Personally, I don't need a badge, real or otherwise, to motive me to do my daily runs. I do for the health benefits and because it relaxes me (when I finished). My "gripe" is that if Apple is going to give attention to National Parks then it could have done a more encompassing job. National Parks are more than mountains and tree and ponds but that is what the badges convey. But it's about conservation of wildlife too. Yet there is just one lonely bird on one badge. Silly.
Also not sure where you got the idea that national parks were "endangered." The amount of national parks has steadily grown since the very first -- Yellowstone -- was established in the late 1800s. I don't see Yellowstone or Denali or Everglades or any other national park being sold at auction or leased for commercialization anytime soon.
The parks mean many things, to many different people. Though there are exceptions (there are always exceptions), the primary impulse behind the establishment of most parks was not endangered species protection - that's "just" a wonderful byproduct (when Yellowstone was established, nearly nobody would have suggested wolves needed protection). National Wildlife Refuges are another matter.
The idea that the number of parks has "steadily" grown doesn't hold up. It's safer to say that there have been several growth spurts through the years. While you can look at a list of parks and see that they've been declared National Parks relatively recently, nearly all of them had other, protected status (such as National Monument) for many decades prior. This list gives a good indication:
https://www.terragalleria.com/parks/info/parks-by-date.html Even that chart distorts the record, as it lists the declaration as a National Monument as the alternate date of establishment. That would have been when administration passed from the Department of Agriculture or Defense (National Forest, Bureau of Land Management, military bases) to Department of the Interior (National Monuments are created by Presidential order from existing public lands. Purchases of new parks require Congressional appropriations, and are few and far between - normally piecemeal additions to existing Parks). Regardless, there are many other NPS units - mostly Historical Sites and National Recreation Areas - those are newer phenomena for the most part, and are either urban, or near urban areas.
I'm not sure what alternate universe you're living in, but the Parks are certainly at risk. While entire parks are not up for lease to commercial interests, the operating budgets have been deeply cut over the years, and the economic reality of those cuts encourages greater commercialization in the form of concessions within the parks, and higher usage fees. There are right-wing politicians who seem to think the parks are enjoyed primarily by liberals, and are therefore a ripe target for de-funding. They are sometimes joined by the hunting lobby, who simply want a crack at that protected wildlife, those who want any vestige or symbol of the Federal government banished from their world... While a whole-park lease of the Everglades or Yellowstone is unthinkable, there are many urban and suburban units of the Park Service that might be easier targets. Though not a National Park, New Jersey's current governor wanted to lease Liberty State Park (adjacent to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, which are NPS units) to a theme park operator. If the parks didn't have broad-based support across the political spectrum, the situation might be far worse, of course.
