A Plea For (Maine's) Public Lands

A deep dive on the lay-offs, hiring freezes, and executive orders impacting National Parks and other federal lands through a Maine lens.

I have no recollection of my first experience on public lands—according to family lore, I was just six weeks old when my parents dipped my toes in a cold northern lake. I’m exceedingly lucky to have grown up surrounded by public lands, and exposed to them from my first waking moments. These public lands have been a through line for my entire life—in fact, I’d go so far as to say that these special places have made me who I am today; a photographer who seeks out the quiet places in nature and tries to share its beauty.

Since those early exposures on public land here in the northeast, I’ve been lucky enough to experience more of the astounding diversity of America’s park system in the furthest corners of this country. From the towering snow-clad summit of Denali to the sweltering depths of the Grand Canyon, the verdant green slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains to the barren volcanic crags of Hawaii’s Haleakala, our park system is, in my estimation, the crown jewel of our country. I think national parks are among the greatest American inventions and are certainly one of our most beneficial exports for the rest of the world. As Ken Burns put it:

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“We were the first nation in the history of mankind to say that the most special places should be set aside not for royalty, not for the rich, not for the well-connected, but for everyone and for all time.”

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That fact, that these public lands would be there, protected, for my grandchildren’s grandchildren to enjoy in the same way I did as a child is something I took for granted. My stance is shifting though—perhaps these places aren’t forever, at least not if we don’t fight to keep them.

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Valentine’s Day 2025 brought sobering news to some 1,000 National Park Service (NPS) employees and a further 3,400 US Forest Service (USFS) employees—they were no longer employed due to a mass lay-off from the new administration. Subsequent executive orders from the White House have dramatically increased logging access on federal lands nationwide. Regardless of one’s political stance, these two actions should be seen as one of the most significant deviations in federal policy towards public lands we’ve seen in decades.

Unsurprisingly given the nation’s political bifurcations, I’ve seen responses that range from frantic cries that America’s public lands are in imminent danger of extinction and privatization to casual dismissals; “corporations fire people all the time, nobody was guaranteed these jobs.”

So, this piece is a look at our federal government’s changing stance towards public lands through the lens of my home state; Maine. I want to get to the bottom of this: what is actually going on? How serious is this? Will this impact our state’s public lands? What can/should we do, if anything? I’ll do my best to lay out the facts neutrally and share a few of my opinions, for what they’re worth.

Note from the editor:

I truly believe this is one of the more important pieces I’ve ever written for Maine the Way. It is our first long-form piece here on Substack—a 4000+ word deep dive that has taken me nearly a month to write, fact check, and release.

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-Cam