Joshua Tree National Park's Neighbors Have Taken to Instagram to Change Your Ways

Above, a turnout in Joshua Tree National Park. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Joshua Tree National Park is seeing increasing numbers of visitors. 

While it is good that people are visiting the national park, there are some who have to act like jackasses while there and posting their juvenile antics on social media such as Instagram.

Fortunately, there are some people who are monitoring social media and are calling out the jackasses.

According to LinkTV:

Joshua Tree National Park is more crowded than it's ever been, and the Park's natural resources are taking a beating. While the majority of visitors are respectful of the desert landscape, many people touring Joshua Tree don't realize just how fragile the rugged-looking desert is. And a few, apparently, know but don't care. 

Social media makes the situation worse, allowing visitors to easily advertise their misbehavior to thousands of potential imitators. 

On Instagram, for instance, the majority of posts from Joshua Tree are sublime, adorable, salacious (and NSFW) or a mixture of the three. But some show destructive behavior, normalizing it and encouraging others to repeat it. The National Park Service doesn't have the resources to educate everyone visiting Joshua Tree about why certain acts — like climbing or suspending hammocks from the Park's namesake trees — are inappropriate here. And so for the last few years, frustration has been building among the Park's neighbors in Joshua Tree and nearby towns as they see more examples of misdeeds ranging from violations of Park rules governing camping, fires, and dogs to deliberate vandalism. 

Some of those neighbors, seeing that NPS is outgunned, are taking matters into their own hands. And they're using the same social media that seems to be causing the problem in the first place.

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