Samuel Martin - Trees in National Parks Victims of Government Shutdown

Joshua Tree National Park’s Signature Trees Are Among Shutdown Victims

Summary:
Since the beginning of the government shutdown, different divisions of the federal government have seen a complete lack of funding as well as furloughed employees. Because these employees are not getting paid, they stopped showing up at their job, which really hits hard at the National Parks in the US. Normally the parks use an entry fee to maintain the parks and pay the rangers, tour guides, etc, but now the entry fees are being used to hire garbage collectors to clean up campsites. The lack of staffing has led to people destroying the famed "Joshua Trees", driving through the desert, and camping underneath thousand year old monuments in the park. The government has been shut down for 21 days (as of January 11th, 2019) and even if the government starts running again, Joshua Tree National Park will close on Thursday to clean up and repair damage to government property.

Analysis:
This article was written on January 11th, 2019 in New York, New York. This means that the author is up to date on his information and he is also close to the source of the government shutdown as well. I had already heard about how the government shutdown is effecting people that don't even work directly for the government (air traffic controllers for example) but I didn't know it was affecting the National Parks Service as well. This relates to the fifth government shutdown in 1990, under the H.W. Bush administration, when the EPA, NPS, Departments of Labor, Housing, Urban Development and more were shut down over the issue of cuts to medicare. The audience of this article is all of the United States, because the government shutdown effects all of us, even if might not expect or think about it like the park service. The article was written by Liam Stack, who is a political reporter for the New York Times who was previously based in Cairo, but now works in New York. The article was written to show that everything effects us all the time, even if we don't see it. This is important because people need to realize the consequences of their actions, in this case the government shutdown is destroying our precious national parks.

Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/us/joshua-trees-cut-down.html