Photo: the Elwha River flows free after the removal of two dams last decade.

The Trump administration’s gutting of the federal government has affected so many facets of life in the U.S., from weather you can get help with health care to food assistance programs. However, some of the most worrying long-term impacts of mass federal staffing and budget cuts have to do with public lands, where decades of conservation work have been undermined by lack of resources. A case is is salmon restoration in Olympic National Park, the subject of my newest piece for The Revelator.

The removal of two dams on the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River last decade put Olympic National Park at the center of one of the most ambitious salmon habitat recovery projects on the continent. In the years since the dams came down, salmon and other species have begun to rebound–but much work remains to be done to get salmon runs back to their historic levels in the Elwha and other watersheds on the peninsula. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s evisceration of support for the Park Service has Olympic Park without the staff or funding to carry basic conservation work.

You can read all about it in my recent story. I learned a lot writing this piece, and came away from it with an even greater admiration for the people who work hard with the limited resources they have to make our national parks function.