A divided landscape
Trump’s ordered review of New Mexico’s Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks and Rio Grande del Norte national monuments’ status highlights long-running debate over the environment, public space and the West’s future
From his home in Southern New Mexico, Dudley Williams can watch the sun rise over the jagged peaks and needles of the Organ Mountains. Like the environmentalists, sportsmen and politicians who cheered then-President Barack Obama’s designation of the mountains as a national monument in 2014, he will tell you it is a breathtaking sight.
But unlike them, Williams welcomed President Donald Trump’s call last week for a review of the national monument’s status. Trump’s review also extends to millions of other acres that received federal protection from three previous presidents.
Williams grazes cattle on land that is now part of the 490,000-acre Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument. And although he wants the iconic mountains that define the skyline over Las Cruces to be protected, Williams also says that including hundreds of thousands of other acres in the monument is a step toward running ranchers like him off the land.
“I think the Organ Mountains ought to be a monument. It’s the most striking landscape Doña Ana County has got,” he says. “The rest of it is just a blatant land grab.”
After two terms of Obama using a 1906 law known as the Antiquities Act to protect swathes of federal lands with the stroke of his pen, Trump’s call for a review seemed to speak directly to people like Williams, who have accused the government of overreaching and threatening a way of life.
But broad coalitions that have backed the creation of monuments like the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks argue that Trump’s review promises not to empower Western communities but to undermine them. Trump’s critics say conservation is more crucial than ever because they’re looking to the outdoors as an increasingly important draw for tourists.
The effect of Trump’s review on the national monument in Southern New Mexico and another, the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument near Taos, remains unclear. More certain is that it places a president who rose to power on a wave of conservative populism smack in the middle of a longrunning debate over the environment, public lands and the future of the American West.
The executive order Trump signed Tuesday focuses on the Antiquities Act, approved by Congress and signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt,
who then established five national parks and 18 national monuments.
Roosevelt protected sites such as the Gila Cliff Dwellings in Southwestern New Mexico and Muir Woods in California. Democratic and Republican presidents alike went on to use the law to lend special status to some of the nation’s most iconic landscapes as well as obscure but significant sites, including Bandelier, Chaco Canyon, the tent rocks at Kasha-Katuwe and White Sands in New Mexico.
Trump’s order will not affect those monuments but instead directs Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review all designations under the Antiquities Act since 1996 that cover more than 100,000 acres.
Zinke told reporters that includes “about 24 to 40 monuments” stretching for tens of millions of acres. They include the two newest in New Mexico: Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks and the Rio Grande del Norte.
The secretary said the Trump administration’s top concerns are whether heightened protection of some federal lands has hurt local economies or reduced public access, and whether communities have had a meaningful voice in the decisions. This echoed an argument common among some Western conservatives that Obama went too far with his powers under the Antiquities Act.
Zinke is to present his recommendations in four months even though newer monuments, such as those in New Mexico, were established only after years of debate.
Zinke is tasked with examining whether some monuments should be cut in size. A section of the Antiquities Act calls for setting aside no more land than is reasonable for “proper care and management.”
The order also requires the secretary to report on whether the designated spaces might include land not worthy of monument status. And it says the review should consider how non-federal lands and nearby communities are affected by each monument.
Mark Allison, executive director of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, says the Trump administration’s suggestions that newly created monuments have shut out communities and industries are empty criticisms.
Allison counters that the monuments represent a relatively small share of public lands in New Mexico, protecting just a piece of the landscape from oil and gas development that is allowed on other properties controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. He fears that Trump’s goal is to turn over federal monuments for state governments to then privatize, thereby shutting out the public altogether.
Instead of limiting economic development, Allison says, the monuments have bolstered tourism, a sector that has proven a bright spot in the state’s economy as New Mexico’s unemployment rate has ranked among the country’s worst.
The state has seen spending by tourists grow for six consecutive years, according to a study last year commissioned by the New Mexico Department of Tourism. Proponents of the new monuments says that is due in no small part to the prominence that Obama gave to some of New Mexico’s most scenic sites, as visiting a national monument established by the president has an appeal that visiting a Bureau of Land Management recreation area does not.
“These monuments have really put New Mexico on the map,” Allison says. “For us to go backwards seems like a job killer to me.”
Advocates say changes to the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks seem more likely than to the Rio Grande del Norte.
At nearly 500,000 acres, Organ is relatively large, comprising four separate units across Doña Ana County. Besides the eponymous Organ Mountains and its “sky islands” — peaks above the Chihuahuan Desert — the monument also includes relatively remote stretches of land that spread toward Hatch and the Mexican border.
Once crisscrossed by the Butterfield stagecoach route and known as a hideout for the likes of Geronimo and Billy the Kid, the monument also includes archaeological sites that reflect more than 10,000 years of human history.
Ranchers like Williams can still graze their cattle, too. But he worries that a management plan still in the works for the monument could limit his use of the land.
U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce, a Republican who represents Southern New Mexico, has proposed a far smaller monument. He once suggested designating an area of about 54,800 acres. Pearce welcomed Trump’s review.
“The Obama administration and the administrations before it repeatedly abused the Antiquities Act by creating expansive national monuments that blatantly disregarded input from local communities and governments that are directly affected by these designations,” Pearce said in a statement last week. Williams takes a similar stand. “Follow the Roosevelt doctrine behind the Antiquities Act,” he said. “Use the smallest area possible to protect cultural and archaeological sites. Do not grab half a million acres in one county.”
But no president has undone a national monument, and whether Trump even has that power remains unclear. “Most of the experts — and there aren’t many experts on this sort of thing — have pretty grave doubts about the president’s authority to rescind a monument designation,” says John Leshy, who served as the Interior Department’s top lawyer under President Bill Clinton and is now a professor of law at the University of CaliforniaHastings.
Franklin Roosevelt considered abolishing the Castle Pinckney National Monument, the site of an old fort in Charleston Harbor. But the attorney general advised against it, saying only Congress has that power.
With the Antiquities Act, Leshy says, Congress gave the president authority to protect lands but not to reverse protections.
Presidents, though, have shrunk national monuments. Some in Southern New Mexico hope Trump will do that with Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks.
Still, Leshy says, such changes have not been challenged in court, raising questions about how far a president can go. For example, he adds, courts may not approve of a president redrawing boundaries so radically as to change the purpose and character of the monument.
That the law books offer little guidance demonstrates how sharply the current debate departs from the bipartisan tradition of the Antiquities Act.
While Trump’s review includes monuments that are 20 years old, it centers on a debate raging in southeastern Utah over the newest national monument, established in late December, which conservative lawmakers in Utah have argued is an example of federal overreach.
Tribes and conservationists cheered Obama’s designation of Bears Ears, about 1.35 million acres with cultural sites regarded as spiritually significant. But other residents raised concerns about the restrictions that may come with the land’s new status.
Zinke told reporters his department will issue recommendations on Bears Ears sooner than his four-month deadline for reviews of national monuments.
The debate has turned into just the latest battle between conservatives who argue the federal government will squeeze local residents and industry off the land and conservationists who fear a giveaway of the nation’s public spaces.
“I think that’s what stirred up the whole thing,” says Esther García, the former mayor of Questa, who campaigned to establish the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument. She says she believes opposition to Bears Ears rather than monuments in New Mexico spurred Trump’s review.
New Mexicans long have chafed against the federal government’s land management policies. But opposition to the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management often is rooted not in the sort of libertarian stands found elsewhere in the American West but in disputes over grants and treaties that can date back centuries.
A former president of the San Antonio del Rio Colorado Land Grant, García is quick to point out that the Rio Grande del Norte has the backing of a coalition that includes tribal leaders, sportsmen, ranchers, other land grant heirs, business owners and conservationists.
The monument stretches across 242,500 acres up the Rio Grande Gorge, far past its landmark bridge, to the Colorado line and west across a high desert over which volcanic mountains loom and elk herds roam.
Environmentalists have hoped monument status will ensure greater protection for the land, its wildlife and water. Businesses see the monument as a way to boost tourism and burnish the brand of an area renowned for its rafting.
Questa in particular has hoped to parlay the prominence of a national monument into money. A molybdenum mine that was the town’s major employer shut down a couple years ago, and the village is trying to position itself as the gateway to the Rio Grande del Norte.
But Obama’s proclamation, like that for Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, also protected traditional uses of the land, such as grazing and wood gathering.
Taos Pueblo leaders issued a resolution supporting the monument, citing myriad pluses of the designation. Proponents say this is the sort of support that will prove the best defense for keeping monuments the way they are now.
“I hope they listen to the local people,” García said of the Trump administration. “Not just people who have issues with other monuments.”