California’s protected forests, deserts and mountain ranges would be spared from President Trump’s plan to reduce the size of America’s national monuments under new recommendations from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
But six of America’s national monuments — from Utah’s red rock canyons to remote islands in the South Pacific — would be reduced in size, according to a memo leaked to several large news organizations and published Sunday night by the Washington Post.
The original list of 27 monuments that Zinke was reviewing for possible changes included six national monuments located in California, but none of them are being recommended for boundary changes, or for rule adjustments that would allow for more logging, grazing or mining, according to a 19-page memo that Zinke sent to the White House last month.
“While it’s encouraging that no California monuments are on Zinke’s list, it’s important to remember that these are just recommendations,” said Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ll remain vigilant because we know that the Trump administration sees our country’s magnificent public lands as nothing more than cash cows and could still illegally mess with our monuments.”
Trump could accept Zinke’s recommendations, reject them or modify them. A White House spokeswoman declined comment.
“The Trump Administration does not comment on leaked documents, especially internal drafts which are still under review by the President and relevant agencies,” White House spokeswoman Kelly Love told the Post.
California environmentalists and many of the state’s political leaders were alarmed when six national monuments located in the Golden State were first published as part of the list that Zinke was reviewing. They were:
• Giant Sequoia National Monument, which protects 33 groves of ancient sequoias — some of the world’s largest trees — across 328,000 acres of national forest land in the Sierra Nevada west of Visalia.
• Carrizo Plain National Monument, a 246,000-acre area owned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management east of San Luis Obispo that is famous for carpets of wildflowers and which contains the largest native grassland remaining in California.
• Mojave Trails National Monument, a 1.6 million-acre 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 and Napa County known for bald eagles, black bears, rare plants and Indian history.
• San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, 346,000 acres of national forest 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 provides key wildlife corridors near Joshua Tree National Park.
But for reasons not spelled out in Zinke’s memo, he recommended no changes.
Environmental groups criticized Zinke for urging the president to alter any national monuments and vowed to sue.
“These are places that speak to our values, and have been enjoyed by all Americans,” said Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association.
“They protect incredible canyons, rivers, forests, oceans and even ancient artifacts that were being looted. If this administration goes through with these plans and allows mining, oil and gas development and timber harvesting, they will be sacrificing our culture, our history and our outdoor heritage for potential short-term gains. Generations to come will judge them for this shortsightedness.”
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.
A law signed in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt, called the Antiquities Act, gives presidents the authority to establish national monuments without a vote of Congress, something that nearly every president has done since then. But in recent years, rural Republicans have argued that the law has been abused, and rather than protect archaeological sites, has been a potent tool to block logging, mining, oil drilling and cattle grazing on some public lands, and commercial fishing in some ocean areas.
In April, slamming what he called “a massive federal land grab,” Trump signed an executive order directing Zinke to review all national monuments that were established since 1996 and are larger than 100,000 acres. The national monuments that Zinke’s report recommends be reduced in size are:
• Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a 1.9 million-acre area that was established in Utah by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and whose protection killed a proposed coal mine.
• Bear’s Ears, a 1.3 million-acre monument in southeastern Utah designated by President Barack Obama last year.
• Gold Butte, a 296,000-acre site north of Las Vegas that is known for bighorn sheep, desert tortoises and a ghost town.
• Cascade-Siskiyou, an 86,000-acre monument in Oregon that was established by Clinton and doubled in size by Obama in January. Cascade-Siskiyou is mostly in southern Oregon, on national forest and BLM land near Ashland, but about 5,000 acres extends into Siskiyou County, California.
Zinke also recommended that Trump reduce two ocean monuments in size, according to the memo. They are Pacific Remote Islands, a vast area southeast of Hawaii that includes Wake Island and Johnston Atoll, and Rose Atoll, west of American Samoa. Both were first set aside for protection by President George W. Bush and are known for rich coral reefs.
Zinke’s memo did not recommend by how much Trump should shrink the monuments. It urged rule changes to four others, including allowing commercial logging in Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine; commercial fishing in Northeast Canyons and Seamounts off New England; and changes to two New Mexico national monuments, Organ Mountains Desert Peaks and Rio Grande Del Norte, which could allow more cattle grazing, logging or mining.
Zinke also recommended that Trump establish three new national monuments. They are Camp Nelson, a former Union Army base in Kentucky and key training area for African-American soldiers in the Civil War; the home of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss., who the report notes “was assassinated outside his home in 1963 by a white supremacist;” and the Badger-Two Medicine area in Montana’s Lewis and Clark National Forest, which sits adjacent to Glacier National Park and is considered sacred by the Blackfeet Indians.
