"A grove of giant redwood or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral." — Teddy Roosevelt

To say Teddy Roosevelt was a wise man is an understatement. At the turn of the 20th century, in a time of rapidly increasing industrialization and the rapacious plundering of the natural world, Roosevelt got it.

The giant sequoias tucked away in the folds of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains could have been a source for millions of wood planks. Instead, they’re the source of millions of memories and a reflection on what it means to be human, thanks to efforts of conservationists, including Roosevelt, more than a century ago. The coarse-grained wood encased within the sequoias’ burnt orange trunks tells a history that stretches well beyond our individual lifespans. These trees have lived through the birth of Christ, the Spanish settlement of the U.S., and the California gold rush.



Giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park. Credit: Tuxyso/Wikimedia Commons

Staring up from their gnarly base to their bushy crowns nearly 300 feet above the forest floor is to share a sense of wonder experienced by generations. It’s impossible not to be awed by their size — after all they’re among the largest living things on the planet. When a roughly 49,000-acre chunk of land was set aside in 1890 as Sequoia National Park — the nation’s third national park — it was done so with the intention of having the mighty sequoiadendron giganteum inspire awe for centuries to come. And in 1916, when the National Park Service came into existence, that mission spread to a growing quiltwork of natural and cultural wonders across the U.S. Now, as the National Park Service celebrates its 100th anniversary this summer, these irreplaceable sequoias face an uncertain future. Sequoia National Park has grown to more than 400,000 acres, but global warming has wormed its way into those boundaries and is pushing sequoias’ climate into a new and tenuous state. Rising temperatures, an increase in extreme dry years and disappearing snowpack are altering the conditions that have allowed these trees to thrive for eons in a thin band along the Sierras’ western flank. The ongoing California drought has hit the southern Sierras hard and increased the risk of more destructive wildfires, and less water availability in the summer. Researchers have already documented a dieback in older trees during the drought, one of the many “a-ha moments” that point toward future challenges for the Giant Forest. The average annual temperatures in the park are projected to rise around 7°F by 2100 if carbon pollution isn’t slowed, further disrupting a delicate balance. With only 65 groves of sequoias in the world — most of them clustered in and around Sequoia National Park — climate change poses a huge threat to these trees and the ecosystems they support. To lose these majestic giants would be not only a blow to the National Park Service’s mission, it would also mean losing a little piece of us. Sequoia National Park isn’t the only place to feel the heat. The whole system of National Park Service-managed sites, which includes 59 national parks and 352 other monuments, battlefields, trails, historic sites and other crucial pieces of American and natural history, is facing threats from water shortages, too much water, rising temperatures, and the onrush of seas and ocean acidification. Delicate Arch at night in Arches National Park. Credit: Arches National Park Those threats and how the National Park Service manages them hit close to home for almost all Americans. Every state has at least one National Park Service site. Last year, more than 300 million tourists visited the national park system. With Memorial Day right around the corner, that season is about to lurch into full gear as millions go to find their park. Amid growing partisan rancor and arguments about the role of government, national parks are one thing most Americans can agree on. The National Park Service has a 84 percent approval rating. That’s because parks embody shared cultural values most Americans relate to and crave. They’re neither red nor blue, but rather communal spaces that allow individuals to craft their own experiences and narratives. They tell hopeful stories about innovation, and confront harder truths of American history, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights struggle. Oh, and America came up with them first so there’s probably a little home country pride involved.

Climate change isn’t the first challenge to the wonders that national parks protect. Air pollution, the threat of oil and gas extraction on their borders, budget woes and the arrival of non-native species have all put the pinch on parks. But climate change represents an existential threat the likes of which the National Park Service has never had to deal with. “Fundamentally, it’s the biggest challenge the National Park Service has ever faced,” Jonathan Jarvis, the NPS director, said. “I put it up there because it fundamentally changes the way we are going to manage our national parks into the future. It’s making us rethink the whole paradigm under which we manage them.” Your browser does not support HTML5 video. Americans have called our parklands home since Yosemite was first set aside as public land in 1864 and Yellowstone was dubbed the nation’s (and for that matter, the world’s) first national park in 1872. Teddy Roosevelt used the newly created Antiquities Act to declare Devil’s Tower in Wyoming the first national monument in 1906. And in 1916, Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act, which created the National Park Service as a way to manage the growing network of parks and monuments across the nation. These places and the subsequent 409 additions to the National Park Service domain that have followed were set aside as safe havens from the rapidly industrializing world. But they’ve been unable to keep climate change — the most direct negative impact of the Industrial Revolution — out. Impacts are showing up on parks’ front doors and in more and more cases, inviting themselves in and rearranging the furniture. In some parks, climate change is adding new furniture to the rooms and throwing the old stuff out at a rate not seen in millennia (and likely longer than that).