An advisory opinion issued Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Justice says protections for land designated as monuments can be abolished by a sitting president because it is not expressly forbidden in law.
The 1906 Antiquities Act — long a thorn in the side of Utah and other Western states — gives the U.S. president the authority to create a monument to protect cultural artifacts, precious landscapes and more. But the act was clear in that it has to be “right sized” for the area it is meant to protect, which is where the controversy comes in.
The law was passed and put into motion by President Theodore Roosevelt, who designated Yellowstone as a protected and cherished space. The first of its kind.
Utah has five national parks — “mighty” attractions for the state. The parks would not be affected by this order. It also has land designated as national monuments.
Zion National Park, the state’s first, comprises 146,597 acres. It was a monument first but to become a national park it had to go through Congress, which is what happened.
Arches National Park, with the world’s most intense concentration of more than 2,000 sandstone arches, is just over 76,000 acres.
So when the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and its 1.7 million acres was designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996, it felt like a slap in the face to many Utah politicians and rural families.
When President Donald Trump was in his first term in office, he sent an envoy to survey Grand Staircase and Bears Ears National Monument, another controversial designation.
The Interior Department secretary at the time, Ryan Zinke, rode through portions of the monument on horseback. He also did a flyover.
All he could simply say: “It is big.”
Bears Ears, a 1.35 million-acre monument was created by President Barack Obama, reduced in size by Trump then restored by President Joe Biden.
This advisory opinion says there is nothing in the law, or sitting precedent, to preclude a presidential action to completely reverse or alter previous monument designations.
It cites a variety of actions taken over the years.
In 1911, President William Taft reduced the size of the 60,776-acre Petrified Forest National Monument by 25,625 acres, stating only that a geological survey allowed the relevant land to be “more particularly located and described.”
In another instance, President John F. Kennedy acted to “exclude(d) from the detached Otowi section of the” Bandelier National Monument “approximately 3,925 acres of land” that he concluded “contain(ed) limited archeological values which had been fully researched,” as well as because the land was “not needed to complete the interpretive story” of the monument.
The question that has been stirred by this advisory opinion centers on the balance between public lands protection and the vitality of industries that include ranching, mining, and even harvesting fish off the East Coast.
Environmental groups were quick to call the advisory opinion an assault.
“This legal opinion is (Pam) Bondi’s desperate attempt to re-write a century of caselaw in order to feed America’s national monuments into the ravenous maw of the fracking and mining industries,” said Taylor McKinnon at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“The MAGA fixation on enriching polluting extractive industries at the expense of our natural heritage is a national embarrassment and an insult to every single American. These monuments protect some of our most iconic landscapes and cultural treasures. We’ll fight like hell to safeguard their future.”
Read the full article here
