This is the worst thing to happen to public camping since poison ivy.

State parks belong to all of us. That glamping site? It’s my campsite, too. It also belongs to the poor kid in Spokane who’s not yet craned his neck at a hemlock taller than his apartment building. Not one fire ring should be cordoned off only for those who can pay triple-digit rates to sleep under the stars.

In this era of unequaled unequalness, state parks have no business segregating people based on bank balance. Those who can’t afford to pay need to feel a bracing breeze off a park’s mountain lake just as much as those who can; in fact, they probably need it more.

The villains are not the parks but the state legislatures. Since 2008, spending by state parks has increased by only $100 million, to $2.4 billion. At the same time, state budget allocations to these parks have declined by $250 million, forcing parks to cut operations or turn to other sources of money.

This pattern continues. In Wisconsin, for instance, Gov. Scott Walker, a potential Republican presidential candidate, has proposed cutting all state funding for parks. He wants them to rely instead on existing park revenue and an increase in user fees. And the Legislature in Alabama, for another example, is considering cutting about $10 million from its parks, which could result in closures.

In the face of such cuts, parks are charging (or charging more) for a slew of basic services, or adding more fee-based amenities. Fees for campgrounds, parking, you-name-it made up, on average, nearly 42 percent of state park operating expenses nationally in the 2014 fiscal year, according to Lewis Ledford, executive director of the National Association of State Park Directors.

Charging you for stuff is now a billion-dollar enterprise and the largest single source of money for state parks over all.

One of the hardest hit places has been my beloved Evergreen State. The Legislature chopped the system’s public funding by 79 percent over the last six years. The system hosts about 30 million visits annually but has lost one-third of its staff.