The partial government shutdown is nearing the four-week mark, and it's having an impact on the hundreds of thousands of government workers who aren't at work and aren't being paid. But the shutdown is not just personal — it's also affecting national parks and other public lands. There are overflowing trash cans and toilets, thefts of artifacts, trees have been chopped down and there have been multiple fatalities. Sally Jewell, who served as interior secretary under President Obama from 2013 to 2017, says it's a "huge mistake" not to close the parks that have remained open during the shutdown. "I appreciate that people love their national parks and want access. But when we went through the shutdown in 2013, the issue was parks can't be open in terms of roads and access without people there to manage them," Jewell (@sallyjewell) tells Here & Now's Robin Young. "And we've seen that with the garbage piling up and the human feces in the parking lot that these employees face." Illicit off-road driving in places like California's Joshua Tree National Park is just one example of damage that will long outlast the current shutdown, Jewell says. "You have people riding four-by-fours on cryptobiotic soils, which take hundreds if not thousands of years to recover," she says. Interview Highlights On the importance of cryptobiotic soils, and the long-lasting nature of the damage "It's like an old-growth forest. It's an old-growth ecosystem coming up from the soil that is very important habitat to a number of species in that part of the desert Southwest. And when you put a footprint in that, or a tire track, it basically destroys that ecosystem and the continuity of that ecosystem with the soils around it. You can see footprints that people have done when they've walked off trail where they're not supposed to go that will just basically be there forever."

"The destruction of these resources is something you can never get back." Sally Jewell

On issues like the theft of old-growth timber "These trees are part of national parks. They are part of wilderness areas and protected areas, and they're designed to preserve these places unimpaired for the future, to preserve the ecosystems that are attached to them. The destruction of these resources is something you can never get back. I mean, they're hundreds of years old. We did see the theft of old-growth timber in, for example, Olympic National Park. These are assets that belong to all American people in the places that are most special. And when you are an employee who is in the forever business, then the destruction of those resources for personal gain no matter what is something that just strikes at the core, at your core, saying that people don't care about these places." On morale among people conducting scientific research "One of the biggest impacts of this shutdown is a sense that people have that their work is not valued. If you are a scientist working on eDNA to prevent the invasive Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes, and you have lost that data, you've actually lost your experimentation fish you were working with, and you may have missed some data of invasive species that have migrated into places like the Great Lakes that nobody wants. I just cannot express enough the long-term impacts, that is not just about this data being lost, but potentially a gap in data and the ability to correlate that will impact this work for years." On whether it's too late to close the parks altogether "No. I mean I think that you have seen some park superintendents make the decision to close their doors because of the damage that's being done. Some of them have shut the gates, and in the case of a national park close to me, Mount Rainier National Park, it was closed. They then used fees — which should be for visitors services and deferred maintenance and so on — they used those to reopen the gates temporarily and I'm sure they're getting pressure to do that."

"One of the biggest impacts of this shutdown is a sense that people have that their work is not valued." Sally Jewell