For twenty years, developers have pushed to cut a private road through Yosemite National Park, and for twenty years the answer was no. Now, for the first time, the federal government is working to say yes.

According to reporting from NOTUS, the National Park Service has spent more than a year under pressure from Interior Department leadership to arrange an unprecedented land exchange: trading away land inside Yosemite so a private developer can build a road to an 83-acre property just outside the park's western boundary, five miles from one of Yosemite's ancient sequoia groves. Federal courts rejected this exact road twice. No final decision has been made, but the deal could move forward without any further vote in Congress.

That last part is why your voice matters right now.

Yosemite is where the national park idea was born, when Abraham Lincoln protected Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove in 1864. The Merced and Tuolumne rivers rise inside this park as Sierra snowmelt, then flow downstream to the salmon fighting their way home, the 3 million people who drink from these rivers, and the 480,000 acres of Central Valley farmland they sustain. What happens to Yosemite happens to all of it.

We'll deliver every signature to the top congressional members and the Department of the Interior, and we'll keep you posted as this fight develops. Public pressure has protected this park for 150 years. It can again.

It's up to all of us to defend our wild places. Add your name.