Do folks nonetheless say a automotive was “sold for parts”? Because the US is being bought for components or simply handed over to the oligarchy. It’s a hearth sale, a chapter public sale, it’s a deliberate dismantling of the whole lot from its army to its establishments of increased training to its scientific analysis to its public lands.
And whereas the risk to sell off part of Yosemite National Park is about a quarter-mile parcel on the park’s edge, Yosemite is a crown jewel within the nationwide park system and, arguably, the world’s first nationwide park.
To let any bit of it’s bought off for the profit of a company’s deliberate growth on the park’s western border would compromise the inviolability of nationwide parks and sacrifice public good for the sake of non-public revenue. This is of course the continuing agenda of the Trump administration.
Public lands belong to all of us, a reward from the previous as a result of folks labored onerous to shield these forests, mountains, canyons, and a belief for the long run, as a result of the general public ought to embrace everybody on this nation alive now and everybody but to come.
The Trump administration’s ruthless efforts to flip over public lands for mining and logging and fossil gas exploitation whereas it additionally dismantles the Forest Service and Park Service is about turning longterm well-being for the various, human and greater than human, into quick time period revenue for an elite.
These public lands have many sorts of worth – the bushes and grasslands are sequestering carbon as part of a pure local weather amelioration, the mountains are watersheds, and most of these pure locations now are key to rural tourism and outside recreation economies.
White folks first entered Yosemite valley within the early 1850s, on a army marketing campaign to punish, displace, or exterminate the indigenous folks there who had been interfering with one other period’s environmental destruction: the Gold Rush, whose miners had been looking out the sport, reducing down the bushes, polluting the rivers, and massacring the area’s unique inhabitants.
Some of the early guests acknowledged Yosemite’s extraordinary scenic magnificence of its oak grasslands, excessive canyon partitions, waterfalls. By the 1860s, photographers reminiscent of Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge had made photos of Yosemite that had been proven internationally. The place turned iconic earlier than many white folks had visited it.
In the spring of 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed into legislation a invoice establishing that “Yosemite Valley’s premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation; shall be inalienable for all time.” It was initially managed by the state of California, for the reason that federal authorities had little presence within the west and was busy preventing the civil battle.
Yellowstone nationwide park, alternatively, was put aside eight years later as a federally managed protect as a result of Wyoming and Montana weren’t but states and is normally acknowledged as the primary nationwide park.
The doc Ulysses S Grant signed mentioned 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 at all times a lie within the basis of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon and lots of different parks, in that they had been Indigenous peoples’ ancestral homelands lengthy earlier than Columbus set sail or Lewis and Clark headed west.
In Yosemite, these wrongs have been addressed over the previous 30 years by adjustments in signage, representations of the place’s historical past, and opening to the normal utilization and ceremony of the unique inhabitants’ descendants. The flawed premise of nationwide parks issues, however so does the truth that the system stored these locations from being privatized, developed and destroyed.
But that is what is now taking place to the Park Service as a entire: Trump has been funneling Park Service cash meant to be unfold throughout the nation to his pet initiatives on the White House and in Washington DC together with gilding statues and the incompetent $16m painting of the reflecting pool.
Michael Scherer reports within the Atlantic that there’s a fast-track approval course of for funding Trump initiatives out of Park Service funds, whereas the nationwide park service as a entire 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 additional slash the quantity of park service workers, who had already been decreased by 24% in 2025.
To give away a piece of land is one kind of hurt to the parks, to take away the park’s employees, whose labors shield endangered species, waterways, land, prevents fires and offers public companies from search and rescue operations to training to clear restrooms is one other.
To open up the traditional sacred website of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico to fracking is one more kind of destruction by the Trump administration underway. The identical is true of the 90% discount 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 throughout one civil battle. Another is underway about whether or not the federal authorities exists to serve the nice of the various or the profiteering of the few. A small parcel in Yosemite is nonetheless a massive indicator of who this nation belongs to and whose rights and pursuits matter.