By Clare Duffy, CNN

New York (CNN) — The 10-second video begins with a close-up on the abs of a sweaty, shirtless man wearing low-slung, gray sweatpants. But three seconds in, it cuts to a panoramic video of Havasu Falls in Arizona, with its striking turquoise water cascading down from red rocks.

Welcome to ParkTok.

The video — from an unofficial account posting about Grand Canyon National Park and other nature sites in Arizona — is emblematic of a trend that’s gone viral on TikTok in recent weeks that pairs sexually suggestive clips or music with scenic images and footage of America’s natural wonders. Unofficial accounts representing state and national parks, mountains and rivers have participated in the trend, sometimes trading playful barbs about which has the “biggest trees” or “longest lakes.”

The videos are funny and moderately unhinged in the way TikTok trends often are, but they have a serious aim: to raise awareness about threats to US public lands amid the Trump administration’s efforts to gut national parks staffing and designate more of America’s wild lands for drilling, mining and logging.

Many of the videos encourage viewers to donate to organizations such as the National Park Foundation or to call their local representatives to advocate for protecting public lands, part of a long tradition of using social media to organize social and political movements.

“This does go way beyond the thirst traps,” Kim Tanner, who runs the unofficial Joshua Tree account @joshuatreenp with more than 250,000 followers, told CNN. “It’s a way to pull people in, it’s a way to hook them, and it works. But at the same time, you’re showing them that beautiful imagery (of the parks) and hopefully, even if subliminally, you’re educating them.”

ParkTok emerged last fall, long before their videos started with sexy teasers and ahead of President Donald Trump’s second term. At the time, many of the account holders just wanted to promote the beauty of their local parks, like Phoebe, a nature enthusiast who started the unofficial Multnomah Falls account @multnomah_falls to share her love of Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. Phoebe asked CNN not to use her last name to avoid being identified by her employer.

Then in February, the Trump administration fired thousands of National Park Service and Department of Interior workers as part of widespread government workforce reductions, prompting national parks and monuments to announce closures, pause reservations and limit hours. In his first three months in office, Trump also signed orders to increase mining and oil and gas drilling in Alaska, expand logging in federally protected national forests and roll back rules that pushed car makers toward cleaner forms of energy — all of which have drawn concern from environmental groups.

As the potential impact of Trump’s environmental policies started to sink in, several ParkTok accounts joined a group chat on TikTok. “We started thinking we could probably do some good with this instead of just sharing our hiking videos,” Phoebe said.

The group decided to start “doing coordinated, themed posts, in between our silly posts and our nature posts, about the threats of logging and the threats of our public lands being sold and all of these things that have been introduced by the federal government,” she said.

The National Park Service and the National Park Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.

Some ParkTok videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views, including one Phoebe posted earlier this month showing videos of Multnomah Falls set to the explicit song “Fat Juicy & Wet.”

They’re not all sexually suggestive. One video, posted by an unofficial Bryce Canyon National Park account, shows a scenic image of nature with a voiceover saying, “show me the reason you have no money,” and then it cuts to an image of the White House. It’s been viewed more than 1 million times. Canadian parks such as Banff National Park have also gotten in on the action to advocate for their American neighbors.

Both Tanner and Phoebe said their ParkTok accounts are just hobbies aimed at raising awareness for places they love. They both have full-time jobs and aren’t making money from the accounts, although they said they would donate any future earnings from TikTok’s creator fund to the causes they’re promoting.

And Tanner said she thinks ParkTok can help bridge the divide between people from different political parties because “one thing that does bring a lot of people together is the national parks and national forests.”

“If you see these beautiful images and these beautiful photos,” she said, “you start to fall in love with these places, you start to get attached to them, then your natural instinct is going to be to want to protect it.”

The-CNN-Wire
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