A proposed Chuckwalla National Monument near Joshua Tree National Park would protect the threatened Mojave Desert tortoise and help many other species thrive, including people.
The Mojave Desert of Southern California is a place where creatures move and grow at a slow pace. In this vast, harsh landscape, the desert tortoise has served as a hard-working hero that has helped life flourish around it for centuries. But its population has been plummeting for decades, and activists have been working to preserve more than half a million acres that will help the tortoise, and many other species, survive.
In this episode, host Jennifer Errick travels to the Mojave Desert to speak with desert tortoise expert and NPCA California Program Manager Luke Basulto and Executive Director of the Desert Advocate Media Network and 90 Miles from Needles podcast host Chris Clarke. These two long-time desert residents and park advocates talk about how the desert tortoise is critical to the Mojave, why the proposed national monument is a special place for a variety of plants and animals, the special lure that blank spots have on the map, and some of the rare desert sights you can only see at Chuckwalla.
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
This episode was produced by Jennifer Errick with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to NPCA Communications Manager Caitlyn Burford.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about the Protect California Deserts Coalition at protectchuckwalla.org
Learn more about the Desert Advocate Media Network and listen to Chris Clarke’s 90 Miles from Needles podcast at thedamn.org
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation’s only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org
Episode 37
A New Park for an Old Hero?
Jennifer Errick: The desert tortoise is one of the hardest working heroes of the Mojave, but its population has been plummeting for decades. Advocates have been working to protect more than half a million acres near Joshua Tree National Park that would help this keystone species survive.
Learn how a new Chuckwalla National Monument could be a game changer for the tortoise and many other desert creatures — including people.
I'm Jennifer Errick, and this is The Secret Lives of Parks.
I’m excited to share some breaking news to lead off today’s episode. NPCA received word that later today, the Biden administration plans to create a new national monument in Maine honoring Frances Perkins, a pioneer in the labor movement and the first female cabinet secretary in U.S. history. You can learn about the exciting campaign to create this monument—which is just the thirteenth national park site specifically designated to honor women’s history—at npca.org.
Today’s podcast concerns another proposed national monument that advocates are hoping President Biden will create on the other side of the country with its own important history. Now, on with the story.
[Background sound of two men talking]
The Mojave Desert of Southern California is a place that moves at its own pace — and that pace is slow. An average of just two to six inches of rain falls here each year, and the forms of life that can withstand this level of scarcity eke out their existence gradually. The color palette offers endless shades of brown and green: sculpted rocks, sunbaked cacti, arms of creosote and ocotillo bushes reaching for the sky, and an assortment of rodents, reptiles, birds and other curious beings that evolved to blend seamlessly into this wild expanse of beige.
Among this kingdom of slow, earthy creatures is a model community member, the desert tortoise — an ancient species that has helped life flourish for centuries in a harsh landscape. It might not look like your average Superman, but without its steady presence, scientists say this desert as we know it would eventually cease to exist.
And the tortoise population has been plummeting for years. The reptile is federally classified as threatened and was just declared endangered in the state of California earlier this year. According to a 2020 report by the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, there are half as many tortoises now than there were just 20 years ago, and about 90% fewer than there were in 1970. Multiple studies, including field surveys by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, have shown precipitous declines throughout the tortoise’s range. Protected lands in Southern California are some of the most important habitats this keystone species has left.
If advocates have their way, a new national monument just south of Joshua Tree National Park will safeguard thousands of acres the tortoise uses to survive. Last month, I had the opportunity to visit the area, known as Chuckwalla, named for a medium-sized brownish-black iguana that inhabits rocky areas in the Southwest. I also got to see many of the spectacular public lands around Chuckwalla with desert tortoise expert and NPCA California Desert Program Manager Luke Basulto. We were joined by Chris Clarke, executive director of the Desert Advocacy Media Network and former NPCA California desert program director.
[Sound of getting map from ranger at entrance gate]
The three of us explored hundreds of miles of this vast landscape in a tiny rental car. On one hike in the Cottonwood area of Joshua Tree, we stopped at some rocks along a quiet section of the trail to talk.
Luke Basulto: I was born in Barstow, California, a small desert town, used to be an ag town, kind of the middle of the Mojave. So, for me it's hard to quantify when people ask me why I love it here. It's similar to asking me, like, why do I love my grandma? It's what I know. It's what raised me. This landscape is what made me who I am.
Jennifer Errick: That's Luke, who has spent his entire life in the desert, aside from his years as an undergrad in Northern California, where the lush forests and towering redwood trees just made him homesick.
Luke Basulto: Whether I knew it or not, my being here and being surrounded by it always and learning from it has really molded me into the person I am, and I see this place as family. So, when I'm thinking of advocating for it and trying to protect it, I come at it with that same level of caring. You know, it's like somebody coming for my brother or my sister. This place is all I know.
Jennifer Errick: Chris has also spent decades living in the desert, writing and editing for major media outlets and serving as a longtime advocate for parks and wildlife.
Chris Clarke: I live near this park, as does Luke, and so, this is my backyard. And while it's one of the most visited parks in the U.S., there are a lot of places like this right here where you can go and not see too many people. There are places where you can go and not see anybody. And it may sound counterintuitive, but I think everybody has the right to go to a place where they won't see anybody. Hopefully not all at the same time.
Jennifer Errick: Chris produces the podcast 90 Miles from Needles, where he explores a wide range of desert conservation issues.
Chris Clarke: There's just something about the fact that you can stand in a place like Amboy Crater, just north of Joshua Tree here. Or certainly in Chuckwalla. You can look out and see the landscape as it was before settlement, when the Native people were managing the landscape. And just being able to observe and to some degree be a part of that continuity, it just … it gives me a sense of purpose.
Jennifer Errick: Luke has spent over half of his life learning about and advocating for the Mojave Desert tortoise. He's excited — like, noticeably excited — when I ask him about this elusive reptile.
Luke Basulto: Oh man, let's get into it.
Jennifer Errick: Yeah, please. I mean this is what it's all about, right?
Luke Basulto: Yeah, yeah. So, for those who don't know what a keystone species is, a keystone species is an organism that occupies a role in the ecosystem that is vitally important. If you think of an arch made of stone, the keystone would be the very top point of the arch that kind of stops the arch from collapsing. So, when you remove that or you weaken it, the arch then weakens. And that's what we're looking at when we're thinking of the role that as a tortoise or the gray wolf, which is a really popular and prominent example of a keystone species.
Jennifer Errick: In Yellowstone.
Luke Basulto: In Yellowstone. What that means is that the tortoise, its presence on the landscape really has a significant impact. And when you think of the term “landscape architect,” what I mean by that is that this animal, its role and its behavior, contribute to the survival of many, many other species. They're burrowing tortoises, and what that means, because they are so massive — it’s one of the largest reptiles in North America — it means a big hole. And like what big holes mean in the desert is coolness.
Jennifer Errick: Shelter.
Luke Basulto: And shelter, exactly. So, what this animal does is, it'll burrow, you know, several feet into the earth to escape the heat, and because other animals need to do that, too, and don't want to dig a giant hole, they'll follow suit. They'll kind of inhabit the same hole as the tortoise.
Jennifer Errick: Together?
Luke Basulto: Yeah, they all live together in there, and they'll dig little offshoots. A gopher will go down partway and dig a little offshoot. Then a burrowing owl will dig a little offshoot.
Jennifer Errick: I'm imagining a children's picture book as you’re describing this — like, all the little character animals.
Luke Basulto: Yeah. It's like a little apartment complex down there. And the tortoise is just a very generous landlord. And the with the Mojave being as harsh of a climate as it is, any form of refugia is vitally important. If the tortoise were to disappear today — suddenly, no more tortoises — the burrows would still exist. Burrows can last several years, a decade. But we would see ecosystem collapse without our desert tortoise. We don't have a desert ecosystem because without its presence on the landscape, all these things, all these animals and life forms that are dependent on its life also decline, and then so does the web and the interconnectedness. It just all starts suffering.
Another reason why they're considered a keystone species is also their ability to disperse seeds. Desert tortoises are herbivores. They eat grasses. They eat annual little plants that pop up in the spring after rains. And they eat their seeds. And what the tortoise will do is, it'll walk off, you know, a few hundred yards, and it'll it'll poop. And those seeds will germinate, and it adds new genetic diversity to different areas. So this animal is literally building this this landscape. It's contributing new genetic diversity within its little realm of existence, and without that, we would see genetic bottlenecking. Plants would only, you know, reproduce with what was near them and wouldn't move to new areas.
That's kind of lends to the time scale that we're working on in the desert of everything moving very slowly. We wouldn't see an ecosystem collapse in 50 years. Maybe wouldn't see this ecosystem collapse in a century. But two or three centuries from now, without this animal on the landscape, it would just, it would fade away.
Jennifer Errick: Many plants, like the Joshua tree, are in a climate crisis where the heat is affecting their ability to reproduce. It seems like the tortoise is a key conduit to helping them get out of the more difficult places.
Luke Basulto: Oh, definitely. As the tortoise moves, so do those plants. So, like, if the tortoise is moving the areas that are more habitable for it, so do the plants that it relies on, and like, the two, they coincide, right? So, like the tortoise is literally moving its habitat along with it in some cases. So, as we see with climate change, hot areas get hotter and drier. Higher elevations become more hospitable to animals that maybe they weren't before. So, the tortoise is slowly inching higher in elevation to move somewhere where it can live.
Jennifer Errick: Is there a factor that's made the tortoise so endangered?
Luke Basulto: The precipitous decline is essentially the culmination of several factors. You have climate change being a massive one — habitat just not being hospitable as it once was, coupled with human encroachment, habitat fragmentation through development and roads. Road mortality kills a lot of them. Just crossing desert highways, you know, is risky for them. That, coupled with our trash — littering, you know — it lends to their decline.
Jennifer Errick: Like, eating the plastic, like a sea turtle, or …?
Luke Basulto: Well, it could be that. But it's also a more roundabout, like a more drawn-out process. You may have heard that raven flying around earlier. Ravens are now at a thousandfold what they should be in population size because of their ability to really take advantage of our trash and of our development. So, ravens being one of the smartest, if not the smartest, birds on the planet, are very opportunistic. They see baby tortoises as, that's the easiest thing I could possibly eat. And that's probably a very naturally occurring relationship that existed maybe 400 years ago, before we exploded the population, where ravens would, say, I’ll eat a tortoise every time I find one, whatever, and they’d come across one very infrequently. Now when you have thousands and thousands more, exponentially more ravens, you have more and more interactions with the tortoise.
Jennifer Errick: So, human trash has created an environment where the ravens are thriving, and as a result, the overpopulation of ravens is leading to more predation on the tortoise.
Luke Basulto: Exactly, yeah. So when you ditch your trash? I mean, that just puts into context just how thoughtful you have to be when you're operating in this landscape. When you're enjoying the park, your trash has an impact. A colorful candy wrapper can have an impact. Like, the Skittles wrapper is really brightly colored. What that looks like on a landscape that, we're looking at it now, is very drab — a bright red thing sticks out. Like, the flower on that ocotillo down there sticks out like a sore thumb. And it sticks out to ravens, too, and they’re curious birds. So, they check it out. And tortoises love brightly colored flowers, brightly colored food. So, they go check it out. So, your Skittles wrapper can bring those two together even more, and then the raven will say, I can't eat the Skittles wrapper, but there's a little tortoise there. I can eat him.
And there is good work being done to mitigate the Raven problem. We’re seeing some really good progress in reducing the Raven population, but it takes a team. We’ve got to cover our trash. We’ve got to be mindful of what we're what we're putting out into the world, and that goes into it.
Jennifer Errick: After the break, Luke, Chris and I talk about why a section of Joshua Tree was removed from the park decades ago, and how they're working on a related campaign to add those lands back. Luke also tells me about some of the rare species you can see at Chuckwalla.
Luke Basulto: They're really intimidating, especially if you're bald like me.
Jennifer Errick: I'm not bald. I want to see one!
That's coming up next. Stay with us.
[Music break]
As we wind down 2024, there’s so much to celebrate. This year, advocates pushed the Environmental Protection Agency to strengthen air quality standards throughout the country. We made significant progress restoring bison to Yellowstone and bears to the North Cascades of Washington state. We secured stronger protections against oil and gas leasing on public lands. We did so much together in parks across the system. You can learn more about the victories NPCA and our supporters achieved at npca.org/2024. And please consider making a year-end donation at npca.org/donate to keep parks strong in 2025. Your support means more now than ever, and we appreciate your dedication to our nation’s most iconic and inspirational places, our national parks.
[Music break]
[Background sound of walking and conversation.]
Jennifer Errick: Luke and Chris have both spent time working with a coalition to preserve the Chuckwalla region. About 400,000 of the national monument’s 600,000-plus acres would be designated as critical habitat for the desert tortoise.
Chris Clarke: Every time people look at an acre of the desert with serious intent, they will find a new species of something. There's all this really cryptic biodiversity. I mean, we're walking among these plants that will be still alive a thousand years after I’m dead and that we're starting life maybe six or 700 years before any of the relatives that I remember were born. You're just in the presence of these incredibly long-lived things in a landscape that has been constantly changing, but is still basically the same overall as it was. And it's just such a good antidote to doomscrolling. It's like if you if you scroll, like, a page every 1,500 years, that's what the desert's like.
Luke Basulto: That's awesome. That's a good way to put it.
Jennifer Errick: Advocating for a national monument at Chuckwalla has been a major focus of Luke’s work since he joined NPCA in 2022.
Luke Basulto: I conveniently got hired at NPCA, just as this monument campaign was becoming reinvigorated. So I really got to a master class in how monument campaigns work.
Jennifer Errick: Lucky for us. That was great timing for NPCA.
Luke Basulto: It worked out really well. And in that process, like, you learn that this isn't something that one organization can do. Conservation, especially on the scale that we're talking, especially in the desert, is a team effort. You know, we have to work with each other, and thankfully this coalition, the Protect California Deserts Coalition is comprised of some of the best, most intelligent people and advocates and organizations in the area.
Tribal support has been paramount to this. Like, without our Tribes and without the support and collaboration and generosity of the region's Tribes who see this landscape as a part of themselves — without that perspective and that guiding principle, this campaign wouldn't be what it is.
Jennifer Errick: The Protect California Deserts Coalition has also been working on a related campaign to restore 17,000 acres that were removed from Joshua Tree years before it was officially designated as a national park in an area known as Eagle Mountain.
Luke Basulto: The area that we're considering for expansion, the Eagle Mountain area, was once a part of Joshua Tree National Monument. There was a war going on, World War II, and that area was identified as being very mineral-rich, namely iron-rich. So, the idea behind removing it was to remove it for the purposes of mining iron. The agreement that was struck was that if that mine were to ever go defunct or to stop producing for its intended purpose, was for that area and all the undisturbed lands to be reverted to national park.
The Eagle Mountain expansion area is kind of smacked between two really important populations of desert bighorn sheep. This area is sort of where they can converge and have genetic exchange, which is obviously great for any species.
One of the other important facets of this area is its remoteness. In order to get to the Eagle Mountain expansion area, or what would be that part of the park, you have to be a recreationist. You have to be someone who understands how to navigate a 4-by-4, 4-wheel drive vehicle. It's really rocky and narrow, and you have to have some driving skills to get out there. It's important because recreation itself, like that ability to go out on the landscape, is a form of connection.
Connection is another really important reason for doing this. Connection looks different for different people. I can speak personally to that. If it wasn't for me doing those things at a younger age — riding a motorcycle or going rock hounding or hunting with my family — like, all those things lent to my understanding of the importance of the of those activities and like what it means to actually connect. And the Eagle Mountain area has that value to it, too.
Chris Clarke: I've always been intrigued by blank spots on the map. And I also am a big, big fan of holding people to their promises. And when this land was taken out of the park in 1950, in order to promote a private enterprise, namely the Kaiser Mine, Kaiser promised to give it back once they were done. And they're done. Just because a promise was made 74 years ago doesn't mean that it's not valid.
The more pieces of the desert that we can protect, the better off the desert is going to be in 100 years, 200 years, 500 years. This should be a no-brainer, because it's not really in demand for any economic activity. There is some recreation that goes on here, most of which could continue. It seems like an obvious solution to go and take the agreement that the federal government and Kaiser entered into in 1950 and fulfill that.
Jennifer Errick: Joshua Tree and Chuckwalla are both part of a much larger connected landscape that is a haven for biodiversity. Earlier in the day, Luke drove us to a scenic overlook called Key's View, and he pointed out many of the public lands we could see, spanning hundreds of miles along the horizon.
[Sound of Luke Basulto at overlook: We're currently standing in Joshua Tree National Park. The valley you're seeing is the Coachella Valley. Down a ways, you have the Salton Sea. Further that way, you have Anza Borrego State Park kind of nestled back in there, and then just over that way you'll have our proposed Chuckwalla National Monument. When Chuckwalla is established, this valley will be totally encompassed by protected land.]
Jennifer Errick: Chuckwalla will create a contiguous protected region from the Southern Border with Mexico up to Death Valley, over to Lake Mead and the Grand Canyon, and up into the Four Corners region of Utah. These connected lands benefit wildlife and people alike.
Chris Clarke: There is a campaign that's still technically in progress, you don't hear as much about it these days, of Yellowstone to Yukon, in which conservationists were trying to get a connected landscape from the Northern Rockies up to the Arctic Circle. I remember reporting on it when I first learned about it in the 1990s. And it was seen, I think, even by the people that were really working on it diligently as kind of pipe dream. It was, like, an aspirational goal. We have it here. It's an equivalent stretch of landscape. It's just an amazing, amazing accomplishment. And I think it’s testament to the fact that people really care about the desert these days, a lot more than they did even just 10 years ago.
Jennifer Errick: But for years, Chuckwalla has remained a missing piece in the landscape, despite its wealth of biodiversity.
So, as someone who has not been to Chuckwalla, what would I see there? What’s special about it?
Luke Basulto: There's so many good things there, it's hard to figure out a starting point. I've spent a lot of time in the Chuckwalla Bench, which is what the region is called.
Jennifer Errick: The bench? Why is it called the bench?
Luke Basulto: I'm not sure what the term bench comes from.
Chris Clarke: It's because it's a flat area that’s kind of elevated.
Jennifer Errick: Oh, OK.
Luke Basulto: That makes sense. A bench. Yeah.
So, I spent a lot of time as a field person in the Chuckwalla Bench doing land surveys there, seeing really what the place has to offer. And it's one of the most beautiful places on the planet. When you think of what it is, this is an area that is full of micro-fill woodland.
To put that in the context, think of what it takes for a tree to exist. A tree needs water. Trees and deserts, they're not really synonymous with one another. So, to have a small forest within a desert is truly a thing of beauty. And what these small micro-forests contribute to the landscape is a stopover for migrating birds, a place for them to nest and rest and, again going back to the idea of refugia, to escape a really, really hostile environment outside. So, micro-fill woodlands are a massive, beautiful thing that Chuckwalla has to offer. Multiple cultural sites. I mean, going back to what we talked about earlier with the Tribal involvement, this landscape is seen as a cultural landscape, in context, the way it is, is important to the original stewards of the land.
Jennifer Errick: Luke explains the concept of micro-endemics to me. An endemic species is one that is native to a particular landscape. Chuckwalla is home to a number of micro-endemics species that only exist in a very small area.
Luke Basulto: In the Mecca Hills Wilderness area, you have the Mecca aster. A really pretty purple flower lives on just in a few canyons in in the Mecca Hills wilderness. And you have the oracopia sage that only exists in a few canyons in a very small range in the Orocopia Mountains Wilderness. And you have the Munz’s Cholla, which is, like, a giant cholla. You’ve seen chollas earlier today, and you can see how intimidating the small ones are. So, think of like a 9- or 10-foot-tall cholla, that kind of towers over you. The only place on Earth that they exist is in Chuckwalla.
Jennifer Errick: I had no idea there were 9- or 10-foot chollas.
Luke Basulto: Yeah, and they're really intimidating, especially if you're bald like me.
Jennifer Errick: I'm not bald. I want to see one!
Luke Basulto: You'll definitely get to see one day, but yeah, I mean, stuff like that is it's just so amazing that you get to protect, like, all there is on the planet. Having another layer of protection over it feels good when you're protecting the only individuals on Earth, right?
Jennifer Errick: Why is this the missing piece? Why is everything around it protected, and it's been kind of left out?
Chris Clarke: There were other places in the desert that conservation activists, especially from outside the desert, liked or were more familiar with. They'd go to Death Valley. They'd go to, you know, Cima Dome. Joshua Tree for sure. But the Bradshaw Trail, I mean you need intense vehicle equipment to do the Bradshaw Trail. My Crosstrek would die out there and never be seen again. So it's hard to get to, and as a result, there really wasn't momentum built up to protect it. There were people that liked it, but it just it never had the cachet until pretty recently that places like Joshua Tree or Mojave Preserve had.
Luke Basulto: Chris and I both live in the Morongo Basin, which is very, very conservation-minded. You know, we live in a bubble, and like, it's not the same across the across the board in the desert. Where I grew up, I spoke to it earlier, you don't have people thinking about this.
You know, I think that that's a really important role that NPCA has been able to occupy in the time that we've worked in the desert, and we're good at seeing importance in areas that traditionally people look past. Chris said some of his favorite places are the blank spots on the map, and I think that as desert conservationists, that needs to be always at the front of our minds. Like, how can we help these areas of the desert that don't have the charisma of Joshua Tree or Death Valley or of Chuckwalla? How do we help some of these areas around Barstow or Victor Valley or the in-between areas?
Jennifer Errick: I feel like the desert just as a whole often gets a short shrift. It’s like oh, it's that empty, barren place. And as we've been seeing all day, it's absolutely not. So, like, the charisma of the Joshua tree, some folks don't even necessarily see that. It's a lot of education to get people to see that these are vibrant places.
Luke Basulto: And it just takes being out there and taking the time. I mean, everything's, again, so slow here, and it takes time to build an appreciation for a place like this, and just, you take the time and sit here like we've been sitting on these rocks for an hour or so. You see all the little things that start coming out and adjusting to your presence. And that's just really what it takes to see it, this place, for what it is.
Jennifer: Well, thank you both. I really appreciate you sitting out on the rocks with me. This has been beautiful.
Luke Basulto: I'll take this 10 times out of 10 over looking at a computer screen.
Jennifer Errick: Oh my gosh, yes.
After our talk, we drive along Box Canyon Road through a region of Chuckwalla known as Mecca Hills. The exposed rock in these canyon walls dates as far back as one and a half billion years.
I’m struck by how the weathered formations along the road look like the Badlands of South Dakota, jagged hills with ancient rock layered in stripes of beige and brown, grooved from centuries of water trickling down their peaks back into the Earth. We park the rental car on the side of the road — hardly anyone is out here with us — and we wander into the paths between the rocks for a while. We have no map and no plan, just a beautiful November afternoon with sunshine and a brisk wind to encourage us. The ground is sandy, like walking along a beach, and bushes poke out from the ground in occasional bursts of green and brown. Luke spots a cluster of asters nestled along a section of rocks with a few yellow blooms peeking between the withered stems and leaves. It’s a sight that for me encapsulates the essence of being in the desert — this glimpse of a tiny flower set against the vast, wild landscape that surrounds it — a moment of beauty that feels simultaneously too small and too large to fully grasp.
I don’t get to see any desert tortoises, unfortunately. It’s late in the season and a bit chilly for them. Part of loving the desert — and all national parks — is knowing that there’s so much beyond what the eye can see — so much that’s worth caring about, so much that science has yet to even discover. It’s enough just to be here, in a special part of the world, adapting to its slow pace and feeling faith in its power to survive.
[End theme]
Jennifer Errick: The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 37 was produced by me, Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to NPCA Communications Manager Caitlyn Burford.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about the Protect California Deserts Coalition at protectchuckwalla.org
Learn more about the Desert Advocate Media Network and listen to Chris Clarke’s 90 Miles from Needles podcast at thedamn.org
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation’s only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org