The Antiquities Zinke Really Wants to Preserve

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke grew up in Whitefish, Montana, where, over a few decades, he watched a once-strong timber industry wither. In 1990, Montana produced more than 1.4 billion board feet of lumber; by 2014, output was just 600 million board feet. U.S. timber has declined thanks to a cocktail of regulatory, economic, and social pressures, but Zinke’s diagnosis isn’t so nuanced. In a 2015 Missoulian op-ed, the then-representative for Montana blamed the industry’s woes on “predatory lawsuits funded by out-of-state special-interest groups” and “federal regulatory constraints.”

Zinke’s report on national monuments, delivered to President Donald Trump in August and recently leaked to the Washington Post, identifies the same villains. His analysis of monuments established after 1995 blasted prior presidents’ use of the Antiquities Act to create landscape-scale monuments. Overwhelming public support for the monuments was the result, Zinke wrote, of a coordinated national campaign by environmental groups, and did not indicate local approval. 

His analysis recommended shrinking six monuments and changing management practices in another four. Objects worthy of protection, the report stated, should be defined in the narrowest possible fashion—a single archaeological site, for example, instead of a landscape that contains thousands of such sites. Zinke emphasized promoting “traditional uses”—he specifically lists mining, grazing, timber harvest, and commercial fishing—in all 10 monuments. 

When Zinke talks about “traditional uses” he sounds a lot like James G. Watt, the Interior Secretary under President Ronald Reagan. Inspired by the Sagebrush Rebellion, Watt viewed public land as an industrial asset, and he acted accordingly: the area of federal land leased to coal mines increased fivefold during his tenure. Zinke echos that thinking when he writes, “It appears that certain monuments were designated to prevent economic activity such as grazing, mining, and timber production rather than to protect specific objects.” 

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