More Than Just Parks

More Than Just Parks began the way most of our work has, with a camera and a long drive. For years we made films about America’s public lands, and the agencies that manage those lands hired us to do it. The National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Interior Department all brought us in to film the places in their care. Our photographs ran in National Geographic and our films screened for members of Congress inside the Capitol. We spent those years doing the thing we still love most, standing in these places and working out how to show people what they’re looking at.

Somewhere in all of that, the work changed. The more time we spent on public lands, the better we understood how they came to be protected, and how easily that protection could be undone. When this administration started taking the protections apart, opening the lands to industry and gutting the agencies we’d worked alongside, we couldn’t keep filming these places as though nothing was happening. So we turned the same skills toward the fight, reporting and digging through the records, naming the people and the money behind the decisions.

That’s what More Than Just Parks is now. We publish almost every day, tracking what’s being done to public lands and who’s responsible for it. We built a map of every active threat and a scorecard that grades Congress on how its members actually vote. We also built a tool that puts your voice on the public record when a federal agency asks for comment.

Most of what we build now, we build for you. The people who love these places have always been the ones who protect them, and too often they’ve had to do it without a clear way to find the fight or know where their voice would count. That’s the gap we’re trying to close. We’re putting our reporting and our tools in the hands of everyone who cares about public lands, so that caring about a place can turn into protecting it.

Will & Jim Pattiz / More Than Just Parks