If we break America's parks, the whole world loses.
Plus: a bad dzud you don't want to meet.
The envy of the world gets chopped down in size
Last night, my ongoing tour of Mongolia brought me to the home of a Mongolian park ranger who proudly told me about his training visit to Wyoming's Grand Tetons. It's a common encounter in Asia's protected areas: America's National Park Service has long been the model that emerging conservation programs aspire to emulate, with rangers from around the world making pilgrimages to learn from what many consider the world's most successful public lands experiment.
But that legacy is now on notice. This week, approximately 1,000 National Park Service employees were abruptly terminated, including 16 of 17 supervisory positions at Grand Teton National Park. (3,400 more jobs were eliminated in the U.S. Forest Service.) The cuts are already forcing difficult decisions about operating hours, trail maintenance, and public safety across America's 428 national parks and historic sites.
While these cuts eliminate just 5% of the Park Service workforce, they hit an agency already stretched desperately thin. The NPS manages over 85 million acres and hosts record-breaking crowds on a total budget that represents just 0.07% of federal spending. Slashing its already minimal staffing now, just before peak season, seems designed to fail.
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The stakes extend beyond visitor access. America's national parks have been the stage for some of conservation's greatest comeback stories.
In Yellowstone, the return of wolves transformed entire ecosystems - their presence changed not just predator populations but allowed vegetation to recover and even altered the course of rivers
In California's Channel Islands, careful management and removal of non-native species helped bring the island fox back from near extinction
In Florida's Everglades, decades of dedicated work restored American crocodile populations from just a few hundred individuals to stable numbers
These successes didn't happen by accident – they required generations of scientific expertise, dedicated rangers, and consistent funding. The math makes the cuts even more baffling: America's parks generate $55.6 billion in economic activity and support 415,000 jobs in gateway communities, all on a modest federal outlay of $4.8 billion this year. But the deeper cost may be to America's role as a global conservation leader, right when the world needs such leadership most.
To drive the point home even further — as I traverse through Mongolia's eastern protected areas, each entrance bears usually a telling sign: "Made possible by USAID." It's a stark reminder that America's conservation legacy extends far beyond its own borders or even its own park service. These indiscriminate cuts aren't just dismantling institutional knowledge – they're threatening the very funding that helps new parks take root around the world.
Why the steppe might be more silent than usual
After my week in Mongolia's eastern steppe with scientist Vadim Kiriliuk, we've checked dozens of camera traps but captured surprisingly few images of manuls. While these elusive cats are always challenging to spot in winter, there may be a deeper reason for their scarcity: Mongolia is still reeling from one of its worst dzud disasters in recent memory.
A dzud, for those unfamiliar, is a uniquely Mongolian climate catastrophe. It comes in several devastating forms, but they all spell disaster for the steppe's wildlife and the nomadic communities that call this harsh landscape home. In 2024, Mongolia experienced what locals call a "combined dzud" - a perfect storm of conditions that began with a summer drought that prevented animals from building up crucial fat reserves, followed by heavy early snowfall that buried what little grass remained.
The impact has been staggering. Over 8.1 million livestock perished last winter — a 12.6% mortality rate that approaches the devastating dzud of 2009-2010. For context, that's equivalent to losing most of the cattle population of Texas. But the effects ripple far beyond domestic animals.
For manuls and other wild predators, the dzud creates a desperate chain reaction:
Their prey base collapses as pikas and small rodents can't access food beneath the snow and ice, while melting and refreezing snow floods their burrows
Desperate for food, cats must hunt during dangerous daylight hours, making them vulnerable to golden eagles and other predators
Fewer kittens survive their first winter, leading to lower population numbers that can take years to recover
What makes this situation particularly concerning is its frequency. Historically, severe dzud events occurred roughly once a decade. But as Mongolia warms at nearly triple the global average rate, these catastrophic winters are becoming more common. The region has now experienced six major dzud events in just the past ten years.
Even though this winter's conditions are more typical, the effects of last year's catastrophic dzud continue to ripple through the ecosystem. With prey populations depleted and many young animals lost during last year's crisis, it may take several seasons for wildlife numbers to recover. It's a stark reminder of how these extreme weather events can reshape life on the steppe long after the immediate crisis passes.
Looking out across Mongolia's vast grasslands now, you'd never guess the devastation that unfolded here just twelve months ago. But the quiet at our camera traps tells a different story — one of an ecosystem still slowly healing from one of nature's most unique and unforgiving disasters.
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Here's a conservation win for an unexpectedly endangered bird: turtle dove populations across Western Europe have surged by 25% following a 2021 hunting ban. These birds, often featured in holiday songs and poetry, had seen their numbers plummet by 98% over three decades. The turnaround came through coordinated action across their entire migratory route — from the U.K. to Portugal — showing again just how important international cooperation can be. While British populations are still struggling (down 15% since 2023), Operation Turtle Dove has enlisted over 400 landowners to create suitable habitat, and conservationists are optimistic about the species' long-term survival.
This week’s FUZZ FILE is up on YouTube, talking all about hippos — both big and small. Subscribe to FUZZ on YouTube if you haven’t yet. Thanks to subscriber K for another great edit.