Government Has Announced a New Ban in Yosemite — and Visitors Believe It’s a ‘Badge of Honor’

National parks aren’t just landmasses pockmarked with trees, flowers, and monuments, decorated for the visitors to enjoy. They are trails of stories punctuated across timelines of thousands of years, millions maybe. As TED-Ed points out, the two goals of a national park service are to preserve the park for future generations and to allow visitors to enjoy its features in the present. In the past few weeks, the budget cuts imposed by the government shutdown have restricted America’s national parks and their visitors to a jolt of suffering. Now, to add to this agony, the Trump Administration has kicked off a thunderbolt. Nature writer Obi Kaufmann (@coyotethunder) recently revealed that his book has been banned from the bookstores of Yosemite National Park.

It is not unsurprising for the government to ban books that it believes promote negative views about American history or distorted stories about the country’s past that could influence the way people view the world. From Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which rebelled against government control, to George Orwell’s 1984, which projected a dystopian picture of society, tons of books have been banned in the past. But as the saying goes, everything comes out in the wash. The ban of this book, in particular, seems to be a “clandestine attempt to exert non‐democratic power and to control the narrative,” Kaufmann says. 

And while Kaufmann’s book, titled The State of Water: Understanding California's Most Precious Resource, has not been pulled off the shelves, Yosemite will not buy any more copies of this book, and visitors can’t buy it from Yosemite's bookstores. This ban comes as a forethought following the Executive Order "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

The order, published in a press report by the White House, states that everything that presents a concerted effort to rewrite America’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth, will be banned. Works like these, the House wrote, deepens “societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.”

In history, the House said, people have attempted to promote a view that depicts America being driven by racism, which is not just a biological reality, but a social construct and human invention. Several parks have come under the radar. The Smithsonian American Art Museum rolled out an exhibition named “The Shape of Power” depicting how the US uses race to establish power in society. 

The National Museum of African American History and Culture proclaimed that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.” In Yosemite, the bombshell dropped on Kaufmann’s book. But why his book? Likely because it exposes the ecological decline and water exploitation prompted by the Trump Administration's activities, Jonathan Rosenfield from San Francisco Baykeeper told SFGate. According to the publisher, Heyday Books, Kaufmann’s book exposes a history of unlimited growth in spite of finite natural resources.

“His book being banned just shows you what the administration is scared of,” Rosenfield said, adding that water is California’s most precious resource that determines not only the health of ecosystems but also the job market, a matrix that is being threatened by the government’s agenda that supports energy development and corporate interests.

Shutdown was the initial trigger, followed by this book ban jaw-dropper. Yosemite’s visitors have met the ban with a backlash. Many are encouraging Kaufmann to keep writing books like these, and the more they are banned, the more sales they will make. “Huge bummer, but truly punk rock to create a book that gets banned. Something legendary about that,” commented America’s famous filmmaker @chrisburkard. Others, including @plantdreams and @louesaroebuck, believe that this ban is a badge of honor. “Keep up the good fight, comrade!”

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