Politics & Power Quote by Norm Dicks

You can hear the legislative knife twist in the folksy setup: "people go to the park this summer". Norm Dicks isn’t waxing poetic about wilderness; he’s translating budget politics into an immediate, middle-class inconvenience. Summer is doing heavy lifting here. It’s the season of packed minivans, long weekends, and civic rituals. By pinning the harm to a predictable moment, Dicks turns an abstract funding cut into a ruined plan.

The line’s real argument isn’t just that ranger staffing matters. It’s that public land is a public service, and services degrade quietly before they collapse loudly. "Not going to have the same quality" is bureaucratic language with a consumer sting, as if the park were a product that’s suddenly been cheapened. That phrasing is strategic: it invites even non-environmentalists to feel cheated. You paid in taxes, you drove the miles, you show up, and the experience has been thinned out.

Then comes the deeper subtext: "important cultural and historic areas". Olympic National Park isn’t only scenery; it’s a curated story about place, Indigenous presence, settlement, conservation, and national identity. Without a ranger "to tell them", that story goes untold, and what’s lost isn’t merely information but meaning. Dicks is defending interpretation as infrastructure: the human layer that turns land into heritage, and citizens into stewards rather than just tourists.