I agree with Nicholas Kristoff. I've testified every single year since 2006 before our St. Johns County, Florida State Legislative Delegation in support of combining our government-owned lands into a St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore. This year, we saved our state parks from depredations by our former Congress-critter, Governor RONALD DION DeSANTIS, who wanted material alterations of our state parks, including our beloved Anastasia State Park. Great victory. More here: https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2025/01/save-our-parks-staugustgreen-ed-slavin.html. From The New York Times:
NICHOLAS KRISTOF
At Times Like These, My Advice: Take a Hike!
Opinion Columnist
America is losing credibility as a democracy, with Freedom House now ranking the United States less free than former dictatorships such as Argentina, Taiwan and the Czech Republic.
We lag in well-being, with life expectancy shorter in Washington than in Beijing. We trail in education: A young person in once-impoverished South Korea is today far more likely to finish high school and get a college education than an American.
Yet there is at least one area where the United States still excels: our wild places. We have some of the world’s most glorious wilderness — and if you want to salve the pain of other national failures, one of the best ways to do that is to accumulate blisters and mosquito bites on our magnificent hiking trails.
Taking in these trails is also an opportunity to contrast today’s political myopia with the foresight of visionaries like President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, his conservationist friend, who under Roosevelt became the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service (and later served as the governor of Pennsylvania). Many government policies are forgotten just a few years later, but the instinct of Roosevelt and Pinchot to set aside wild public lands is one that enriches us more than a century afterward: It helped preserve wild places for us to enjoy, and for our unborn great-grandchildren to cherish in the 22nd century.
I thought about this the other day when I was backpacking with my family in the Wallowa Mountains of Eastern Oregon, my wife and I egged on by our kids to try something called the Wallowa High Route. It’s a vague path — or sometimes no path at all — meandering above the timberline past Alpine lakes and connecting a series of peaks. You’re as likely to see mountain goats as other hikers.
When evening came, we found a flat, grassy spot and laid out our sleeping bags under the stars. We looked for shooting stars, hoped it wouldn’t rain, and then we were asleep.
So my daughter and I hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada over six summers — the best parenting I ever did.
Some people find such refuge from the world’s storms in a church or other house of worship, but I find it in the cathedral of wilderness — “God’s first temples,” as John Muir put it. Perhaps it’s strange, to some, to equate a church with a mountaintop, but there are commonalities. One element of religious faith is awe at a force larger than ourselves, and who does not feel awe at seeing a glacier reshaping the land or at the delicacy of lupine and paintbrush flowers in a high meadow?
Religion also provides perspective, and I find the same is true in the vastness of the wilderness. You understand that it is not all about you. The mountains were here eons ago and will still be here eons from now.
I’m also drawn to the hermitlike simplicity that the wilderness forces on backpackers, as an antidote to our material age. I’m a believer in ultralight backpacking, which typically means a pack weight of 10 pounds or less, not counting food and water. In my case that means no stove or tent, just a small tarp in case of rain. The simplicity rocks: It’s thrilling to pass a mountain storm dry and toasty in my sleeping bag as wind, rain and hail lash my tarp but find no entry.
So when friends are overwhelmed by the craziness of national and world events, when we’re angry at one another and all society feels taut, my counsel is simple: Take a hike.
Alas, this legacy of public lands is threatened by the shortsightedness of today’s leaders. A Republican proposal this year to sell off more than two million acres of public lands faltered because of parliamentary rules, but the idea remains alive. Climate change aggravates forest fires, yet the Trump administration is cutting funding for the Forest Service to fight fires, so more of our wilderness may go up in smoke.
Staffing cuts are reportedly leaving some federal treasures with overflowing trash cans and filthy toilets, a blight even on national parks, which have been called “America’s best idea.” The debasement is said to affect even such national icons as Yosemitein California and the Enchantments in Washington State.
There’s so much that we Americans are divided about, but we should be able to agree on the importance of our generation’s honoring this natural inheritance and recognizing that these are the most democratic spaces we have. On the trail there is no first class or economy; any of us can enjoy camping spots that no billionaire is able to purchase. No one can pull rank on you — other than a grizzly bear. This is our great heritage to preserve and defend.
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Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life.” @NickKristof
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