The National Park Service recently removed numerous signs at Acadia National Park that detailed the mounting impacts of climate change on Maine’s coast and forests.
The move is part of a sweeping campaign that the Trump administration says is aimed at “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” In practice, it has been an exercise in scrubbing certain historical and scientific truths from federal sites and institutions, including the horrors of slavery in the United States.
The now-removed Acadia signs, installed in 2023 at the summit of Cadillac Mountain and at the 100-acre Great Meadow wetland, informed visitors of the many ways Maine’s only official national park is changing and how park officials are working to better manage the ecosystem amid rising temperatures and extreme weather.
“Acadia is changing, so are we,” read one of the signs. “The rapidly changing climate requires new approaches to restoration.”
Much like during President Donald Trump’s first term, the administration has worked to undermine established climate science while boosting the development of planet-warming fossil fuels.
In a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last week, Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) condemned the removal of national park signage as a blatant attempt to “whitewash history” and “limit the exchange and expression of factual information about climate science.”
“Our national parks are not billboards for propaganda,” she wrote. “They are places where millions of people come each year to learn, reflect, and confront both the beauty and the difficult truths of our shared history. Stripping away this context erodes the very mission of the Park Service and insults the public’s right to know.”
Pingree noted that the signs — six tripods at Cadillac Mountain, four at Great Meadow — were created with local partners and “meant to underscore the impacts of climate change — which are well-documented, increasingly visible, and not in dispute within the scientific community.”
The Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service, did not answer questions from The Maine Monitor about what information on the signs warranted their removal.
“Thanks to President Donald Trump, Interior is ensuring that the American people are no longer being fed the lies of the delusional Green New Scam,” Interior spokesperson Aubrie Spady wrote in an email, referring to the Green New Deal, a broad set of environmental proposals that never passed into law. “The content was taken down because this administration believes in only administering facts based on real science to the American public, not brainless fear-mongering rhetoric used to steal taxpayer dollars.”
The ongoing effort to rid national park sites of certain interpretive signage stems from an executive order Trump signed in March, which tasked the Interior Department with removing items that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed up with his own secretarial order in May, ordering agencies within Interior to remove any content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” or “emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur” of a natural feature.
Over the summer, the agency went as far as to put up new signs calling on members of the public to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”
More than 100 organizations, including Friends of Acadia, signed on to a letter late last month that implored Burgum to rescind his order, which they argue “undermines the Department of the Interior’s responsibility to steward not only the landscapes we all share but also the layered histories embedded within them.” (Friends of Acadia partnered with the National Park Service and other organizations to erect the interpretive signs.)
At other sites around the country, the National Park Service has removed information related to slavery, the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and conflicts with Native Americans, The Washington Post reported last week.
Signs referencing climate change in Acadia. Photo by Jay Elhard of the National Park Service.
Todd Martin, northeast senior program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association, told The Maine Monitor that when people visit a national park, they deserve to see uncensored information about that place and its history — the good and the bad.
“That’s exactly what these signs at Acadia were trying to do,” he said. “We have decades of scientific research that demonstrate the impact of climate change on Maine and Acadia National Park — longer droughts, more intense precipitation events, more intense coastal storms, sea level rise. We have the science to back that up. It’s science, it’s not politics.”
“The signs coming down at Acadia is just another example of erasure and censure that we’ve seen at our parks in recent weeks and months,” he added.
For now, the public can learn more about those impacts on Acadia National Park’s website, which features a comprehensive climate change page.
Among other things, the website notes that a record-breaking storm in June of 2021 dumped 5 inches of rain in less than three hours, damaging trails and the park’s 45-mile historic carriage road system. And it warns that “without a significant reduction in greenhouse emissions, there is a chance that some of fragile pieces could be lost forever.”
Whether the webpage survives Trump’s second term remains to be seen.