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Public lands belong to all of us. No one should plunder those lands for profit
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Opinion — Rebecca Solnit
Do people still say a car was “sold for parts”? Because the US is being sold for parts or just handed over to the oligarchy. It’s a fire sale, a bankruptcy auction, it’s a planned dismantling of everything from its military to its institutions of higher education to its scientific research to its public lands.
And while the threat to sell off part of Yosemite National Park is about a quarter-mile parcel on the park’s edge, Yosemite is a crown jewel in the national park system and, arguably, the world’s first national park.
To let any bit of it be sold off for the benefit of a corporation’s planned development on the park’s western border would compromise the inviolability of national parks and sacrifice public good for the sake of private profit. This is of course the ongoing agenda of the Trump administration.
Public lands belong to all of us, a gift from the past because people worked hard to protect these forests, mountains, canyons, and a trust for the future, because the public should include everyone in this country alive now and everyone yet to come.
The Trump administration’s ruthless efforts to turn over public lands for mining and logging and fossil fuel exploitation while it also dismantles the Forest Service and Park Service is about turning longterm well-being for the many, human and more than human, into short term profit for an elite.
These public lands have many kinds of value – the trees and grasslands are sequestering carbon as part of a natural climate amelioration, the mountains are watersheds, and most of these natural places now are key to rural tourism and outdoor recreation economies.
White people first entered Yosemite valley in the early 1850s, on a military campaign to punish, displace, or exterminate the indigenous people there who were interfering with another era’s environmental destruction: the Gold Rush, whose miners were hunting out the game, cutting down the trees, polluting the rivers, and massacring the region’s original inhabitants.
Some of the early visitors recognized Yosemite’s extraordinary scenic beauty of its oak grasslands, high canyon walls, waterfalls. By the 1860s, photographers such as Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge had made images of Yosemite that were shown internationally. The place became iconic before many white people had visited it.
In the spring of 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed into law a bill establishing that “Yosemite Valley’s premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation; shall be inalienable for all time.” It was originally managed by the state of California, since the federal government had little presence in the west and was busy fighting the civil war.
Yellowstone national park, on the other hand, was set aside eight years later as a federally managed preserve because Wyoming and Montana were not yet states and is usually recognized as the first national park.
The document Ulysses S Grant signed said the place was to be “reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
There was always a lie in the foundation of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon and many other parks, in that they were Indigenous peoples’ ancestral homelands long before Columbus set sail or Lewis and Clark headed west.
In Yosemite, those wrongs have been addressed over the past 30 years by changes in signage, representations of the place’s history, and opening to the traditional usage and ceremony of the original inhabitants’ descendants. The flawed premise of national parks matters, but so does the fact that the system kept these places from being privatized, developed and destroyed.
But that is what is now happening to the Park Service as a whole: Trump has been funneling Park Service money meant to be spread across the country to his pet projects at the White House and in Washington DC including gilding statues and the incompetent $16m painting of the reflecting pool.
Michael Scherer reports in the Atlantic that there’s a fast-track approval process for funding Trump projects out of Park Service funds, while the national park service as a whole is being starved. He notes there’s “a decrease of $854m, or 68%, in spending on projects in park regions outside the Washington area in the first eight and a half months of fiscal year 2026, compared with the full prior fiscal year. During that same period, spending around Washington increased by about $100 million.”
The Trump administration proposes to further slash the number of park service employees, who had already been reduced by 24% in 2025.
To give away a piece of land is one form of harm to the parks, to take away the park’s workers, whose labors protect endangered species, waterways, land, prevents fires and provides public services from search and rescue operations to education to clean restrooms is another.
To open up the ancient sacred site of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico to fracking is yet another form of destruction by the Trump administration underway. The same is true of the 90% reduction of the Bears Ears and Escalante in Utah.
As the Associated Press reported earlier this month that this radical shrinkage undoes “protections established by his Democratic predecessors on public lands that are sacred among many Native Americans. Trump administration officials and congressional Republicans have sought to expand drilling, mining and logging on public lands, while removing protections for imperiled species and rolling back rules for conservation.”
Yosemite was first established as protected land during one civil war. Another is underway about whether the federal government exists to serve the good of the many or the profiteering of the few. A small parcel in Yosemite is nevertheless a big indicator of who this country belongs to and whose rights and interests matter.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
And while the threat to sell off part of Yosemite National Park is about a quarter-mile parcel on the park’s edge, Yosemite is a crown jewel in the national park system and, arguably, the world’s first national park.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Rebecca Solnit. Published 31 Aug 2026, 10:00 am.
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