Josh Gohlke is an independent journalist based in Sacramento. He was previously an opinion writer and editor for the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and San Francisco Chronicle. This piece originally appeared on his Substack, Laughing Leads to Crying.
The documentarian Ken Burns subtitled his series on national parks "America’s Best Idea," and at the very least these natural and historic treasures are a close runner-up to our other great innovation, the single-use spork. But one unmistakable lesson of the Trump years is that no idea is so good that it can’t be wrecked by ignorance and corruption.
Enter a possibility so antithetical to our collective sense of progress that it was all but put to rest nearly a century ago: dismantling not just any national park but the epitome thereof, Yosemite.
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The administration is seriously considering a repeatedly rejected proposal to facilitate commercial development at Yosemite’s edge by ceding parkland for a new road, the news organization NOTUS reported last week, essentially enabling a private entrance to the park. It would be the first reduction of the pioneering public land since the Great Depression.
True to Burns’s subtitle, national parks and other protected lands are so broadly accepted and beloved that such downsizing has been generally rare since World War II. One of the few notable exceptions was the removal of millions of acres from the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, under Donald Trump’s first administration. Trump and company have also allowed commercial fishing in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Marine Monument, the Atlantic Ocean’s first such sanctuary; moved to open wildlife refuges in Alaska and Utah to oil and gas drilling; and sent bulldozers into Texas’s Big Bend National Park to pointlessly extend the border wall.
The opportunities must be obvious to anyone eyeing these public treasures for private profit.
The proposed Yosemite development, just outside the park’s western boundary near the “smallest and most secluded” of its old-growth giant sequoia groves, is about an hour and a half away from Yosemite Valley via a tortuous old Forest Service road. And if you’re trying to charge tourists exorbitant lodging rates, that’s just downright inconvenient! The property’s previous owner also wanted to build a new road to shorten the trip and develop the property into a resort featuring rental cabins and a hotel. But the National Park Service rejected the proposal under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama; so did the federal courts after the owner sued.
Mariel Garza
The current owner, a Nevada real estate company that bought the land in 2024 and has connections to the administration, seems to be having more luck under a president who doesn’t know how to pronounce Yosemite, much less appreciate it. NOTUS and others reported that top administration officials are pushing a land exchange with the company, Kingsbarn Realty Capital, which would donate land of supposedly equal value elsewhere in California, a procedure that doesn’t require congressional approval.
The Interior Department issued a strongly worded response to the reports that failed to deny their substance. In a similar vein, Kingsbarn attorney Lanny Davis, a veteran Washington operative, claimed the prospect of reduced driving time — for resort traffic that doesn’t currently exist, by the way — makes the development proposal “pro-environmental.” Well, move over, John Muir!
Davis, who has represented dodgy characters ranging from Bill Clinton to Trump fixer Michael Cohen, said in a statement that the matter has “nothing to do with the Trump administration.” But the fact that similar proposals have failed under past presidents of both parties suggests it has everything to do with the Trump administration — and of course those crass enough to seize whatever advantage the administration provides.
The area of the land Yosemite would lose is small, but the public preservation principles at stake are enormous. As a former park superintendent, Cicely Muldoon, told the New York Times, “If this can happen in Yosemite, it can really happen anywhere in the national park system.”
Deanne Stillman
Indeed, while Yellowstone became the country’s first national park in 1872, the Yosemite Grant, passed by Congress and signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, marked the first time the federal government set aside land for preservation and public use. The Park Service has called Yosemite “a shrine to human foresight.”
It’s easy to regard such a granite edifice as permanent, but this cathedral is built atop a history of war, exploitation and contention. Even after the violence and rapacity of the Gold Rush abated, and the park was entrusted for protection to California and then the federal government, the logging, mining and development pressures on Yosemite persisted. The park shrank by nearly a third between 1905 and 1937, according to one study, and remains about 20 percent smaller than when it was established.
The plot against the park is no longer an anomaly. Trump’s Park Service also eliminated Yosemite’s pandemic-era reservation system, unleashing crowds and congestion on the country’s most visited park. Worse, Yosemite and other parks have fewer rangers and other employees to deal with the repercussions: The administration reduced the Park Service workforce by nearly a quarter and would have cut its budget by more than a third if not for resistance from Congress. And the president has done everything in his power to fan the flames of global warming, one consequence of which is the heightened wildfire threat to places such as Yosemite.
After all, if no notion — from absentee voting to childhood vaccination to the peaceful transfer of power — is too venerable or benevolent to reconsider, why would America’s best idea be an exception? Shrine to our foresight, meet the altar of our ignorance.
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