Brow Beat

Follow Friday: The U.S. Interior on Instagram

Photo posted yesterday by @usinterior on Instagram.

In a public memorandum to the heads of executives departments and agencies, President Obama stressed government should be transparent, collaborative, and participatory.

A small but excellent example of his mantra in practice is the Instagram feed of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The beautifully curated feed showcases gorgeous landscapes and aww-worthy wild animal photos from national parks and reserves from across the U.S. Additionally it features stunning shots of national monuments, memorials, and public projects like the Hoover Dam.

What I like most about the feed is it showcases the full scope of the dramatically different ecosystems and landforms the U.S. encompasses. Along with being awestruck by a lot the photos, I can’t help but also feel a swelling of patriotism when looking at them.

Others must feel similarly, as the U.S. Interior feed has over 3,900 followers, and often gets hundreds of Likes on its posts. But frankly I’m surprised it doesn’t already have more.

If you follow @usinterior (or @Interior on Twitter), you can expect photos of well-known natural beauties, like Denali National Park in Alaska, at sunrise in the early fall:

Or Utah’s Arches National Park, here in a dramatic summer sunset:

Or bison, grazing with the vast Grand Teton mountain range in the background:

The feed also captures some of the U.S.’s lesser known natural beauties, like the Missouri River Breaks in Montana:

Or Paria Canyon in Arizona, shown here in an unfiltered photo:

The feed is also attuned to the internet’s love of adorable animal photography, evidenced by this photo of black-tailed prairie dogs, with one looking unusually pious:

And by this shot of a little northern fur seal at the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge, outside San Francisco:

They even manage to keep shots of our national monuments interesting, as in this hyper-close aerial of the Washington Monument:

Previous Follow Fridays:
The Most Annoying Man on the Internet
Where Debit-Card Numbers Get Stolen
What Twitter Can Teach Us About Language
The Best Celebrity Parody Account Ever?
A Crowd-Sourced Lab for Collective Nouns
The Ghost of William Shakespeare
A Twitter Feed Douglas Adams Would Have Loved
Terrorists Who Tweet
The Twitter Bot Devoted to a Single Grammatical Error
Shit Girls Say

Previous Follow Fridays:
The Most Annoying Man on the Internet
Where Debit-Card Numbers Get Stolen
What Twitter Can Teach Us About Language
The Best Celebrity Parody Account Ever?
A Crowd-Sourced Lab for Collective Nouns
The Ghost of William Shakespeare
A Twitter Feed Douglas Adams Would Have Loved
Terrorists Who Tweet
The Twitter Bot Devoted to a Single Grammatical Error
Shit Girls Say