By The Author

Every few years, the argument reemerges like clockwork: America’s national parks are a “waste of resources.” Why lock away land rich in coal, oil, or minerals when we could exploit it for economic gain? The logic is tidy, but it is also dangerously shortsighted. To reduce national parks to what lies beneath their soil is to misunderstand what they are, what they do, and why they endure.

The False Choice

Framing national parks as either playgrounds or profit centers is a false choice. They are both economic engines and cultural sanctuaries. Roughly 70–80 percent of Americans have visited at least one national park in their lifetime, and half have visited more than one. These places are not neglected tracts of wilderness; they are among the most visited, most beloved, and most economically productive spaces in the country.

In 2024, the National Park System welcomed over 330 million visits. That translates to billions of dollars spent on lodging, dining, guiding services, and local businesses. The parks generate more than $50 billion annually for the U.S. economy and sustain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Extractive industries promise jobs too — but they are temporary, cyclical, and often leave behind expensive cleanup costs that fall squarely on taxpayers.

What We Stand to Lose

To open Yellowstone to drilling or Yosemite to mining would not simply change their scenery. It would end them. Once a landscape is stripped, polluted, or fragmented, it is lost to tourism, to biodiversity, and to heritage.

• Tourism collapses when the very attraction disappears. Few families book vacations to see slag heaps.
• Biodiversity suffers irreparable harm. National parks protect wildlife corridors and threatened species whose survival depends on intact ecosystems.
• Cultural and historical sites vanish. Many parks guard sacred Native American lands, Civil War battlefields, and irreplaceable archaeological treasures. Bulldozers and drill pads cannot coexist with preservation.

What extractive industries offer is, by definition, temporary. What parks offer is perpetual.

The Long Game

Proponents of opening parks often argue that untapped resources should not “go to waste.” But resources are not just ore bodies or shale fields. Clean air, potable water, carbon-absorbing forests, and intact watersheds are resources too — and they only grow more valuable as the climate crisis deepens.

National parks are also investments in human health and civic life. They provide millions of Americans with low-cost opportunities for exercise, reflection, and reconnection with nature. They serve as outdoor classrooms where history, geology, and ecology come alive. They knit together generations, offering the same vistas to grandparents and grandchildren. No mining lease can match that kind of dividend.

Answering the Critics

Yes, the United States needs minerals, energy, and timber. But it does not need them from within its crown jewels. Federal lands outside the National Park System already supply resources, and advances in recycling, efficiency, and renewable energy make the case for cracking open protected areas weaker by the year. To sacrifice Yellowstone for a few decades of copper is not pragmatic — it is reckless.

And to call the parks a “waste of resources” is to miss the fact that their protection is the resource. They are one of the few realms where Americans of every income, race, and region meet as equals. They represent democracy made visible in stone, forest, and canyon.

A Shared Inheritance

The truth is simple: once you mine the canyon, the canyon is gone. Once you drill the valley, the valley is gone. But if you protect it, it remains forever — a continuous gift to generations not yet born.

Our national parks are not a luxury. They are an inheritance, one that pays out not only in dollars but in identity, sanity, and national pride. To squander them for short-term gain would be to sell our birthright for a handful of dust.

The Bottom Line: Mining and drilling may enrich balance sheets for a few quarters. But parks enrich a nation for centuries. They are not a waste of resources — they are the wisest use of them America has ever devised.