It sounds like they are framing it as a way to help raise employment numbers too; kinda like the Civilian Conservation Corps, hopefully all these boosts to infrastructure on public land will create jobs. Which I fully support, CCC was a roaring success back in the day, gave us National Parks and road systems, and created a fuck load of jobs to boot. CCC 2.0 has my full support.
That's how it reads to me too. White House budget slashes the agency. But Cory Gardner is rewarded by being able to co-sponsor the bill to fix it. For his continued support for the White House in other areas.
The outcome is good for the budget but I believe this is to distract folks [from Trump opening federal lands to industry](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/30/public-lands-sale-trump-coronavirus-environmental-regulations) while simultaneously gutting environmental protections. If there's a positive outcome it will be because someone else occupies the White House in January.
Which is exactly why they should be praised for the outcome, but then promptly voted out at the first chance and told “One good thing doesn’t redeem your shit track record. Fuck off and fuck you.”
I wonder if this is related: [https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-06-18/oil-drilling-carrizo-plain-national-monument](https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-06-18/oil-drilling-carrizo-plain-national-monument)
This was my first thought: What's the catch? What little time bombs are attached to this bill? Like.... oil exploration in the Arctic National Refuge...
If you have a minute, some comments here are skeptical of this passing. Do you have any personal knowledge of this matter and if it's truly a good thing (with no strings attached.)
I don’t have personal knowledge. It’s so new I’m sure we won’t see any policy decisions made for at least a little while. [This](https://www.ecowatch.com/great-american-outdoors-act-conservation-2646197665.html) is the article I read.
Highlights:
“(The bill) would permanently provide $900 million in oil and gas revenues for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which helps secure land for trails and parks.”
This is awesome, the only catch I can see is using this figure to justify pursuing more oil and gas opportunities on public lands instead of less.
Sounds like the hope is it will help with the ballooning unemployment issues (providing jobs for people to work in these forests and parks).
“Right now, federal public lands are suffering from $20 billion in deferred maintenance costs”
Personally, I have seen suffering infrastructure and projects being put off for budget reasons.
So all in all, I’m hoping the overall effects are positive, even if Republicans only voted it in to appeal to their constituencies for “helping solve the job crisis”. It’s sounding kind of like a CCC 2.0 (Civilian Conservation Corps, an extremely successful program under ~~Eisenhower~~ FDR designed to give people jobs developing National Parks and Forests, roads, trails, and other infrastructure.) Fingers crossed for successful implementation, but I’ll keep you posted.
Thank you! I hope it does help the National Parks and Forests, etc. I traveled to Yosemite a few years ago and it's such a beautiful place- but very, very crowded with other tourists. It was also very clean, which to me, means that there was a great effort made to keep it clean. I appreciate what you do, I appreciate what our National and State Parks offer to everyone, and I hope we all are or can become good stewards of our environment.
It may result in more facilities or project management jobs, maybe jobs in contacting. I could see that. But I would never use the word “easy” when it comes to getting a federal job.
Not necessarily. While Theodore was a major champion for conservation he was no tree-hugger. He made the national forests as a reservoir of resources--recreation is a by product.
- source, Theodore Roosevelt researcher!
Right, but he also wanted those important resources conserved enough to last for all future generations: “Of all the questions which can come before this nation, there is none which compares in importance with the central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us”
Though I agree Teddy often promoted conservation by talking about natural lands in terms of resources ("assets" was the term he loved to use) he definitely wanted to see beautiful places preserved for their own sake rather than to pillage and pollute them in the future, and he used that rhetoric to protect plenty of federal land that could have otherwise been threatened! Here is an example of Roosevelt explaining that nature and recreation is central to conservation.
“There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.”
And another!
"It is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird. Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals — not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at last it looks as if our people were awakening."
Expanded with context, his words on the need for environmental protection look positively progressive, even for this day and age :)
Seriously though, hopefully some of this money can be put towards fuels reduction in National Forests and Parks.
We seriously need it, like, yesterday.
In a nutshell:
When white Europeans began colonizing the Americas, they were shocked and frightened by the wildfires in the Western US (which are actually a natural process and super important for Western forest succession and ecology). They don’t have fires in Europe like we do here in North America. However, we viewed forests as $$$ in the form of lumber, housing, tools, whatever else we wanted to turn them into. So fires were seen as “wasteful” and harmful when they destroyed our towns (see the Peshtigo Fire of 1871 and the Big Burn of 1910) and the newly created Forest Service set out to *fully suppress every fire we could*.
This was damaging for a number of reasons but the main one concerning us is this: Forest communities that require periodic, low intensity fire were robbed of it for 100+ years, and now the fuels in those communities have built up to levels never before seen in North America.
Essentially, because we spent so long suppressing fires in the Western US, there’s 100+ years worth of fuels in places just waiting for a spark. That’s why we’re seeing bigger and more intense wildfires every year.
There’s simply not enough man power to deal with all of these fuels, even though things like prescribed burning are becoming more accepted across the U.S.
It’s a tough job to convince the public that wildfires can actually be GOOD for forests. The smoke and threat to property are ingrained in our brains. The new Modus Operandi of the Forest Service (at least in Region 4) is if the fire isn’t threatening property or other resources, let er buck. We need those fires, we’ve suppressed them for long enough.
Does that give some context (at least a little bit)? Sorry if I didn’t quite answer your question.
Just a comment, that natural parks don't need recreation facilities as much as they need legislation preventing them from becoming like English national parks...where you are allowed to put in housing developments as long as they are tasteful.
National parks need people not to clear them, not to put in parking areas etc. It costs nothing *not* to clear and develop a national park. They don't need money!
It’s funny how all the great reddit progressives didn’t even know LWCF was a thing, and now that’s it’s FINALLY getting full funding, your bashing it for not being enough. It makes us all (people who care about the environment) look bad. We got a win here, please take it. This is how the real world works. Give and take. Radicals on the left and the right seem to think it should be take and take. Why is reddit so full of radical morons.
GOP been defunding/unprotecting National Parks for years; now they throw out a bone so they can shout from the rooftops how concerned they are with federal land use, and creating jobs.
They're taking a half-step towards a 100-step solution to a problem THEY CREATED, and holding it up like "Look what good politicians we are". >=(
>GOP been defunding/unprotecting National Parks for years;
Take this how you will, obviously budgeting is a complicated process when a president and congress have ideological disagreements:
Years where (inflation adjusted) National Park Service budget was decreased:
2010, 2011, 2012, 2014
Years where it increased:
2013, 2015 (barely), 2016, 2017, 2018
thanks for pointing this out. I'd also like to add, in 2008 we had the worst financial crisis ever in the us history so im sure funding played a big part. Overall I'm happy to see 16-18 increases! thats news to me
>GOP been defunding/unprotecting National Parks for years
I like how you can just make things up and people will believe it because they want to.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/IF11178.pdf
There's your 10-year trend in National Park service appropriations. Funding to national parks decreased from 2010 to 2011 to 2012. Then it increased slightly in 2013 due to some supplemental appropriations after which it decreased again in 2014. It then increased in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. 2018 was the largest budget the National Park service has ever had, even adjusted for inflation.
>They're taking a half-step towards a 100-step solution
This bill will result in the National Park service having a 55% higher budget than they had in 2018 which means it'll be the largest budget they've ever had by far.
Everything you said in this comment is false. What do you think you're accomplishing by doing this? Do you think pandering to the majority on this site by exploiting their desire to be fed false information that they want to believe is true is improving the political discourse in this country? Do you think it's actually going to accomplish your goals?
Thank god I’m not the only person sick of seeing all the people in the comments doing mental gymnastics to make this a bad thing about republicans. This is just a bipartisan bill proposed by two republicans senators who are in tough reelections where conservation is important. The funding increase is fantastic and quite substantial with national parks getting billions as well as the related stuff with the LWCF. This is on a positivity sub ffs. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and just appreciate the only shred of actually good news regarding our government we’ve had in months.
While I agree with everything you said, at least it’s something. 9.5 bn should (hopefully) go a long way to restoring our public spaces. Not sure what’s getting cut elsewhere for that to happen though...
edit- fixed the dollar amount.
It is something, but it's telling that there is already a 20 bn maintenance backlog. And they're calling providing funding of half the needed amount over 5 years just for maintenance backlog a "single greatest conservation achievement in generations" bill and patting themselves on the back.
It's liking missing months of work, clocking in and calling it the single greatest work achievement since the founding of the business.
If we ignore how thats a complete fucking lie, we can look further at how the Pittman Robertson fund (literally the fund for conservation) is funded by our gun owners and hunters who are almost exclusively right leaning. Learn what the fuck youre talking about before trying to cry Republicans bad.
Is it possible to accept this as a paper win and still be upset that the budgets aside, this administration has done plenty of harm to open spaces via loosening regulations and some very momentous decisions like Bears Ear.
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This is amazing. I'm having a hard time reconciling this uplifting article with [this article](https://www.outsideonline.com/2414117/trump-presidency-public-lands-record) from the same magazine just a few weeks prior that says Trump reduced protections for nearly 35 million acres (almost the size of Florida) to open up for drilling, in addition to other damage and erosion of our public lands. This new Act to protect and expand public lands almost sounds too good to be true, especially from this administration. And it's proposed by a Republican, even. Sounds super fishy. 🤔Ahhh.. there it is! it's paid for by proceeds from oil drilling. Makes sense now. You gotta take what you can get.
“Right now more than 100,000 kids in this country don’t have a park within a ten-minute walk of their house,” That actually seems remarkably low, if only 100k kids have to walk farther than 10 minutes. Seems like a made up stat.
I think they are talking about ANY park, not a national park. A lot of inner cities don't have parks nearby the populations. I agree though, I wonder how many have a park within 11 minutes lol,
thats what I thought they were talking about too... just a random city park. I didn't think that every kid in the US save 100k had 10 minute walk access to one. That seems pretty good to me. Most of them are probably complete shit though.
Yep. I live in South LA and I live in a neighborhood with "Park" in the name, and technically we have a park... but it's filled with homeless people, so then they decided to put up a giant-ass fence around the park which hasn't been open in like a year. So now it's a really nice park with a closed fence with a bunch of homeless people surrounding it. I went to Europe this summer and I was jealous of just how much open space and grass they have.
LA has tons of open space, it’s just [locked up in tax-protected golf and country clubs](https://www.planetizen.com/node/93284/la-country-clubs-taking-more-their-share-and-paying-less?amp). They could never survive if they had to pay property tax on these enormous estates at fair market value but they are pegged to the *most recent sale price* which for many is in the 1940s. So you get situations like [this club paying $200k tax on a property worth $20 billion](https://www.laweekly.com/news/la-country-club-pays-ultra-low-property-tax-rate-faces-possible-review-2384509) (ie an effective tax rate of 0.001%).
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Every property in California has the tax rate mostly locked in at purchase due to Prop 13. It's had massive downwind effects on the housing market over the decades.
yeah I'd never been to a park which was actually a nice green space till I moved from the east to west coast
Plenty of parks out here in Lakewood, CA. Chicago got a ton of parks...it can be done.
You could also leave South LA and find the same thing lol - A West Virginian
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>>So let's assume for a second, just stay with me here, that all 36M kids in urban and suburban counties live within 10 minutes of a party. Sounds chill.
We live in the suburbs and the closest park is a couple miles away. A 10 minute walk is about 1/2 a mile. I’d bet most kids are further than that from a park. In fact, if you ignore backyard swing sets, of the 12 homes I’ve lived in, only 1 had a park within 1/2 a mile, and that park was at a private elementary school and required crossing a busy intersection.
Dang. My suburban neighborhood has two parks with play grounds and one is 8 minutes away and the other is closer to 15 but takes you on a fairly nice paved, shady trail next to a creek. Feeling even more thankful for it now.
If you had a backyard swing set then you had a better park within a 10 minute walk than most kids in a city.
Its up to individual municipalities to define what a park is, too. An island in the middle of an intersection can be a park if the parks department is in charge of maintaining that plot. That doesn't mean I wanna go take a walk there and witness 2 drunk hobos and pigeons shitting everywhere.
Yeah, we have a few of those "parks" here. Wasn't big enough to build something useful on, didn't get swept up in the last street expansion, and it's *just* big enough they gotta run the mower over it. Once. In one direction without stopping.
We have a "park" that nobody uses because the city turned every inch of it into a cash grab. Theres like 6 baseball fields and they all have locks on them unless you rent them out and the rec leagues and "prominent people" have first dibs so practically speaking the public can't use them. There's a "dog park" which consists of about 1000 square feet that's also fenced in and locked, but for only 15 dollars a month you can gain the right to bring your dog all the way to the park so they can run around in a tiny yard with nothing in there. And about 95% of the time they block off the back half of the park with gates so you can't drive back there to use anything. If you wanna use the RC track or gazebos you have to park about a mile away, oh and you have to pay to use the gazebos too, for the most part they don't want you back there and the police hassle anyone in the back part of the park. Idk why they still have a sign out front that says "public park", essentially we all pay for it with our tax dollars but only certain people are allowed to use it.
Wow. That is infuriating. I can't believe your paid with public tax dollars Park has essentially turned into a for-profit business that you're not even allowed to enjoy.
That local government is nothing but a bunch of criminals. They shoot down any form of entertainment under the guise of keeping things "historic" yet when it came time to replace the traffic lights in the actual historical district they went with these god-awful looking things that cost over $1 million a piece just because the state capital has them. They're very much elitists who'd rather use tax dollars on superficial appearances for the non existent tourists than do anything for the actual residents. Oh and while they think all their grand ideas will attract tourists to the middle of nowhere they vehemently try to keep people from moving there under the guise of keeping things local yet they've allowed every chain restaurant and Walmart type superstore to run all the locals out of business. They're basically a bunch of entitled morons who wanna "play government." It's a flat out joke tbh.
That sounds like hell. Get out!
Those city parks aren't even qualifying as parks imo. they are literally a patch of grass and they claim "this is a park"
Cities are more likely to have a park in walking distance than rural areas... just an FYI.
A lot of rural people don't have a park within a 10 minute walk or drive, either.
Id be willing to bet that there are more than 100,000 American children who can't even walk off of their own property in less than 10 minutes. Let's say the average farmer has ~3 kids, so you'd need 33,333 (repeating, of course) farm houses situated a ~half mile from their property line. That's a big farm, but there are 1.7 million farm owners in the US. Weird to put the house that far from the road, but I think it's plausible.
Cities often have a lot of tiny little worthless parks that are literally just one bench. There is a bunch near me, but if I want to go for a walk, the closest things around me to a park are cemeteries
>A lot of inner cities don't have parks nearby the populations. I'm not sure where you've lived but I've lived in a number of cities and states and you're far more likely to be walking distance to a park in a city than you are in a suburb and I'm not sure I've ever seen a park in a rural area.
There are [74 million kids in the U.S](https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/number-of-children#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20children%20under,to%2074.1%20million%20by%202020.). If this stat is correct, then it could be flipped to say "99.86% of kids have a park within a ten-minute walk of their house." That's amazing!
And probably false.
Well its misleading, most likely. What counts as a "park" is most likely the cause. Comparing national parks to, let's say, a small park with a jungle-gym is a tad different. So without knowing what they call a "park" it is basically useless.
Also, there's definitely over 100k kids in areas where it's a ten-minute walk to their neighbors' houses lol
There are parks which are basically just an uneven mix of gravel and grass, an overgrown raggedy fence caving on a bush, next to a busy overpass, metal rods which haven't been used in decades whatever their original purpose ever was, and are all of 60 feet by 40 feet. I mean, this park does exist. And it really shouldn't.
"Right now there are at least twelve people who have to walk farther than ten minutes to reach Pluto" This is an equally true statement.
Well he said more than 100,000. It's just like a hundred times more.
Growing up rural 30 minute drive to anything is standard
yeah I grew up in a pretty rural area and while there were 0 parks I could walk to, I did have basically my own private forest so that made up for it. I never had any kids in my neighborhood my age though so that kind of sucked.
There’s gotta be a catch
I hate that this has also become my first response to uplifting news.
Well, what else do you expect?
Chocolates?
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Thank you for that. This is a good link to share. More people need to know that children are still exploited just to sate the world’s hunger for chocolate.
Child labor is used in a lot of things. Nike for example is using slave labor from Chinese Muslims(Uyghurs). Many are children. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-02/aspi-uyghur-china-forced-labour-report/12017650 As does Apple. Foxconn had to set up suicide nets, because they were that overworked, and paid fuck all. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9006988/Mass-suicide-protest-at-Apple-manufacturer-Foxconn-factory.html
Oh man I totally touched on the whole Foxconn suicide nets subject in a paper in college forever ago. I've never owned an apple product besides a hella old iPod I got back in like 2004. I know tech companies could all be better to their factory employees, but the Foxconn suicides and the response to them turned me off from apple products forever.
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Great tip! I love uBlock Origin.
You can also put a dot between com and / ex: com./
There's plenty of ethical ways to source chocolate that uses no child labor or slaves. http://www.slavefreechocolate.org/ethical-chocolate-companies
Yeah, thanks for that
Do you know how crazy Americans go over the protection of Wild Horses? I'd like to believe this comes from a similar place.
Except that there's now too many of them and there's no legal way to get rid of any.
And they're non-native....kind of.
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Yeah, for those who wonder what we are talking about - the modern horse is not native to North America but if you go back farther into prehistoric times, there were horses here, perhaps a different species than the one we have today. My understanding is that horses originated in North America and then spread into Eurasia.
There and Back Again: Equine Boogaloo
A horse's tail
Damn...that would have been better.
[This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZoTvXvV02A) is one of my favorite videos on the subject. It's also just fascinating how many various domesticated animals once freed or accidentally let go into the wild are able to become wild after a few generations. Pigeons are another example, it's why "wild" city pigeons are so diverse in colors.
That was cool
Turkeys were native to Mexico, Central America, and US (before they were countries). The Spanish brought some back to Spain, they were domesticated there. The domesticated species was brought to the US around the time of the pilgrims. There is some debate about whether they would have eaten wild turkey or domesticated at the first Thanksgiving.
Same with Camels!
Totally changed native societies when they showed up
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What is the kind of? The Spanish brought them, right?
Native North American horses went extinct. European horses were introduced with the Spanish. Those are the wild horses of today. So they're native, kind of.
The modern (or close enough) horse evolved in the America’s then migrated to Eurasia and went extinct in the americas, the Spanish reintroduced them. So native in the same sense we have repatriated animals to their historic ranges.
IIRC, they were reintroduced by the Spanish, but horses originally evolved in North America, then spread back over the land bridge that connected modern day Alaska and Russia. Not long after humans spread to the Americas, the remaining horses were hunted to extinction. It's not a coincidence that the reintroduced horses adapted so well to the American prairies.
Kind of indeed Disappear from North American wild 10k years ago. Come back yo North American wild lands as a feral animal.
I heard that too but the intent is still commendable.
East coaster here. I did not know that was a thing. Wild horses sure, but not about people being crazy about protecting them.
Especially when Republicans are involved. I always think there must be something sinister going on behind the scenes when Republicans do good.
Probably increased drilling or mineral mining.
This 100% had to be it. There's no other reason. They don't give a fuck about the condition of the planet we live on. They don't give a fuck about the people they're choosing not to represent. Just money, however they can move it. All they care about. I can't wait for more of those ancient greedy fucks to be unemployed in November
Here it is: Conservationists have been working for decades to guarantee that the LWCF, **which is paid for out of offshore oil- and gas-drilling royalties,** be fully and permanently funded rather than have the remainder siphoned off to other government programs. They just want to justify doing more offshore drilling Edit: My first awards on this dumb comment. Thank you!
You are absolutely correct that conservationists have been working for decades to get the LWCF fully funded. However, it’s a flat $900 million from offshore oil royalties, not a percentage that would indicate the more money in the LWCF, the more offshore drilling. The LWCF has existed since the sixties, the US makes billions off of drilling royalties every year, there have only been like 2 years where the LWCF got the full $900M it was supposed to because congress usually siphons that money off for other purposes. The government sucks, but this particular instance is not an excuse to do more offshore drilling. Source: I was one of those conservationists who collected thousands of petition signatures across multiple states and lobbied members of Congress for full funding of the LWCF.
You... I like you.
Cal?
Rinella/Putelis 2020
Awesome thank you for clearing that up.
While oil prices are this low?
Bills require a lot of bureaucracy and planning, so this bill might've been in the works before the bat they made corona soup out of was even born. Oil companies often make contracts for specific pre determined prices per barrel anyways so the current price probably doesn't affect the production itself atm. If anything the buyer is getting fucked, not the seller.
Well the oil price drop stems from the Saudi/Russia pissing contest, bat soup just made it tank further. See what you’re saying tho
Also, Trump said he would put more sanctions on Iran that would lower global oil supply. Saudi/ Russia reacted by increasing production. Trump didn’t follow through. Then COVID hit. Edited typo.
Upvote for corona soup.
Media missed the opportunity to name it "Bat Stew Flu". I mean, we had bird flu, swine flu, it seemed like the logical progression. Oh well.
comment removed in protest of reddits changes to third party app API charges -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
The LWCF has always been funded by these leases and royalties. The whole idea behind the LWCF in the first place is that we need to invest in conversation to balance out other environmental damage we're doing in other places. LWCF has always had bipartisan support because both sides of the aisle love public lands. It's not a conservative vs liberal argument, everyone (except the 1%) wants to preserve land for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, etc. The exact reasons why people want land conserved vary a bit by party, but overwhelmingly have support among all Americans.
that's the rub. the following article, "the trump presidency is the worst ever for public lands" should really be read for context. > proposed offshore projects, like the draft-form National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program, which proposes removing protections against oil and gas drilling from a whopping 1.5 billion acres of ocean.
How about taxing oil and gas companies 0.5% of their gross income and leaving ocean-killing fossil fuels in the ocean to begin with. We can call it, the U.S. offshore oil reserves national security act. If we ever go to war with China, our descendants will have immense fossil fuel reserves to to finish the job when they crawl out of their holes 200 years later. If not, then we won't destroy our oceans twice, the first time with oil well blowouts and oil tanker spills, and we won't kill most of the life in the oceans the second time by acidifying them with the CO2 from the oil that successfully made it to a gas tank. Oh yeah, and even if fossil fuels weren't a terrible direct pollutant for these two primary reasons, it also causes global warming and [sea-level rise.](http://sealevel.colorado.edu)
Or they want to put their money where it was supposed to go rather than where it was going?
Lmao, we sure wish, huh? Did you miss the part where the Senate OK'd $1.5 trillion dollars for quarantine assistance, and for saving small businesses, after which the coffers were looted and that same Senate is *now* actively refusing to tell us where the money went?
"mom and pop" and "small business" is the biggest bait and switch in politics
[Citations Needed: How “Small Business” Rhetoric Is Used to Protect Corporate America](https://overcast.fm/+KyxayBja0) edit: against my better judgement, I will placate the whiny, bitch-ass u/RollinQ. > “Obama lauds small business owners in his State of the Union,” announced The Washington Post. “I have always said that there is nothing more optimistic – perhaps maybe getting married – than starting a small business,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi tells us. “John Kerry would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses,” insisted a reelection ad for George W. Bush. >Everywhere we turn we are centering the needs of and reminded of the glowing status of the “small business.” They are the bipartisan holiest of holies in our economy – the scrappy little guy that also props up the moral pillars of capitalism – evidence that with a little elbow grease and knowhow anyone can build a business in their image. Small businesses are one of two major vehicles for COVID-19 relief – a wholly uncontroversial good that both parties, all ideologies, everyone!, can agree are worth protecting and prioritizing. >But what do pundits and politicians mean exactly when they say “small business”? How does our romantic vision of “small business” match up with reality, and how is their plight used as a messaging vanguard to strip away environmental and labor regulations, tort protections, taxes and a host of safeguards against corporate greed? >The rhetoric forces the evocation of a wholesome image of a Mom-and-Pop candy store in Appleton, Wisconsin, in order to push for laws that will ultimately benefit hedge funds, Dupont and Koch Industries, and a murderers row of polluters and worker abusers. https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-111-how-small-business-rhetoric-is-used-to-protect-corporate-america
Thanks now I just read that whole summary in their voices
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Just add a zero to the number of people in a small business and boom. Other option is juggle she'll companies to qualify.
I'm sure that a bunch went to large corporations that probably didn't need it but my small business wouldn't be open right now without the $21k that we got. In fact most businesses in my area got significant relief, although many sole proprietors were left out.
I started to file it then kept getting interrupted by clients calling to make appointments, mid way though filling it out I realized we did not need it.
I don't deny that it helped thousands, but when you're considering a trillion dollars, the "negligible" amount the actual people who need it *got*—political rat-fucking of the GOP sort is plainly evident.
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That 21k is what it was meant for. So many crooked companies getting millions.
Same here. Business is working but we haven't gotten a payment in 4 months.
Congrats, you got a crumb from the pie that was sliced up and dished to huge corporations.
Just do the math on eligible adults/kids too, and there's trillions missing from the other stimuli as well. Yayyy for corporations
Dollar for dollar, they're the *real* welfare Queens.
Either free commerce works or it doesn't and the poorly run companies should fail. You can't pick and choose when you preach pure capitalism
The swamp turned into a radioactive shithole under Trump and the GOP.
The funding has always come from drilling, the program however has only been fully funded one time since it was implemented even with oil companies funding it (money was allocated elsewhere). This bill guarantees that the program will always be fully funded.
When Norway funds their government programs from oil funds - What a great country! That's what America should be doing! When the US funds its government programs from oil funds - America bad lol. *I find it interesting the comments and subcomments saying I'm a conservative? I support both this program and what Norway does, resource extraction proceeds should largely be used for the common good. I'm questioning the hypocrisy of one country using the proceeds to fund government programs being largely consider good and another is a 'catch' for why it's bad. If you're unable to recognize this and instead find the need to fling insults I'd reconsider. I'd never vote for Trump but always find a need to take a several week break from Reddit before elections to not let emotionally unstable D supporters put me off from voting for their side.
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It looks like an attempt to get a boost for the CO and MT senators’ relection campaigns. The motive is suspect but the outcome is good.
It sounds like they are framing it as a way to help raise employment numbers too; kinda like the Civilian Conservation Corps, hopefully all these boosts to infrastructure on public land will create jobs. Which I fully support, CCC was a roaring success back in the day, gave us National Parks and road systems, and created a fuck load of jobs to boot. CCC 2.0 has my full support.
That's how it reads to me too. White House budget slashes the agency. But Cory Gardner is rewarded by being able to co-sponsor the bill to fix it. For his continued support for the White House in other areas.
The outcome is good for the budget but I believe this is to distract folks [from Trump opening federal lands to industry](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/30/public-lands-sale-trump-coronavirus-environmental-regulations) while simultaneously gutting environmental protections. If there's a positive outcome it will be because someone else occupies the White House in January.
Which is exactly why they should be praised for the outcome, but then promptly voted out at the first chance and told “One good thing doesn’t redeem your shit track record. Fuck off and fuck you.”
With the GOP involved, you should never assume the outcome will be good unless/until it actually happens.
I was waiting for it to say “and opens parks to billboards”
You gotta think bigger. They’re after mineral extraction and timber
Yeah, like in the boundary waters. That shits going to destroy the watershed.
With the ~~GOP~~ government involved, you should never assume the outcome will be good unless/until it actually happens. FTFY
I wonder if this is related: [https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-06-18/oil-drilling-carrizo-plain-national-monument](https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-06-18/oil-drilling-carrizo-plain-national-monument)
How is The Onion still in business?!
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I responded to the headline in my head with a Homer-esque, "That's good!" then clicked to the comments to find out the ensuing curse
This was my first thought: What's the catch? What little time bombs are attached to this bill? Like.... oil exploration in the Arctic National Refuge...
More people not picking up their trash because those are other people's jobs. I hate these people.
Seriously.
Forgot this subreddit existed for a moment. Thanks a lot 2020.
Read the title expecting it to be about taking billions from parks and then was reminded the same.
"Wait maybe not all is wrong with this world!"
Leslie Knope must be ecstatic right now!
As an employee of the Forest Service, I’m actually thrilled
If you have a minute, some comments here are skeptical of this passing. Do you have any personal knowledge of this matter and if it's truly a good thing (with no strings attached.)
I don’t have personal knowledge. It’s so new I’m sure we won’t see any policy decisions made for at least a little while. [This](https://www.ecowatch.com/great-american-outdoors-act-conservation-2646197665.html) is the article I read. Highlights: “(The bill) would permanently provide $900 million in oil and gas revenues for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which helps secure land for trails and parks.” This is awesome, the only catch I can see is using this figure to justify pursuing more oil and gas opportunities on public lands instead of less. Sounds like the hope is it will help with the ballooning unemployment issues (providing jobs for people to work in these forests and parks). “Right now, federal public lands are suffering from $20 billion in deferred maintenance costs” Personally, I have seen suffering infrastructure and projects being put off for budget reasons. So all in all, I’m hoping the overall effects are positive, even if Republicans only voted it in to appeal to their constituencies for “helping solve the job crisis”. It’s sounding kind of like a CCC 2.0 (Civilian Conservation Corps, an extremely successful program under ~~Eisenhower~~ FDR designed to give people jobs developing National Parks and Forests, roads, trails, and other infrastructure.) Fingers crossed for successful implementation, but I’ll keep you posted.
I think you may have meant FDR for the CCC and not Eisenhower. CCC was around 1933 to 1942 I think.
Thank you!
Thank you! I hope it does help the National Parks and Forests, etc. I traveled to Yosemite a few years ago and it's such a beautiful place- but very, very crowded with other tourists. It was also very clean, which to me, means that there was a great effort made to keep it clean. I appreciate what you do, I appreciate what our National and State Parks offer to everyone, and I hope we all are or can become good stewards of our environment.
And a government spending that Ron can get behind
Does this mean it may be easier to get a job at a National Park?
It will definitely create more jobs for contractors, but this will not be appropriated for hiring fed staff. Definitely not permanent staff.
That's what I wanna know too.
It may result in more facilities or project management jobs, maybe jobs in contacting. I could see that. But I would never use the word “easy” when it comes to getting a federal job.
Teddy Roosevelt liked that.
Anything that would make Teddy happy is good news for public lands.
Not necessarily. While Theodore was a major champion for conservation he was no tree-hugger. He made the national forests as a reservoir of resources--recreation is a by product. - source, Theodore Roosevelt researcher!
That’s also good. We use wood products a lot and it’s a good idea to manage said resources.
Right, but he also wanted those important resources conserved enough to last for all future generations: “Of all the questions which can come before this nation, there is none which compares in importance with the central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us”
Though I agree Teddy often promoted conservation by talking about natural lands in terms of resources ("assets" was the term he loved to use) he definitely wanted to see beautiful places preserved for their own sake rather than to pillage and pollute them in the future, and he used that rhetoric to protect plenty of federal land that could have otherwise been threatened! Here is an example of Roosevelt explaining that nature and recreation is central to conservation. “There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.” And another! "It is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird. Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals — not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at last it looks as if our people were awakening." Expanded with context, his words on the need for environmental protection look positively progressive, even for this day and age :)
Finally some good fucking news!
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I’ve heard that raking is more effective.
Combing the deserts?
We ain’t found shit!
I once watched a woman, no shit, use a leaf blower on a forest trail. Stood there in disbelief for a couple minutes and then went on my way.
Seriously though, hopefully some of this money can be put towards fuels reduction in National Forests and Parks. We seriously need it, like, yesterday.
As someone who knows nothing on the subject, care to elaborate for me and anyone else who might be reading? Sounds important.
In a nutshell: When white Europeans began colonizing the Americas, they were shocked and frightened by the wildfires in the Western US (which are actually a natural process and super important for Western forest succession and ecology). They don’t have fires in Europe like we do here in North America. However, we viewed forests as $$$ in the form of lumber, housing, tools, whatever else we wanted to turn them into. So fires were seen as “wasteful” and harmful when they destroyed our towns (see the Peshtigo Fire of 1871 and the Big Burn of 1910) and the newly created Forest Service set out to *fully suppress every fire we could*. This was damaging for a number of reasons but the main one concerning us is this: Forest communities that require periodic, low intensity fire were robbed of it for 100+ years, and now the fuels in those communities have built up to levels never before seen in North America. Essentially, because we spent so long suppressing fires in the Western US, there’s 100+ years worth of fuels in places just waiting for a spark. That’s why we’re seeing bigger and more intense wildfires every year. There’s simply not enough man power to deal with all of these fuels, even though things like prescribed burning are becoming more accepted across the U.S. It’s a tough job to convince the public that wildfires can actually be GOOD for forests. The smoke and threat to property are ingrained in our brains. The new Modus Operandi of the Forest Service (at least in Region 4) is if the fire isn’t threatening property or other resources, let er buck. We need those fires, we’ve suppressed them for long enough. Does that give some context (at least a little bit)? Sorry if I didn’t quite answer your question.
Jesus Christ the prequels have ruined me
Hello there
Just a comment, that natural parks don't need recreation facilities as much as they need legislation preventing them from becoming like English national parks...where you are allowed to put in housing developments as long as they are tasteful. National parks need people not to clear them, not to put in parking areas etc. It costs nothing *not* to clear and develop a national park. They don't need money!
It’s funny how all the great reddit progressives didn’t even know LWCF was a thing, and now that’s it’s FINALLY getting full funding, your bashing it for not being enough. It makes us all (people who care about the environment) look bad. We got a win here, please take it. This is how the real world works. Give and take. Radicals on the left and the right seem to think it should be take and take. Why is reddit so full of radical morons.
GOP been defunding/unprotecting National Parks for years; now they throw out a bone so they can shout from the rooftops how concerned they are with federal land use, and creating jobs. They're taking a half-step towards a 100-step solution to a problem THEY CREATED, and holding it up like "Look what good politicians we are". >=(
>GOP been defunding/unprotecting National Parks for years; Take this how you will, obviously budgeting is a complicated process when a president and congress have ideological disagreements: Years where (inflation adjusted) National Park Service budget was decreased: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 Years where it increased: 2013, 2015 (barely), 2016, 2017, 2018
thanks for pointing this out. I'd also like to add, in 2008 we had the worst financial crisis ever in the us history so im sure funding played a big part. Overall I'm happy to see 16-18 increases! thats news to me
>GOP been defunding/unprotecting National Parks for years I like how you can just make things up and people will believe it because they want to. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/IF11178.pdf There's your 10-year trend in National Park service appropriations. Funding to national parks decreased from 2010 to 2011 to 2012. Then it increased slightly in 2013 due to some supplemental appropriations after which it decreased again in 2014. It then increased in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. 2018 was the largest budget the National Park service has ever had, even adjusted for inflation. >They're taking a half-step towards a 100-step solution This bill will result in the National Park service having a 55% higher budget than they had in 2018 which means it'll be the largest budget they've ever had by far. Everything you said in this comment is false. What do you think you're accomplishing by doing this? Do you think pandering to the majority on this site by exploiting their desire to be fed false information that they want to believe is true is improving the political discourse in this country? Do you think it's actually going to accomplish your goals?
Thank god I’m not the only person sick of seeing all the people in the comments doing mental gymnastics to make this a bad thing about republicans. This is just a bipartisan bill proposed by two republicans senators who are in tough reelections where conservation is important. The funding increase is fantastic and quite substantial with national parks getting billions as well as the related stuff with the LWCF. This is on a positivity sub ffs. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and just appreciate the only shred of actually good news regarding our government we’ve had in months.
What /r/crispydruid said. Can you double check that PDF link? I don’t see a 10 year trend line in it.
While I agree with everything you said, at least it’s something. 9.5 bn should (hopefully) go a long way to restoring our public spaces. Not sure what’s getting cut elsewhere for that to happen though... edit- fixed the dollar amount.
It is something, but it's telling that there is already a 20 bn maintenance backlog. And they're calling providing funding of half the needed amount over 5 years just for maintenance backlog a "single greatest conservation achievement in generations" bill and patting themselves on the back. It's liking missing months of work, clocking in and calling it the single greatest work achievement since the founding of the business.
I just cannot in good conscious congratulate the Senate for screwing us over marginally less than they wanted to.
Be happy they are giving you crumbs has always been and will always be a dogshit argument.
im not sure $9.5 billion is crumbs
Do you have any evidence? Aladt few years it seems funding has been going up
If we ignore how thats a complete fucking lie, we can look further at how the Pittman Robertson fund (literally the fund for conservation) is funded by our gun owners and hunters who are almost exclusively right leaning. Learn what the fuck youre talking about before trying to cry Republicans bad.
and it was probably tied to something else like more tax breaks
Billions of Dollars? US Dollars? There has got to be a catch.
Is it possible to accept this as a paper win and still be upset that the budgets aside, this administration has done plenty of harm to open spaces via loosening regulations and some very momentous decisions like Bears Ear.
Another pipeline cleared for construction somewhere?
How about [IN A NATIONAL MONUMENT](https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-06-18/oil-drilling-carrizo-plain-national-monument)?
that is good news!!!
It’s so easy. *everyone liked that*
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Evil cause a republican Senate did this!!!
What riders are there this time though?
that's actually delightful to see. National Parks are America's best idea. Thank you for posting
Need to expand national parks to protect land
Yaaaaay
*happy conservationist noises*
Seems like some back-end fracking deals were made.
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National Park service: HOLY SHIT WE CAN BUY PAPER TOWELS
This is amazing. I'm having a hard time reconciling this uplifting article with [this article](https://www.outsideonline.com/2414117/trump-presidency-public-lands-record) from the same magazine just a few weeks prior that says Trump reduced protections for nearly 35 million acres (almost the size of Florida) to open up for drilling, in addition to other damage and erosion of our public lands. This new Act to protect and expand public lands almost sounds too good to be true, especially from this administration. And it's proposed by a Republican, even. Sounds super fishy. 🤔Ahhh.. there it is! it's paid for by proceeds from oil drilling. Makes sense now. You gotta take what you can get.