美国国家公共电台 NPR 'An Eerie Silence' Where Federal Land Agency Workers Are Furloughed

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

We've been hearing a lot about overflowing 1 trash bins 2 and unsafe conditions at national parks due to the partial government shutdown. But other critical works on public lands has also stopped. NPR's Kirk Siegler reports.

KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE 3: Here's the view of the shutdown from the doorstep of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains and the town of Mammoth 4 Lakes, Calif.

JOHN WENTWORTH: It's an eerie 5 silence.

SIEGLER: John Wentworth is on the town council.

WENTWORTH: The folks that are responsible for, you know, stewarding, maintaining and watching out for the - one of the great legacies 6 of the United States, our federal public lands, are absent. They're gone.

SIEGLER: Mammoth is completely surrounded and largely dependent on federal public lands, including its ski resort, which operates on a forest service lease. Wentworth says the abrupt 7 shutdown coincided with the busy holidays. Suddenly, there was no one staffing visitor centers or popular national forest trailheads in the area for snowshoeing or snowmobiling and no one to enforce the rules or just manage the land - millions of acres of it across the West.

WENTWORTH: It's kind of scary. We don't know what to tell our visitors. We don't know what to tell our guests. We don't know how to be good hosts and stewards 8 of these federal public lands because the federal presence is not there.

SIEGLER: This is a familiar anxiety in communities that promote themselves as gateways 9 to massive amounts of U.S. public land, land that's open to everyone and everything from outdoor recreation to natural resource extraction. When your landlord is suddenly unreachable, almost everything is thrown into limbo 10 - about half of California's U.S. public land. Next door in Nevada, it's more like 80 percent.

JAINA MOAN: When they're not there and the longer it goes on, you know, I just start to worry that our lands aren't getting taken care of the way they should be.

SIEGLER: Jaina Moan is with the Nevada chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

MOAN: Sure, there's a lot of citizens out there that will pick up trash. But the larger, landscape scale planning issues, they're not getting addressed.

SIEGLER: In Nevada, this means private-public landscape programs to improve range land for ranchers, and across the West, partnerships 11 on large wildfire mitigation and timber projects. All of these are on hold. Moan's group can still do some work, but they can't access certain closed lands or the expertise 12 of federal scientists who work on them. And big, collaborative meetings are postponed 13.

MOAN: Like most of America, we hope that Congress and the president can resolve this soon because we need those government partnerships to work.

SIEGLER: These partnerships have become critical as funding for federal land agencies has dropped steadily 14. In Mammoth Lakes, John Wentworth says local governments have been trying to plan around this new reality.

WENTWORTH: So that if these spasms 15 that come out of Washington due to unprecedented 16, existential, partisan 17 craziness, we will have partnerships and working relationships in place to be able to mitigate 18 these effects.

SIEGLER: This coming summer, his town hopes to help the Forest Service remove trash from trailheads and better staff them. But this shutdown happened so quick, Wentworth says there was no time for even short-term contingency 19 plans. Kirk Siegler, NPR News.