THE DESTRUCTION OF A MOST BEAUTIFUL TREASURE

The oligarchy has its eyes set on stealing our national parks

Photo of Yosemite National Park by Devon Wolfhart

At the center of the political chaos now dominating our country lies an existential question: Who does America belong to? Until recently, we assumed that that question had long been settled: The United States belongs to its people.

Every great struggle in our history has been a referendum on that question. The historic mission of the United States is for every generation to “form a more perfect union,” establishing an equality of liberty and justice to ever-larger portions of the American population. The struggle for equality, while rarely if ever easy, has usually prevailed. We are not just white, but also Black (Abolition and Civil Rights); we are not just men, but also women (Women’s Suffrage); we are not just straight, but also gay (marriage equality), and so on. That’s not DEI: it’s our national creed

Today the question of equality centers mainly around economics. Does the country belong to its people, or only to its very, very rich?

The power wielded by our new multi-billionaire class is tearing at the very heart of the ideal of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” From access to health care, educational opportunities, and even clean food and air, such opportunities are increasingly monopolized by corporate interests at the expense of the middle class and poor. Over the last fifty years, a majority of Americans have been driven into the bowels of financial insecurity while a tiny .001% of Americans have grown in billionaire status.

This did not have to occur, but it has - due to a stunning betrayal by America’s ruling elite. Adam Smith, a pioneer of free market capitalism, wrote that the free market “cannot exist outside an ethical context.” But boy, it sure does now. America’s economic landscape is a wild wild West of amoral opportunism enabled by our own government - and it’s getting worse.

We’ve become “a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires” - an inherently undemocratic phenomenon by which the levers of power have been turned over to a very wealthy elite. Elon Musk, a man who holds nearly half a trillion dollars of wealth, embodies the morally careless nature of extreme wealth when untethered to philosophical or legal prerogatives of democracy. He displays no concern for the wellbeing of anyone, and in fact seems to enjoy the level of trauma he inflicts on others. Together with his sidekick, the President of the United States, he is presiding over what could be called The Great Backslide, America transitioning from a democracy back into an aristocracy. Today’s aristocracy is a corporatocracy, overseen by multi-billionaire oligarchs who run it. It is the newest iteration of an ancient pattern of injustice, the rejection of which our country founded in order to accomplish. The landed gentry who surrounded Mad King George are now the billionaire club that surrounds Mad King What’s-His-Name.

The American oligarchy increasingly salivates at the idea that much of what belongs to We the People should belong to them. Fewer and fewer guardrails, either in conscience or in law, seem to hold them back. Nowhere is this more evident than in the DOGE-led decimation of our National Park Service.

The National Park System should be considered a sacred responsibility of every generation, and until now it has been. Some of American history’s greatest souls, from Walt Whitman to Teddy Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt, have exalted nature as a unifying force, a place where people can connect with each other and with the natural world. National Parks are a great democratizer in America. They belong equally to all of us.

Yet today, that system is in danger. What is at stake are 433 parks covering over 85 million acres across the U.S. - huge swaths of our country from Yellowstone in Wyoming; Mt. Zion in Utah; the Rocky Mountains in Colorado; Yosemite in California; the Grand Canyon in Arizona; the Grand Tetons in Wyoming; to Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska and much more. Established by an Act of Congress in 1916, the National Park Service protects and enhances our public parks and national monuments, held in perpetuity for the people of the United States. Our public lands do not exist to feed the insatiable economic appetites of private interests.

Yet once again, Elon Musk broke in. DOGE is doing their demolition work, firing a thousand people and with plans to cut $587 million (17 percent) of the National Park Service Budget. The goal of the Trump administration is to turn most of our public lands over to private developers, particularly in this case Oil and Gas. Clutching Project 2025 ever closer to his heart and to his pocket, President Trump prioritizes energy leasing, exploration and production on federal lands and waters. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, himself one of the thirteen billionaires serving in the President’s cabinet, has ordered a review of current oil, gas, and mining regulations on public lands - with the specified goal of reducing barriers to energy development.

Speaking of DOGE’s reordering of the agency, Theresa Pierno, National Parks Conservation Association’s President, had this to say: “Quite simply and astonishingly, this dismantles the National Park Service as we know it, ranger by ranger and brick by brick." Like so many of our federal agencies, the National Park Service is being gutted.

So good luck everyone, is you’re thinking you can’t wait to show little Junior the Grand Tetons someday, because if the Trump and Musk administration gets their way, that’s going to be a big fat maybe. Their plan is for the national parks to basically no longer belong to you. The plan is to give away what is yours, so that billion dollar interests can then sell it back to you a whole lot less pristine.

It’s fair to say that the national parks don’t mean to Trump and Musk what they mean to you and me. They don’t mean to them the awesomeness of nature, the protection of wildlife, watersheds for clean water, endless recreation, the economic ecosystems of local communities, and our responsibility to be good stewards of the earth.

To them, a National Park means endless economic opportunity. It means Drill Baby Drill. It means mining. It means real estate development. And all of that represents the theft of public resources by private interests. Make no mistake about it: in this and in so many things, that is exactly what they are there to do. Governance by billionaire interests is being turned into the rule; it is no longer the exception.

Thomas Jefferson said, “It is the general tendency of the rich to prey upon the poor.” Here in the United States, we’re supposed to guard against that, not help it happen. Our current bro purveyors of crony capitalism – pretending of course to be doing all this in the public interest - are on a burglary spree of our public lands. If their greedy plans are allowed to unfold, what is now a public park will in many cases become an oil field, or a gated community of mega-mansions so that they can have that mountain view.

It remains to be seen whether We the People will allow them to do it.

(NOTE: After I published this article and due to recent court orders, it was announced today that all thousand of the fired National Park Service personnel have been reinstated! I am once again so impressed by the judges - as well as others - who are fighting back and resisting the dismantling of our most important governmental functions.)