Badlands national park – the new heroes of the resistance

Name: Badlands national park.

Location: South Dakota, United States.

Appearance: Vast wild prairies, rich fossil beds and magnificently sculpted buttes.

*Snigger*: Buttes are towers of rock formed by erosion. It’s pronounced bewt, actually.

Sorry, of course it is. Badlands is managed by the National Park Service, which is part of the US Department of the Interior, the role of which, among other things, is to “move our nation toward a clean-energy economy” and “coordinate climate-change science and resource-management strategies”.

I see. And now Americans have elected a president who says that’s all a secret Chinese plot that he has no proof of. Indeed. Needless to say he isn’t very popular at the NPS, whose Twitter account retweeted photos of the sparse turnout at his inauguration, and shared news of civil rights, climate change and healthcare pages disappearing from the White House website.

I can’t help cheering, but civil servants shouldn’t publicly undermine their elected bosses, should they? No. And the NPS Twitter feed was shut down for a day while they all got a good talking to. But now Badlands has struck back!

How come? On Tuesday, the Badlands National Park Twitter account began publishing blandly accurate information about climate change. For example: “Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. #climate.”

Does President Trump disagree with that? Hard to say. I expect he’d get bored and stop reading.

No doubt. Anyway, the tweets were soon deleted.

Censorship! Not necessarily. The National Parks Service said that they were the work of “a former employee” who wasn’t supposed to have access. “The park was not told to remove the tweets but chose to do so when they realised their account had been compromised,” they said.

Is that true? Or has the new government already begun secretly burying inconvenient climate data? Well, we don’t have any evidence that the NPS is censoring things that Badlands would normally have said. The tweets were a bit out of character for Badlands, and another of its tweets about climate change since Trump took office still hasn’t been deleted.

So … we don’t know what to believe? No. Get used to it.

Do say: “Let’s kick butte!”

Don’t say: “Dangerous manmade climate-change is/isn’t happening and requires/doesn’t require urgent action. [Delete according to mood]”