Trump advised to shrink sites
Interior secretary’s unreleased report recommends adjusting boundaries on federal areas
The Trump administration on Thursday backed off a threat to abolish some of America’s national monuments, but moved forward with plans to shrink up to 21 of them — boundary adjustments that could allow logging, oil and gas drilling, cattle grazing, and mining in scenic areas from California’s giant sequoia groves to Utah’s red rock canyons to coral reefs in Hawaii.
But exactly which national monuments would be affected, and how much they would be reduced in size, remained unclear.
U. S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke sent recommendations to President Donald Trump on Thursday, but refused to release the long-awaited report to the public. White House officials who wouldn’t speak for attribution said they expect to make it public soon, but did not say when Trump will make a final decision.
“The report is a draft, so we are continuing to work with Interior on getting the best information on which to base recommendations for the president,” one White House official said. “Once we have a final report, in the coming weeks, we will make it public.”
National monuments are federal areas — usually owned by the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service or National Park Service — where presidents use their executive authority to provide protections, including bans on oil and gas drilling, mining, grazing and off-road vehicle use. Some of them are eventually turned into national parks by Congress.
Appearing Thursday in Billings, Montana, for a firefighting event, Zinke told The Associated Press that he is not recommending eliminating any national monuments. No president has ever abolished a national monument, and environmentalists have promised to sue over the issue. Instead, Zinke said he is recommending reducing the size of “a handful,” without offering specifics.
Zinke also told the AP that he is not recommending that any of the monuments, which are on federally owned land, be sold off. He declined to say whether areas removed from monument designation will be opened for oil and gas drilling, coal mining, cattle grazing and other extractive uses that Trump has championed.
In a news release Thursday, Zinke said his recommendations “provide a much-needed change for the local communities who border and rely on these lands for hunting and fishing, economic development, traditional uses and recreation.”
Environmental groups blasted the moves, calling them the latest example of Trump’s rollbacks of environmental protections. They noted that 2.7 million people commented on the proposed changes in recent months, with 99.2 percent of the comments opposed to eliminating monuments or changing the boundaries of monuments.
“If Secretary Zinke expects Americans to be thankful because he wants to merely erase large chunks of national monuments instead of elimi- nating them entirely, he is badly mistaken,” said Jennifer Rokala, president of the Center for Western Priorities, an environmental group in Denver.
In February, Trump signed an executive order directing Zinke to review all national monuments that were established since 1996 and are larger than 100,000 acres.
That list of 27 areas includes six in California that total roughly 3 million acres, an area four times the size of Yosemite National Park. They are:
• Giant Sequoia National Monument, which protects 33 groves of ancient sequoias — some of the world’s largest trees — over 328,000 acres in the Sierra Nevada east of Visalia
• Carrizo Plain National Monument, a 246,000-acre area east of San Luis Obispo in the San Joaquin Valley that is famous for carpets of wildflowers and which contains the largest native grassland remaining in California
• Mojave Trails National Monument, a 1.6 millionacre desert landscape that bridges the area between Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave National Preserve
• Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, 331,000 federal acres between Mendocino County to Napa County known for bald eagles, black bears, rare plants and Indian history
• San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, 346,000 acres of Forest Service land representing more than 70 percent of Los Angeles County’s scarce open space and the source of 30 percent of its drinking water
• Sand to Snow National Monument, 154,000 acres in San Bernardino County that provide key wildlife corridors near Joshua Tree National Park
U. S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D- California, criticized Zinke for not releasing the full list now.
“The American people have the right to see his entire report,” she said Thursday.
“A proposal to strip protections from public lands should be made public immediately.”
In recent months, Zinke recommended no changes to California’s Sand and Snow National Monument, along with five others: Grand Canyon-Parashant in Arizona; Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado; Craters of the Moon in Idaho; Upper Missouri Breaks in Montana and Hanford Reach in Washington, leaving 21 still on the table.
The origin of national monuments can be traced to the 1906 Antiquities Act, a law signed by President Theodore Roosevelt to reduce looting and theft of Indian pottery and other artifacts in New Mexico and other areas.
The law gives presidents the power to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” as national monu- ments without a vote from Congress.
In the past 111 years, nearly every president has used the law to establish monuments. Roosevelt used it to set aside the Grand Canyon, Herbert Hoover used it to protect Arches in Utah and Death Valley in California, and President George W. Bush used it to set aside vast areas of the remote Pacific Ocean, including the world’s deepest location, the Marianas Trench.
But many rural Western leaders have chafed at its breadth. When President Bill Clinton established the Grand Staircase in Utah in 1996 on 1.9 million acres of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management, it killed plans for a huge coal mine there.
Some groups welcomed Trump’s review.
“The previous three presidents brazenly violated the text and spirit of the Antiquities Act,” said Jonathan Wood, an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento group that advocates for private property rights and limited government. “They ignored Congress’ requirement that monuments be the smallest area compatible with protecting antiquities, often also ignoring local input.
“This review has been sorely needed,” he added.