Oh my GOSH!!! That is a good story!!! Dying laughing. Here is my true confession, I've been afraid to spill about my whacko enviro days :)
Darksheare won't talk to me anymore.
I worked for the NPS for ten years, and it wasn't like that then... many of my good friends still work for the agency, but they are more like law enforcement/fire/rescue types and not the crunchy rangerette granolas. I saw one in Yellowstone last summer though, and she is a completely brainwashed liberal. We have exchanged heated emails since then.
I have written scathing (but polite) letters to the current Nazi Superintendent at Saguaro NP. Just as one example, she "temporarily" closed a mountain biking trail last year in Saguaro - THE ONLY ONE IN THE PARK and it's only two and a half miles long. Some extremists wanted it shut, so they shut it. It's finally open now, but what a joke that was.
There is so much "dead wood" at Saguaro, and at a lot of other parks too. When I conducted my master's research there, I was continually harassed by one of the feminazis, even though my research was unobtrusive and I had permission from the superintendent. I could go on and on for hours with specific examples. My letters never get answered.
I attended that public meeting last month about the "problems in the parks", thinking I would learn something, contribute my experience, and also reconnect with some old buddies. Even though something like $4/5 used to come out of our pockets each year to support the national parks (we had it figured out to the penny when I worked there and qualified for food stamps even though I'd NEVER apply of course), and every administration has slashed park budgets; never funded them enough; never fired the dead wood; never investigated the fraud; etc., all of a sudden everything is President Bush's fault. AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH is right!
The US Forest Service is doing some similar things, and calling it "pre-European settlement conditions" and using that as a baseline for what condition the national forests should be in. These "conditions" have been incorporated into the Forest Plans as standards that should be met through the various management activities. No timber cutting, no livestock grazing, no mining, no firewood cutting, no campgrounds...