Consider the sequoia. This American icon has a whorled orange-hued exterior, and is topped off with an instantly recognizable bristly form. Yet when 19th century loggers felled these colossal trees, they found little of substance: “sequoia wood is too fibrous and brittle to be much use for anything,” wrote The Economist in its Christmas Issue in an ode to this giant of nature. Remind you of anything?

The National Park Service does amazing work preserving America’s natural jewels, from Appalachia to the Channel Islands. It’s hardly the most controversial bureau of the Department of the Interior: maintaining the rich variety of flora and fauna across the US is important work, it inspires thousands of volunteers including Boy and Girl Scouts to help conserve these beautiful areas, and it ensures future generations can enjoy jewels like the sequoia. It’s not the obvious target for a Twitter fight.

But it seems that’s where the new administration is taking things.

It started when the National Park Service’s Twitter account retweeted pictures comparing the crowds for Donald Trump’s inauguration and that of Barack Obama in 2009. To be fair, they’re responsible for the National Mall – they just spent $40m on fancy new grass for it, requiring those white lawn covers to protect it from crowds (the same coverings Sean Spicer blamed for the photographs looking empty). Anyway, this, and another retweet about policy changes on the White House website meant the National Park Service was promptly reprimanded and banned from tweeting.

National Park Service climate change Twitter campaign spreads to other parks Read more

Obviously, it’s not very professional to send a retweet commenting on policy matters from a federal bureau’s account. But telling all bureaus to immediately cease use of government Twitter accounts until further notice is something of an overreaction: it’s as if Ranger Smith had just Harambe’d Yogi Bear for stealing a picnic basket.

But the men and women of the National Park Service are used to dealing with avalanches, floods and droughts. They literally know how to defend themselves from bears. Twitter ban? These are guys who can survive in the woods with only a penknife and a bivouac.

One valiant ranger in South Dakota’s Badlands national park decided that those city-slickers in Washington needed some #FACTS about climate change and defied the ban to post a series of tweets about the impact of carbon emissions on the environment.

Picture him or her sending them from a ruggedized phone using a satellite antenna from the top of a rock formation while a lone wolf howls in the moonlight ... OK probably not. But it was enough for an NPS official to tell BuzzFeed they were from a rogue former employee and to delete them. Next, Golden Gate national park service shared a Nasa report on rising temperatures. Oh, 2017: it’s still only January, and rogue rangers on social media is a thing.

What’s next? The NPS account starts to share “alternative facts” about how Pikachu is a native species of 38 states? Seabirds love to roll around in oil because it’s like a deep-cleanse facemask for their feathers? Sequoias are actually really sturdy and that’s why we should chop them down and use the wood to make luxury condos? In all seriousness, the environment is in grave danger. Governments globally agreed steps to try and fight climate change last year.

The people who maintain America’s wilderness know this, and want to share relevant information. On-brand social media will not stop the oceans acidifiying (nor will the off-brand kind – but at least people know they need to take action).

Finally, the whole thing is just absurd. As one wag on Twitter noted, picking a fight the National Park Service in your first week is “like starting a new job and kicking the office cat to death”.

Hopefully, this episode is just teething pains of a new administration: if it’s more indicative of the way things are going to be handled, we’re in for a long four years. There’s never been a better time to go to a national park, admire the majesty of nature and take a deep breath in the fresh air.