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Actually gonna make an account just for this comment.
I highly doubt there's a guy whose only job is to sit around and talk about flowers all day. I've worked with state botanists and park rangers before and I can assure you that they're tracking and recording all sorts of information about plant health, species diversity and stuff like that too on top of the typical work of making sure that people are following the rules (one place for example called Rocky Face Mountain in NC has a lot of endangered and rare plants so people come trying to collect them which endangers the populations there).
Even if that's all they did was sit around and tell tourists about plants all day, that would still a job regardless because public education is a form of work. Again, it's not just what they do, they're expected to do all sorts of different things but "telling tourists about the flowers" requires a bunch of domain knowledge about the local flora, which is a lot more complex than you might think. Especially since we tend to set up a fair bit of these parks in areas where biodiversity is high like Yosemite or the aforementioned Rocky Face. Our parks are like museums, but of nature. People love museums, people love zoos, and people love the parks and they like hearing and seeing and learning about cool things on the parks. We have one mountain (I forget the name I only went twice) where they have a bunch of signs set up on the trails explaining the history of the mountain, various plants, etc and it's actually a pretty popular spot for school trips.
It does actually happen in the private sector. One of my biology professors had personally met and worked with Tim Sweeney when he bought up a lot of land in NC for preservation. I didn't hear too much details on what they did (after all it was just a side topic in class) but lots of people like nature and they like knowing about nature and preserving nature.
Their work helps to create awesome resources like this https://auth1.dpr.ncparks.gov/flora/index.php. I don't know the other states resources but we have entire databases around what plant species occur in what counties, their various different attributes and descriptions, etc. Natural plant diversity is an important part of the ecosystem, from the beetles/flies/bees that pollinate them to the herbivores that eat them, to the carnivores that eat those. Also good proof that they're not just "telling tourists about flowers"
Which leads back around to how they are under a lot of threat, even plants that are famous worldwide like the Venus fly trap exists almost entirely within a 50 mile radius of Wilmington NC, and despite how easy it is to get legal seeds and plants now they still have to monitor and track for poachers and illegal collectors threatening the local populations. Hey, that related back to part 1!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-park-ranger-fired-dream-job-emotional-viral-letter/
Here's a quote from this person's letter:
You're right, it sounds like some of the other things they do other than talk about plants is talk about bird songs.
And this is abstractly valuable. Do you think this means they should be able to demand that people make sacrifices in their own lives to give money for this?
I'd say that they have a responsibility to recognize that demanding we all pay for this stuff is a privilege, and recognize that as much as they might not enjoy, they might have to do things like send 5 bullet points describing what they do every week. I think it would be reasonable to ask them to send an email every day detailing what they did. I've certainly had various slack bots and things that have asked that of me, and I didn't throw a protest or pen and melodramatic letters about it.
A random worker writing a letter trying to appeal to parents is not some full job description of everything they do. If that's genuinely what you got your idea of park service work from then you should reconsider how you source your information and beliefs going forward.
Another topic you don't seem to have any knowledge about. Maintaining a healthy ecosystem and biodiversity isn't some abstract value, it helps keeps the world we're living in stable. This is the system of our world and we are not yet an interstellar species. A nd it helps with things like pharmaceutical research. So much of the medicine we have right now comes from random plants. Famously aspirin came from Willow bark originally but we also have stuff like heart medications from Foxglove research. You can find tons of examples like this from random plants and animals. Likewise you can get from basic internet searches plenty of studies talking about this very thing https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/14/3/392/734905/Biodiversity-Medicine-New-Horizon-and-New https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5735771/ etc etc etc you can look up for plenty of examples.
You’re wrong about where I get my characterization of federal workers. Especially parkies.
Correct. The people who we hired to do it should take their job more seriously.
That was the source you gave for your information.
That was a reference I gave to a story that has been in the news, and the one that I alluded to.
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