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Former National Park Service Director: Close Parks During Shutdown, Federal Workers Miss First Paycheck

During the partial government shutdown, we’ve seen photos of trash piling up inside national parks, and heard stories of damage done to those parks, and the amenities and ecosystems within them. The Show's guest says it’s a mistake to keep the parks open during a shutdown.

Jon Jarvis is a former director of the National Park Service; he’s currently executive director for the Institute for Parks, People and Biodiversity at UC Berkeley. We spoke with him and asked him about the balancing act of keeping public lands accessible to the public during a shutdown, while at the same time, keeping those lands, and their visitors, safe.

Park rangers are among the estimated 800,000 federal workers who are missing their first paychecks today because of the shutdown. So is Justin Eddinger. He works for the U.S. Forest Service and had been serving as project manager of an ecological restoration project on the Lower Salt River.

He recently took to Twitter to ask other federal workers to share their stories about how the shutdown is affecting them. He shared his with The Show.

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Mark Brodie is a co-host of The Show, KJZZ’s locally produced news magazine. Since starting at KJZZ in 2002, Brodie has been a host, reporter and producer, including several years covering the Arizona Legislature, based at the Capitol.