Yosemite, again in corporate crosshairs, embodies the long war over US national park privatization

Reports indicate the Trump administration is negotiating a land swap that would give a private developer a slice of Yosemite National Park for an access road connecting the park to a proposed resort, in exchange for the developer transferring land of comparable value elsewhere in California to federal ownership.

A government spokesperson said the deal has not been finalized, which is the sort of sentence that precedes both nothing happening and everything happening. Park advocates and staff have spent more than a year worried that budget and staffing cuts at the National Park Service would accelerate exactly this kind of arrangement.

The piece traces over 160 years of tension between preservation and profit at Yosemite, from 19th-century squatters evicted by the Supreme Court to a 1925 gas-station turf war to Universal Studios' 1973 concessions purchase, which packed the valley with tennis courts, a golf course, and 15 gas pumps before falling profits ended the experiment. The pattern, per the piece, is that private profit keeps knocking on the park's gate, and the gate keeps needing to be re-latched.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.