President Donald Trump should let go of his misguided notion that reducing the size of three or more national monuments would benefit the nation by opening them up to logging, grazing and oil and gas drilling.
The potential damage to national treasures is immense, while the economic gains are seen by a majority of economists as minimal, at best.
Four months ago Trump asked Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review more than two dozen national monuments designated by presidents over the past two decades. Zinke floated the idea and opened it for public comment.
Nearly 3 million Americans told the White House what they thought of it: 99.2 percent were strongly opposed. That didn’t deter Zinke. He submitted a report last week recommending the reduction of the size of at least three national monuments — but chose to keep the details from the public.
Coward.
Zinke and Trump have no valid case for shrinking national monuments, but here’s their likely reason. It was President Barack Obama and President Bill Clinton who expanded the three sites in question. Trump is obsessed with erasing their legacies, particularly in environmental protection.
The Antiquities Act of 1906, signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, was specifically designed to protect public land from commercial exploitation. Since then, presidents from both parties have designated 200 national monuments.
Trump sees this as a “massive federal land grab” and says “it’s time to end these abuses and return control to the people.”
“The people” in this case means business and industry.
At the top of the list of monuments Zinke recommends downsizing is the Bears Ears National Monument, home to cliff dwellings, prehistoric villages and rock art panels of ancestral Pueblo Indians in Utah. The other two are Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.
A study released earlier this year by Headwaters Economics, a nonpartisan economic research firm based in Bozeman, Mont., “found no evidence that designating these national monuments prevented continued economic growth. Instead, trends in key economic indicators such as population, employment, personal income, and per-capita income either continued or improved in each of the regions surrounding the national monuments.”
The national monuments Zinke wants to shrink are breathtaking in their beauty. Environmentalists will fight this outrage, and we will cheer them on.
— The Mercury News
