Dinosaur National Monument preserves one of the richest collections of late Jurassic remains on Earth. But where there are fossils, there are often fossil fuels. Could a push for new drilling and mining threaten this beloved park and its prehistoric reptiles?
Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado and Utah is the original Jurassic Park, created 110 years ago to protect a trove of more than 1,500 fossils, including the Allosaurus, the Diplodocus, the Stegosaurus and many others. Visitors can even touch real dinosaur bones from 149 million years ago.
This area has long been a target for oil and gas development, but earlier this month, incoming Interior Secretary Doug Burgum raised the threat level when he issued a new secretarial order directing his assistant secretaries to review all public lands for potential new resource extraction, specifically targeting national monuments. NPCA released a list of 13 national monuments our organization believes are most vulnerable to new development threats, including Dinosaur National Monument.
This episode host Jennifer Errick speaks with Cody Perry, a longtime advocate for Dinosaur National Monument and assistant director of Living Rivers and Colorado Riverkeeper, and Kristen Brengel, senior vice president for Government Affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, on what makes Dinosaur so special, why it and other national monuments are under attack, and how public outrage isn’t just normal — it’s also useful.
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 39, Save the Dinosaurs, was produced by Jennifer Errick with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton, and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to Cory MacNulty, Daniel Hart, Beau Kiklis, Katelynn Shea, Michaela Pavlat, Caitlyn Burford, Michael Jamison, and Betsy Buffington.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
See NPCA’s list of 13 threatened national monuments at npca.org/13monuments
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
Podcast listeners can get a 10% discount at npca.org/store through March 31, 2025, by using code PARKSPOD at checkout. Check out our “I stand with park rangers” T-shirts and other gear, and make sure Dana knows we sent you!
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 39
Save the Dinosaurs
Jennifer Errick: At the border of Colorado and Utah, where the Green and Yampa Rivers meet, Woodrow Wilson set aside land in 1915 to preserve one of the richest collections of dinosaur bones on Earth.
But where there are fossils, there are often fossil fuels. The incoming Interior Department secretary issued an order earlier this month attempting to remove barriers to drilling and mining on public lands. Could these prehistoric reptiles get caught in the crosshairs?
I’m Jennifer Errick, and this is the Secret Lives of Parks.
Before we begin our main story, I want to share my concern and appreciation for the thousands of National Park Service, Forest Service and other federal employees who were indiscriminately fired earlier this month. These are the people who protect America’s most revered and nationally significant places, who guide tours and help rescue visitors, who have the specialized knowledge to care for rare species and historic objects, who fight wildfires, who hand out maps at the entrance gates, who maintain campgrounds and trails, who offer directions, who know just what hike or overlook to recommend for your one afternoon in a special place, and who do the thankless work of carrying out trash and cleaning the bathrooms after you and I go home for the night.
Beyond that, these workers are also our relatives, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends, neighbors and community members. No one applies for a job at the Park Service to get rich. They do it because they love our country and want to care for it, brick by brick and leaf by leaf. Now, many are struggling, needlessly, with no idea where their next paycheck will come from.
NPCA is adamantly opposed to this reckless action and fighting to have these jobs reinstated. You can follow our efforts and call on Congress to reinstate these jobs at npca.org/1000jobs.
Now, on to our main story.
[Sound of river]
Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado and Utah is the original Jurassic Park, created 110 years ago to protect a trove of more than 1,500 fossils, including a few beloved reptiles your favorite grade-schooler may already have raved to you about. You can see the Allosaurus, the Diplodocus, the Stegosaurus and many other prehistoric stars. At the site’s main exhibit hall, hundreds of these bones are still embedded in the same rock where they’ve been trapped for the last 149 million years.
And if you’re the kind of person who knows you’re supposed to leave no trace but still wishes you could touch things, this park offers you a special opportunity. You can’t go grabbing willy-nilly at the fossils, but there are a few designated places where you can put your hands on real dinosaur bones from the late Jurassic.
Unfortunately, I’ve never had the opportunity to visit Dinosaur National Monument, so when I heard the park was facing a new threat earlier this month, I called on an expert who has advocated for this place for years.
Cody Perry: It's this unique landscape where mountains in the Colorado Plateau kind of merge into each other, and it's like nothing else I've ever seen — my absolutely favorite park unit there is.
Jennifer Errick: That’s Cody Perry, a former consultant with the National Parks Conservation Association who currently serves as associate director at the nonprofit Living Rivers and Colorado Riverkeeper. Cody grew up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, about a two-hour drive from Dinosaur National Monument — though his favorite way to get there is to float.
Cody Perry: We in that community place a premium on that particular park unit because of its connection to the Yampa River. The Yampa River flows through Steamboat and eventually leads into Dinosaur. The watershed leads downstream into this place that is mind-blowing. Over my time in Steamboat, there were several oil and gas leases and parcels that were proposed really close to where, as a recreationist, you'll have direct encounters with new pads, new pad development, oil and gas resources. And I saw extractive industries being placed in direct proximity to these landscapes that we consider sacred.
Jennifer Errick: This area has long been a target for oil and gas development, but earlier this month, incoming Interior Secretary Doug Burgum raised the threat level when he issued a series of orders on his first day in office. In one secretarial order, titled “Unleashing American Energy,” he directed his assistant secretaries to review all public lands to recommend how the agency could remove what he referred to as “impediments” to resource extraction in these areas, specifically targeting national monuments. The following day, NPCA released a list of 13 national monuments our organization believes are most vulnerable to new development threats, including Dinosaur National Monument.
I asked Cody to tell me more about this remote Southwestern park and why he loves it so much.
Cody Perry: So, Dinosaur National Monument is a little bit over 210,000 acres and it's bisected by the political boundaries of Colorado and Utah. The monument itself presents over a billion years of the Earth's history across 23 different rock formations. It represents one of the most complete geologic records of any national park unit. Dinosaur is completely untrammeled. It's a very primitive type park unit, in particular compared to other ones with amenities for visitors, visitor centers, developed roads and campgrounds. It has a very light footprint in that regard, so it's easy to get out into wilderness resources. It's an absolutely incredible place.
Cody Perry: Most people that visit Dinosaur National Monument come in on the Utah side to see the Carnegie Quarry with over 1,500 fossils that are from the Late Jurassic that are visible right on this vertical piece of rock. But a much smaller number of visitors experience Dinosaur National Monument as I have, on the rivers through these dramatically carved canyons of the Green and the Yampa. And these are some of the most sought-after river trips in the country. And the canyons are incredibly dramatic and incredibly diverse, and a trip on the Green and Yampa are completely different experiences. They're just adjacent to each other, but they have absolutely different character, different rock formations and different side canyon experiences. They're wholly unique, and they meet in the center of the monument in this like exceptional place called Echo Park. The rivers join and float on and continue a journey through another set of canyons that are just as different as the ones that you came from.
Jennifer Errick: That sounds absolutely incredible. So, as someone who has been to Zion, I've been to Bryce Canyon — Dinosaur sounds like a very different experience.
Cody Perry: Absolutely. Did you want to know about some of my, like, favorite places within the monument?
Jennifer Errick: I would love to hear your favorite places.
Cody Perry: To kind of just spit out a few places, Deer Lodge is on the very eastern corner of Dinosaur National Monument. The Deer Lodge area is like a whisper of the Pleistocene era. There's a huge natural river that comes into the monument. The Amber River doesn't have large water projects on it that regulate the flow. It’s still driven by the natural occurrences of snowmelt, and that has profound implications to how the river looks. So there's, you know, this wild river, there's large Cottonwood forests. There's these rolling Mancos shale hills, and there's herds of elk and the waterfowl, the bird life, the wildlife itself, just out in that area, it’s so sparsely populated that it just speaks of wild country. There's views there that haven't changed for 10,000 years.
The Yampa Bench itself is an area on the southern side of the Yampa River that parallels the Canyon. And there's these great opportunities to hike out above the twisting Canyon of the main river. You're way up on the upland. Views of the Canyon is below you. It's unique. It's where I proposed to my wife. It's an amazing place.
Sea Cliff is another exceptional area with these, like, large bands of limestone that extend away from the base of the river and up the canyon. Whirlpool Canyon, Rainbow Park Moonshine. I mean I can go on and on. It's an incredible place.
Jennifer Errick: I Iove that you're talking about all of these wild natural features, because it's not what the monument is known for. Like you said, most people come in on the Utah side, and the first stop is usually the quarry. But there's so much beyond the quarry.
Cody Perry: Absolutely. And not to diminish the importance of the paleontological resources. That is very important, fascinating, inspiring. But this place is super scientifically and culturally significant, and that extends over the entire monument.
Jennifer Errick: Can you talk about that a little bit?
Cody Perry: The confluence of the Yampa and Green provides these opportunities to study a wild, unregulated river — the Yampa — and then a flow-regulated river — like the Green. And then the hybrid river beneath them when they meet. What kind of riparian environment exists alongside the Yampa River and what kind of riparian environment exist alongside the Green River? Two entirely different things. That's a unique area that allows us to understand the forces at play and how to manage rivers better all over the West.
It's also like critical habitat for three endangered species. You know, there's 629 cultural sites that occur within the monument, … preserving and protecting the complete chronology of the prehistoric Fremont culture. And the items that researchers and archaeologists have uncovered in these areas evoke deep connection with the natural world that is just beyond our cultural paradigm. We're talking about headdresses that were composed of species of flicker birds that didn't exist historically on the west side of the Rocky Mountains. So, it speaks of vast trade routes, and you know, people on foot in just a culture that is so much larger than what we, on face value, take it to be.
Jennifer Errick: You had been talking earlier about how you became involved in advocacy around the monument. Can you talk a little bit about how you became involved or aware of that larger development threat?
Cody Perry: So, I became more aware of land use around Dinosaur National Monument by being such a river enthusiast. Ending your river trip in Utah ends with driving into these communities in northeast Utah whose economies are largely based in the extractive industries. And it's very common to see roads completely full of fracking vehicles, drill trucks, company trucks, just a lot of hustle and bustle of an industry that's gone through a ton of boom and busts. And over the years, you know, as a river enthusiast, you start to have a desire to push on beyond the boat ramp there at Dinosaur and continue floating into the Uinta Basin.
Floating into the Uinta Basin is floating into an area that's known to have one-third of the world's known oil shale reserves. And this particular oil that they're getting out of the ground is not like black oil bubbling up from beneath the ground. It’s a waxy substance that at room temperature will sit like wax in your candles, so it has to be heated up in order to transport it around in a truck or to put it into a tank. So, you see a large amount of traffic all the time.
So, floating through the Uinta Basin, it became really evident to me — and this was early on before I got into being a conservation advocate — of just seeing the intensity, the industrial land use that is occurring right on the border of Dinosaur.
Jennifer Errick: How close to the border?
Cody Perry: There is periodically oil and gas development that has been 2,000 feet away from Dinosaur’s western boundary. Most of the oil and gas development is miles away, but there are periodically proposals to develop, like, literally right on Dinosaur’s footstep.
One important thing to remember when we think about oil and gas development is, this area, managed by the Bureau of Land Management in the Vernal Field Office, has a mandate in its planning to develop a nationally significant oil and gas resource. So, they're gangbusters to tap into this and to provide oil and gas industries, you know, the means to extract and develop this resource.
We're talking about in excess of 30,000 wells. Greater than the population of the immediate town per capita of wells to people. The amount of development in the area is, you know, from a cumulative standpoint, is so significant. A well doesn't necessarily have to be right on the boundary to impact the resources the park.
Jennifer Errick: How have you been working to advocate for Dinosaur?
Cody Perry: The opportunity to advocate would take shape through drafting comment letters and working with cooperative organizations, other organizations we worked with, such as the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Center for Biological Diversity. We would both identify these threats and contribute and compose comment letters to what was, at the time, like, a friendly administration — or a more friendly administration — that would often give us outcomes or make decisions that incorporated those suggestions and would more often than not give us an outcome that I think protected those park resources and just like attempted to find a middle ground.
Jennifer Errick: What kind of outcomes did you get?
Cody Perry: Lease sales itself, there are particular parcels that we were able to get deferred and removed from you know lease sale consideration. And we were successful in that regard in several instances. We would also comment at large about the cumulative impacts to emissions, climate change, you know.
So, we’d comment on specific parcels, but then also on the lease sale as a whole and how that contributed to the bigger picture. It also gave us an opportunity, you know, to engage with the public and help them engage, you know, in these processes also.
Jennifer Errick: The goal of this secretarial order is to remove impediments to resource extraction, and Dinosaur is one of those places, as you noted, where there is already such active development. Are you concerned about what this could mean for this monument?
Cody Perry: So, as you mentioned, Dinosaur was created by presidential proclamation initially in 1915. You know, it was a small monument then, it was 80 acres. It was just located around these exceptional deposits of fossils. And then in 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt expanded the monument. An additional 200,000 acres that centered around the canyons of the Yampa and the Green Rivers coming in. That was also by presidential proclamation.
What happened after that were several decades of large-scale water wars that swept across the West, and Dinosaur was one of the places where one of these large reservoirs was proposed. What culminated out of that was the monument we have today without a large reservoir in it. So, the forces of conservation prevailed. But also, there was another public law that formalized the boundaries of Dinosaur that passed in September 8th of 1960. Congress approved the boundaries, and so Dinosaur actually has a separate layer on top of it, where it's not just an Antiquities Act unit, which I take as a layer of where Dinosaur may not be subject to a monument review in the same way that we see with, say, Bears Ears or Escalante.
Jennifer Errick: It's important to note that even with the additional layer of congressional protection, Dinosaur is one of very few national park sites that already allows drilling within its boundaries due to a rare situation called a split estate. In a split estate, the Park Service owns the land above ground and private entities own some of the mineral rights underground. The site has already been under development threat for years, and Secretary Burgum’s new push to open public lands to more drilling is likely to increase this threat. Cody agrees.
Cody Perry: I do think, even though the boundaries might be under an additional protective layer of law, the land use priorities of this administration pose an additional threat to these monument resources and that will take shape through exploratory oil and gas wells.
Everything on the Utah side, where there is a density of hydrocarbon resources to be extracted, there is an expectation that those resources, developing those resources, under this current dubious energy emergency will be exploited and to the detriment of wild land resources. So, I am concerned. And that concern for impacts to climate change, ozone and wildlife integrity are, you know, that's one layer. Another layer is how current hiring trends are unfolding. Hiring seasonals. How will the management be able to bring on resources that meet the public's demand in the monument, monitor campground resources in the monument? Those are issues that I'm quite worried about.
Jennifer Errick: Coming up after the break, we share more about what a national monument is exactly, why these types of parks have repeatedly been targeted, and why my expert colleague believes getting mad about these kinds of threats isn’t just normal, it’s also productive.
Kristen Brengel: We've been through this before, and oftentimes, the public outrage is so much that they realize that it's not worth going after these areas, and we believe that this may be another time where we need to show that the public is not interested in having energy dominate over these special areas.
Jennifer Errick: That’s coming up next. Stay with us.
[Music break with ad for npca.org/store. Podcast listeners can get a 10% discount at npca.org/store through March 31, 2025, by using code PARKSPOD at checkout. Check out our “I stand with park rangers” t-shirts and other gear!]
To learn more about Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s new order threatening national monuments, I talked with an expert on government affairs who also happens to be a fan of Dinosaur National Monument.
Kristen Brengel: Dinosaur National Monument, which sits on the border of Colorado and Utah, is one of the most extraordinary places I've been. You go to the Yampa River. It's just so drop dead gorgeous. And it's not only a place of great beauty, but scientific interest. But to get to Dinosaur, if you’re driving, you go drive right through an oil field, you see pump jacks.
Jennifer Errick: Kristen Brengel is senior vice president of Government Affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, and she’s witnessed countless attacks to national parks in her more than 15 years at the organization. This is not her first rodeo. I asked her to share why Secretary Burgum’s order on “Unleashing American Energy” concerns her.
Kristen Brengel: The order about unleashing energy focuses on the secretary’s desire to increase oil and gas drilling and mining on public lands. Toward the end of the memo, it asks each assistant secretary to take a deeper look at some particular issues, and the one that we're most concerned about is this look at the areas that have been designated under the Antiquities Act.
And the importance of the Antiquities Act is that it was a law that was passed in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt, and it was intended to protect places that had special objects that the public will want to appreciate into the future, meaning we want to set this aside for nature, for science, for history, and not necessarily extraction. And so, it was to take these places off the table so that they wouldn't be considered for other uses.
Jennifer Errick: And these are places that people will have heard of, places like the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty.
Kristen Brengel: Correct, correct. And a key part of the Antiquities Act is the reason that Theodore Roosevelt wanted the ability for a president to designate these areas was because there were many places that were in constant threat. The Grand Canyon, for instance, was under threat due to mining, and so when he went out there and saw the Grand Canyon for himself, he thought “this needs to be protected.” Many of the places that were designated under the Antiquities Act became some of our greatest national parks, including Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree, Denali — and the list goes on and on.
Jennifer Errick: So, when a president first creates a public land through the Antiquities Act, it becomes a national monument. I was hoping you would explain what a national monument is. The term is a bit misleading, because when you hear about a national monument, it sounds like a statue or a memorial, like Grant's Tomb, but it's actually much broader than that.
Kristen Brengel: Sure, in modern times, in the 21st century, we consider things that are monuments, like the Washington Monument in Washington, DC, where you see an obelisk and you say, OK, that is a monument. Or we see the Statue of Liberty and we say, that's a monument because it's the image of a woman. But at the time in 1906, they classified a monument as land — land that was going to be protected in some manner. Even at that time, there were a lot of competing interests, and there were people like Theodore Roosevelt that were worried that conservation wasn't being done fast enough, and so the Antiquities Act was a way to make sure that, at the same rate of homesteading and other industries coming into play in Western expansion, that someone was saying, hold on a second. Let's also look at what we should be conserving.
Jennifer Errick: So, I know that NPCA earlier this month put out a list of 13 national monuments that our experts, including you, feel are most under threat — and we’ll link to that in our show notes. Can you tell me why these 13 are, in your view, among the most threatened?
Kristen Brengel: The reason that we highlighted these 13 monuments is because the secretarial order doesn't have any sideboards to it. It doesn't have any qualifications. It just says anything that was designated under the Antiquities Act, and that's when our radar goes up pretty high at NPCA, when someone says something in a blanket way. Because it puts everything on the table. Some of these places have had 100 or more years of protection, and now is not the time to undo those protections. And some of these areas that are potentially a target for this order are on people's bucket lists.
Jennifer Errick: To that point, on the list of threatened places is the very first national monument, Devils Tower National Monument, that was created by Theodore Roosevelt himself using the legislation, the Antiquities Act, that he had just passed. And I have been there. It is an absolutely magnificent site. Can you speak to why this site would be on the list?
Kristen Brengel: Clearly Devils Tower was part of President Roosevelt's thought process when he said there are certain places we absolutely have to conserve and the fact that it was the first national monument that he designated speaks a lot to what we just talked about, which is it's beautiful. It's sacred. And it's a sight to behold, right?
It's also in the middle of the Powder River basin oil and gas field. And even though it's about 1,300 acres, the probability that there's oil and gas underneath it is pretty high because of where it sits. And so, we looked at Department of Energy map on where oil and gas fields were and where there were also minerals, and we overlaid that with these Antiquities Act designations and found that, not to our surprise, Devils Tower is a potential site that could be reviewed under this secretarial order.
Jennifer Errick: According to NPCA’s analysis, 1.7 million acres of land is already available for oil and gas leasing in the area, and though most of it is more than 30 miles from the national monument, it includes parcels within 5 miles of the boundary. The park is part of a larger geologic basin known as the Powder River Basin, which is one of the top 10 oil and gas producing regions in the country.
Kristen Brengel: Another area that we are very, very concerned about and have been very proactive about is the area around the Grand Canyon. We know that there are three national monuments that have been designated in the last 30 years or so specifically to protect the Grand Canyon watershed from damage from uranium mining. There has been dramatic damage to the area from uranium mining. Bad, bad records of cleanup in the area. It is imperative that organizations like ours work toward these designations to fully protect that area.
Jennifer Errick: I feel like this is a recurring theme, at least in the last five or ten years, that there have been these repeated attempts to either overturn or weaken the Antiquities Act specifically. Can you speak to why members of Congress or members of an administration would want to limit the power of the Antiquities Act?
Kristen Brengel: How do I put this? There are so many industries that like to use public lands to make money. And so, these interests make their case to Congress, and they say, we could have 1,000 jobs in this area if we can drill here, and then the member of Congress has to decide what they want to do. Do they want to go with what the industry is asking them to do, or do they want to preserve an area and conserve it?
And that's where the fight takes place a lot of times. The point that we're making in the analysis that we did is that 12 million acres are already being used for oil and gas drilling. Another 12 million are leased but not being used. So, why do we need to go after these special monuments, when we know that there are 12 million acres that are already leased but not being used? That's just excessive and careless, and we can preserve areas and not have to worry about meeting the demand of any particular industry.
And so, our recommendation for the secretary — even though this isn't a public comment period, he was only asking his assistant secretaries to review this — our advice to him would be to take these special places off the table. We've been through this before, and oftentimes, the public outrage is so much that they realize that it's not worth going after these areas, and we believe that this may be another time where we need to show that the public is not interested in having energy dominate over these special areas.
Jennifer Errick: It’s like you could anticipate my next question. During the first Trump administration, the president also attempted to reduce the size of two national monuments and to allow development, specifically at Bears Ears and at Grand Staircase-Escalante, both of those sites in Utah. And NPCA's staff and advocates, with the leadership of Tribal partners, overwhelmingly took action against these attacks. The orders were reversed. We've always maintained that was illegal. And people were fired up over two, two national monuments. How is this new secretarial order different from what we saw in Utah in 2017?
Kristen Brengel: What happened in 2017 was awful and illegal, and you'll notice that even though those boundaries were changed during the Trump administration for Bears Ears, no extraction happened. There was no company that came in and ran into Bears ears and said, I want to go mining for uranium here. So why would we even consider it this time around when there was not even any interest in it last time around? The premise of this secretarial order doesn't even fit with the place like Bears Ears. That says a lot. Who are you doing this for?
This review right now is just a review. It isn't changing anything with any of the national monuments, just taking a look at them. And so, what we're hoping for is that Secretary Burgum, after this 15-day review, hears from the public, hears from our members, hears that nobody wants to put these places on the table, and then he proactively says that as he pursues, you know, energy resources, he's not going to look at any monuments under the Antiquities Act.
Jennifer Errick: Do you feel that there can be a balance of developing more energy resources in keeping with this order?
Kristen Brengel: Yeah, and our position at NPCA has always been that there are places that they should be looking at more closely than areas either within or around national park units. We have millions of acres of public lands. Not everything is suited for this type of development. Sometimes conservation should be the dominant use, and for a variety of reasons, right? But it's 2025. We have incredible resources and cartography that show us how to protect a watershed, how to protect wildlife migration, how to make sure our air is as clean as possible. We know all of this right now. There's no need to do anything in this sort of blanket or blind way at all.
It's just really a shame. Because we're better than this. National parks have never been more popular than they are right now. People love conservation. They love preservation. They take their families to these places. They have bucket lists. Why would you even want to go there? if I were a politician, I would want to say the most popular things and show the public that I'm dialed into them.
And the other thing that I haven't even mentioned is the $55 billion in revenue that is generated through the tourism to our national parks. There's so many gateway communities that depend on people being able to visit these areas. Tourism is a huge industry in our country. You're sacrificing that as well. You're saying that extractive industry is more important than all of these other folks who are trying to make a living.
Jennifer Errick: And, you know, defending a place like Devils Tower or the Grand Canyon, I mean that just seems like the very definition of “America first.” This is America.
Kristen Brengel: Yeah. One of the things that we did in the analysis is we put the year of establishment of these national monuments just to give people a sense of how long these areas have been protected. Dinosaur National Monument, 1915. Hovenweap, 1923. Natural Bridges, 1908. Devil's Tower, 1906. We've protected these places for over 100 years, through all the history that we have, all the wars we've been in, all of the population booms that we've been through, and no one has ever gone into these places and said, “Nope. Let's stop protecting them. Now's the time to go into them and seek these energy resources.” We don't want to be that generation that disrupts over 100 years of protecting something and then ruins it. I think we want to be the generation that knows better.
Jennifer Errick: You can read our list of 13 threatened national monuments, including Dinosaur National Monument, and join us in protecting them at npca.org/13monuments
[End theme]
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 39, Save the Dinosaurs, was produced by me, Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton, and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to Cory MacNulty, Daniel Hart, Beau Kiklis, Katelynn Shea, Michaela Pavlat, Caitlyn Burford, Michael Jamison, and Betsy Buffington.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about this podcast at thesecretlivesofparks.org
Podcast listeners can get a 10% discount at npca.org/store through March 31, 2025, by using code PARKSPOD at checkout. Check out our “I stand with park rangers” T-shirts and other gear, and make sure Dana knows we sent you.
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.
Learn more and join us at npca.org