Two more monuments face boundary changes
Sites in Oregon and Nevada are targeted. Three new protected areas are proposed.
SALT LAKE CITY — Eight months after President Trump ordered a review of national monuments, and a day after the president removed 2 million acres of public land from federal protection in Utah, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Tuesday announced recommendations for boundary adjustments to monuments in Nevada and Oregon.
During a conference call with reporters, Zinke said he urged the president to adjust acreage in the 297,000acre Gold Butte National Monument in Nevada and the 113,000-acre CascadeSiskiyou National Monument in Oregon. He described the changes as modest, but did not specify exactly how the boundaries would be revised.
One unexpected result of the Interior secretary’s review was his recommendation to establish three new monuments, two in the South to preserve Camp Nelson, a 4,000-acre Civil War training depot in central Kentucky, and the home in Jackson, Miss., of Medgar Evers, the slain civil rights leader. The third is the 130,000-acre Badger-Two Medicine area within Lewis and Clark National Forest in northwestern Montana, close to where Zinke was raised.
The final recommendations Zinke made to the president focused on adjusting the boundaries of two Pacific Ocean marine monuments — the Rose Atoll and the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument — and changing management practices at an Atlantic Ocean monument, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts. The changes reflect the administration’s desire to open the areas to fishing, which has been limited by the monument designations.
All of the proposed changes are within the president’s authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act to adjust boundaries and management plans, Zinke said.
He also said Trump’s directive to review monuments stemmed from concerns by states and neighboring communities that previous administrations had overreached, particularly in establishing the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears and 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in southern Utah.
Zinke said that in certain instances the designation of a national monument had shut down roads and trails, and blocked access to recreational and grazing lands that had been used for generations.
“The Antiquities Act was designed to protect rather than prevent the public use of land,” he said. “No president has the authority to remove the public from their land. The president was absolutely right in asking for a review.”
The administration’s review, particularly the decisions to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Es calante, has received enthusiastic support from cattlemen and rural communities across the West.
It has prompted fierce criticism from Democratic lawmakers, Native Americans and environmental groups who say Trump does not have the authority to remove so much land from federal protection.
The administration’s monuments review is a sharp departure for American public land management, which has been distinguished by the steadily evolving doctrine of safeguarding exceptional expanses of the national domain and expanding those protections. Trump is the first president to remove so much ground from federal protection.
Trump promised during his campaign to disrupt policy conventions, and his decision on Monday to radically alter the boundaries of the two big Utah monuments does just that.
The monuments review started on April 26 when Trump signed an executive order directing Zinke to study “all presidential designations or expansions of designations under the Antiquities Act” since Jan. 1, 1996, if they involved more than 100,000 acres.