Now-deleted tweets from the Badlands National Park about climate science, in defiance of a Trump gag order on EPA and USDA scientists, 24 January 2017. Graphic: Badlands National Park / Nathan Rott

By Darryl Fears
24 January 2017 (The Washington Post) – Badlands National Park tugged on Superman’s cape Tuesday. It spit into the wind. It pulled the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and it messed around with President Trump. In tweets about climate change that lit up Twitter, the park ignored Jim Croce’s advice in his 1972 hit song and thumbed its nose at the president. With the Trump administration placing a gag order on the Environmental Protection Agency, shutting down its Twitter feed, forcing employees off their individual accounts and dismantling Web pages with climate-change information, Badlands went rogue. “Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years,” it declared in one of at least four tweets. Admirers went nuts. They created a hashtag, #Badasslands, in an ode to the defiance and dubbed the park Breaking Badlands after the TV show Breaking Bad. Within hours, the park gained a huge audience. [more]

For a few hours, Badlands National Park was bad to the bone in defiance of Trump