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Departing from past work that has positioned the attachment of US federal offshore oil and gas leasing revenues to the Land and Water Conservation Fund in 1968 as the outcome of a rare moment of bipartisan support for environmental protection in US Congress, this article argues that the arrangement served as a spatial fix for conditions that emerged with the growth of the American oil industry and its expansion offshore. Tracing the fund’s political and economic origins and spatial legacies, it reveals how the fund perpetuated a model of conservation that primarily serviced the needs and interests of oil and gas, timbering, tourism, insurance and real estate industries—and white consumers. At a time when old energetic and spatial schemas had grown outmoded in the 1960’s, the attachment of petrocapital to parks funding largely reified existing racial and economic norms.