Not for ore, necessarily, but for precious species. National Parks Traveler has the rundown:
Today marked the end of the public comment period on the Park Service’s intention to open the parks to bioprospecting, in which commercial enterprises would be allowed to sift through a park’s natural resources — Yellowstone’s mudpots and hot springs, for instance, or Olympic’s temperate rain forests — to see if there are any beneficial organisms that might hold commercial promise.
Stands to reason that if some undiscovered mushroom can cure cancer, the parks ought to be able to cash in on the commercial potential. The big if: can these species be “mined” without doing more harm than good?