Turning national parks into corporate profit centers

Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder.

Dolack provides disturbing evidence that this process is already underway. Under corporation control the public parks will be relaxing restrictions on mining, drilling, timber harvesting, and cattle grazing. As government, which is essentially owned and controlled by the capitalist class, imposes more austerity cuts on park services, this trend is likely to accelerate.

Given the corporatization of ever more commons, we may yet be visiting Golden Arches National Park or Disneyland Dinosaur National Monument. Even if the most extreme right-wing plans to auction off public lands don’t ever come to fruition, ongoing neglect can only promise creeping corporate colonization of the United States National Park system.

Commercialization is still relatively minimal in national parks, but worrying signs are there.

Added to this corporate threat, global warming is also damaging public parks.