In this comment piece, Rebecca Solnit argues that a Trump administration plan to sell off a small parcel of Yosemite National Park to benefit a private corporate development on its western border exemplifies a broader agenda of transferring public assets to a wealthy elite. Although the disputed land amounts to only a quarter-mile strip, Solnit contends that allowing any part of Yosemite, widely regarded as the first national park, to be privatised would undermine the principle that national parks are inviolable and set a dangerous precedent for public land protections generally.

Solnit traces Yosemite's history from its violent origins, when Indigenous peoples were displaced during the Gold Rush, through to Abraham Lincoln's 1864 designation of the valley as inalienable public land and Ulysses S Grant's 1872 founding of Yellowstone as the first federally managed park. She notes that, despite this flawed founding on stolen Indigenous territory, the national park system has for over a century prevented such places from being developed or destroyed, a protection she says the Trump administration is now eroding by diverting Park Service funding and pushing to open public lands to mining, logging and fossil fuel extraction.