The Great American Sellout
Let’s just call it what it is. A betrayal. They’re selling our birthright right back to us, piece by glorious, commodified piece, and they have the gall to wrap it in a flag and call it ‘progress’ or ‘patriotism’. The Department of the Interior can churn out all the sanitized press releases it wants about ‘modernized’ and ‘more affordable’ access. What a joke. Since when did ‘modernized’ become code for putting a price tag on a sunset over the Grand Canyon? Since when did the very concept of a public good, a space set aside from the relentless grind of capitalism, get relegated to another line item on a budget sheet, another asset to be leveraged? This isn’t modernization. This is desecration.
The whole idea, the very soul of the National Park System, was that these places were so profound, so essential to the American spirit, that they belonged to everyone. Everyone. Not just the people who could afford the new tiered pricing plan. Not just the ‘residents’ on special ‘patriotic fee-free days’. These spaces were meant to be a great equalizer, where a billionaire and a broke college student could stand in awe of the same giant sequoia, humbled by something far older and more powerful than either of them. But that’s not good for business, is it? Can’t have that. There’s no profit in shared wonder.
The Velvet Rope Around Nature’s Cathedral
So they start chipping away. They raise the fees, they create different price points for different people, they start talking about ‘managing access’ and ‘sustainable revenue streams’. It sounds so reasonable, so bureaucratic, so utterly devoid of the passion that created these parks in the first place. This is how the rot sets in. It doesn’t come with a bulldozer and a wrecking ball; it comes with a memo and a new payment portal. They put up a velvet rope in front of nature’s cathedral and tell you it’s for your own good. They tell you it’s to preserve the very thing they are actively cheapening by making it a transaction. What’s next? Are we going to have to pay per view for Old Faithful’s eruption? Will there be a surcharge for breathing the clean air in Yosemite Valley? Don’t laugh. We’re already halfway there.
And this poison infects everything. It turns a family trip into a financial calculation. It makes a foreigner, someone who traveled thousands of miles to see the beauty we claim to cherish, feel like nothing more than a walking ATM. This idea of tripling the fee for non-residents is just the ugly, xenophobic cousin of the domestic cash grab. It’s all rooted in the same diseased ideology: that nothing has value unless someone is paying for it, and that ‘we’ deserve it more than ‘them’. It transforms our national treasures from a global gift into a private club with a steep cover charge. It’s pathetic. A nation that has to gouge tourists to keep its most beautiful places running is a nation that has lost its way completely.
The Two-Faced Political Machine
Don’t let them fool you into thinking this is a one-party problem. This is a system-wide failure, a rot that has taken hold in the very heart of the establishment. On one hand, you get the slick, corporate-speak announcement from one administration, talking about ‘modernization’ and ‘affordability’ which is just a gentle way of saying they’re adjusting the price of admission to your own property. It’s the soft, insidious creep of neoliberalism into the wilderness. Then, the other side comes crashing in with all the subtlety of a monster truck rally. Suddenly, it’s not just about fees, it’s about ‘America-first’ entrance fees. It’s about ‘resident-only patriotic fee-free days’. What in the hell is a ‘patriotic’ fee-free day? Is my love for my country measured by my ability to get a discount to see a moose? It’s the most cynical, jingoistic branding imaginable.
And the commemorative annual passes featuring a politician’s face? My God. That’s the moment the mask doesn’t just slip; it’s torn off and set on fire. They have managed to turn a pass to the great outdoors, to places of quiet reflection and natural grandeur, into a piece of political merchandise. A campaign button that gets you into Zion. It is the ultimate expression of a political ego so vast and so fragile that it needs to plaster itself over the very landscape. Can you even imagine? Standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, feeling that sense of infinite space and time, and then pulling out a pass with a politician’s smug face staring back at you. It shrinks the whole experience. It drags the petty, toxic squabbles of Washington D.C. into the last few places we could go to escape them. It’s a disgrace.
The Left Hand and the Right Hand Both Pick Your Pocket
So what are we left with? A choice between two different flavors of garbage. Do you want the slow, creeping privatization dressed up in friendly, accessible language, or do you want the loud, abrasive, nationalist branding that turns a park into a political rally? Both paths lead to the same destination: a world where our public lands are no longer public. They are assets. They are political props. They are revenue generators. One side will sell the naming rights to a multinational corporation with a slick PowerPoint presentation about ‘public-private partnerships’. The other will sell them to the highest political donor and call it ‘The Patriot’s Peak Presented by Freedom’. See the scam? Either way, you lose. The park loses. The very idea of wilderness loses.
The fight is not between ‘affordable access’ and ‘America-first fees’. The real fight is between the people who believe these places have an intrinsic value beyond money and politics, and the system that sees them as just another resource to be exploited. They want you to argue about the details. They want you to get bogged down in debates about whether the fee for a German tourist should be $25 or $75. It’s a distraction. While we’re busy fighting over the crumbs, they are fundamentally changing the nature of the entire meal. They are redefining what a National Park even is, and they’re doing it right under our noses.
Welcome to YosemiteLand, Presented by a Soulless Corporation
Let’s play this out. Let’s follow this trajectory to its logical, soul-crushing conclusion. If we accept the premise that parks must be self-sustaining businesses, and that patriotism can be monetized, where does it end? The answer is simple: it doesn’t. Once you open that door, you can never close it. First, it’s higher fees. Then it’s tiered access. ‘For an extra $50, you can use the express lane to Delicate Arch!’ ‘For a $100 premium, you get access to the less-crowded-because-we-priced-everyone-else-out viewing platform!’ Sounds insane, doesn’t it? But is it really that far from charging foreigners three times as much? Is it so different from creating special days for special ‘patriotic’ people? It’s the same principle. The principle of exclusion.
The next step is obvious. Corporate sponsorship. Why should the government foot the bill when a benevolent corporation could step in? Get ready for the ‘Coca-Cola Geyser Basin’ in Yellowstone. Prepare yourself for the ‘Amazon Prime Redwood Forest’, where subscribers get free two-day access. They’ll tell us it’s the only way to keep the parks open. They’ll say it’s an innovative solution to budget shortfalls—the same shortfalls they created by defunding public goods for decades. And people will swallow it. They’ll get used to seeing logos on the trail signs, just like they got used to them in sports stadiums. The sacred will become profane so gradually that most people won’t even notice the shift until it’s far too late.
The Future is a Theme Park
After the sponsorships comes the full theme-parkification. If you’re running the park like a business, you need to maximize profit. That means more concessions. More gift shops. More ‘experiences’. Why just look at the mountain when you can ride a zip line off of it? Why hike a trail when you can rent a branded, all-terrain Segway? They will build luxury hotels that block the best views and then charge a fortune for a room that looks at them. They will pave over meadows for more parking, because more cars mean more customers. The wildlife will become characters, the rangers will become ‘cast members’, and the entire magnificent, chaotic, untamable wilderness will be packaged into a safe, predictable, and incredibly expensive consumer product.
This isn’t some wild dystopian fantasy. It is the inevitable end point of the path we are on. Every time we accept a new fee, every time we nod along to the language of ‘revenue’ and ‘sustainability’ when applied to our most sacred natural spaces, we take another step toward that plastic, soulless future. The announcements we’re seeing now, from both sides of the aisle, are not the main event. They are the prologue. They are conditioning us to accept the idea that nature is a commodity. That our access to it is a privilege to be purchased, not a right to be cherished. And once we accept that, we’ve already lost everything that made the National Parks worth fighting for in the first place.
