The revolution will be digitized. In a protest seen around the world, activists hung an American flag upside down atop El Capitan on February 22. It was a visible distress call from within the thinning ranks of the National Park Service. Behind acts of protest like these is the Alt National Park Service, the official “Resistance” team of the U.S. National Park Service, which called upon Americans to fly their flags upside down in solidarity with a federal workforce in crisis.
For an institution designed to protect the land and the people, plants, and animals upon it, the National Park Service—and its digital rebel offshoot, Alt National Park Service—now serves to protect freedom of speech, as well. Their Facebook feed is a running list of news updates, saboteur missives, and cryptic numbers and codes broadcast as a deliberate subterfuge of the barrage of contradictory and condemnatory orders from the new administration. As the Trump administration’s attacks on various social services widened and deepened over 2025, the Alt NPS Facebook feed has become a voice for the voiceless: calling attention to Americans’ eroding civil liberties, uniting workers and informing the public of happenings often not shared by mainstream media..
Emerging in 2017 against the first Trump administration, Alt National Park Service has served up science in an era inimical to scientists. Theirs is punk rock of the social media variety. “Can’t wait for President Trump to call us FAKE NEWS,” tweeted the original @AltNatParkSer in 2017. “You can take our official twitter, but you’ll never take our free time.”
“Alt National Park Service and other similar NPS-related social media accounts have helped me not feel alone. As a person of color who has never really been to many national parks before I worked in them, my experience was far from easy. I navigated complicated bureaucracy, natural disasters, overcrowding, learning to recreate in wild spaces, and so much more. To know at times that my struggles are not just my own, but are part of the hard aspects that make up these jobs, helped me feel seen and among like-minded companies,” said a seasonal NPS summer ranger who spoke anonymously.
It can be a lonesome life in the NPS as staffing has declined 20 percent over the last 15 years while visitation has increased, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. Other accounts like National Park Disservice and the Pine Pig speak the in-joke language of the flat-hats. A streak of cynicism long predates the present-day budget cuts amidst a social media–influenced culture of hugging bison or walking into geysers that speaks to a public needing help from themselves.
“Finding community within the chaos has us pushing forward. Creating space to vent, be transparent, and brainstorm on ways to prepare for a future in the forest service has been bittersweet. Morale is low, but choosing to continue working the meaningful work we do is our act of resistance,” said a US Forest Service ranger and former NPS ranger.
As federal conservation jobs are cut like trees, millions are now left to wonder who will be left to speak for them, as Dr. Seuss’s Lorax once pondered.
“I really hope people understand that this fight is more than just the right to have our jobs back. It’s a fight for the very thing that inspired many of us to wear the green and gray—profound love and appreciation for our public lands.…Protecting our public lands means protecting our environment, our local economies, our natural resources, and our air quality that makes human life [sustainable] in major cities,” said a former NPS ranger.
Throughout the winter, the public responded with resounding upset to the cuts, showing up by the hundreds across national parks with signs of protest and more upturned flags. On Thursday, March 13, the chaos was temporarily reversed, with two federal judges ordering the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of federal employees previously fired by DOGE.
The battle for public lands continues, as whether they’ll have the staffing to continue to protect and preserve them is uncertain. Either way, the Alt National Park Service gives us hope that the seeds of change can still be planted, one act of resistance at a time. As they wrote on their Facebook on March 14, “We have each other. We are the Resistance now. All of us.”
All Photos Courtesy Of Laure Andrillon / Afp Via Getty Images
