Resolution 2026-03
WHEREAS, public lands, including units of the National Park Service, serve as both ecological resources and places of historical and cultural preservation, where the stewardship of wildlife, landscapes, and waters is inseparable from the accurate interpretation of the people, events, and systems that have shaped them; and
WHEREAS, the scientific community recognizes that conservation depends upon accurate, longitudinal understanding of ecosystems, including both successes and failures in management practices; and
WHEREAS, conservation science is an iterative process grounded in observation, error, and correction, and relies on institutional memory to avoid repeating past mistakes, including but not limited to fire suppression policies, species introductions, habitat destruction, and the exclusion of Indigenous knowledge; and
WHEREAS, incomplete or altered scientific and historical records increase the risk of ineffective or duplicative management decisions, misallocation of limited conservation resources, and the repetition of past ecological harms; and
WHEREAS, the landscapes now understood as “natural” across the United States were shaped over millennia by Indigenous land stewardship practices—including fire management, agriculture, and water systems—and were later transformed through colonization, displacement, extraction, forced labor, and slavery, often resulting in ecological degradation, loss of biodiversity, and long-term environmental harm; and
WHEREAS, interpretive materials and historical markers on public lands function as essential tools of public education and civic engagement, allowing the public to encounter, understand, and build trust in the stewardship of natural resources; and
WHEREAS, the removal or revision of historical markers, ecological data, interpretive exhibits, and website content risks reinforcing the false notion of a static or “untouched” wilderness and undermines public understanding of how ecosystems have been shaped by human activity over time, including the effects of climate change; and
WHEREAS, federal actions and directives have called for the review and potential revision of historical and interpretive materials on public lands to align with ideological narratives, and not for the purpose of managing the country’s public lands and natural resources in trust for current and future generations; and
WHEREAS, when federal directives call for avoiding interpretive content that “disparages Americans living or past”, but in observable practice constitutes a systematic removal of content that accurately depicts historical events and persons, consistently minimizing the positive contributions of Indigenous, Latino, and Black Americans, and often inaccurately depicting the actions of people of white European descent, this raises significant concerns about the suppression or alteration of scientific and historical information.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the National Wildlife Federation, at its Annual Meeting assembled June 14-17, 2026, affirms that the preservation of accurate and complete historical and scientific information on public lands is essential to effective conservation, sound resource management, and maintaining public trust in the stewardship of natural resources; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the National Wildlife Federation affirms that conservation must be guided by long-term ecological understanding, built over generations and informed by the full record of human interaction with the land, including Indigenous knowledge systems and histories; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the National Wildlife Federation opposes the removal or revision of historical markers, ecological data, interpretive exhibits, and website content that document ecological change, past management decisions, or the impacts of human activity on wildlife and landscapes for ideological reasons or in a manner that is inconsistent with scientific data and historical records; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the National Wildlife Federation affirms that understanding the full history of America’s landscapes—including stewardship, displacement, exploitation, and recovery—is essential to sound conservation, and that omitting or obscuring this history because it weakens both scientific integrity and the public’s ability to engage meaningfully in the work of protecting wildlife for future generations; and
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that the National Wildlife Federation calls upon federal agencies, including the National Park Service, to maintain and strengthen standards of scientific integrity, transparency, and historical accuracy in all public-facing materials.