Trumps Public Lands Policy Arcs Toward Extraction

The decision to amend national monuments has roots in pro-energy, anti-conservation politics that has been simmering for 40 years

On September 18, 1996, Orrin Hatch was livid. President Bill Clinton had just designated 1.88 million acres of southern Utah canyon country as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Hatch had spent two decades as Utah’s senator resisting federal oversight of the public land in his state, and by his standards, Clinton’s use of the Antiquities Act was egregious.

“This is the mother of all land grabs,” Hatch said at the time. “The president may have some statutory authority to take this action, but he certainly does not have the moral authority.” On the Senate floor, he compared the designation with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Hatch was similarly incensed when another million-plus-acre monument, Bears Ears, was designated by another Democratic president, Barack Obama, in 2016. But the 83-year-old senator is approaching vindication. Last week, President Donald Trump told Hatch he plans to shrink both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante as part of a national-monuments review Trump had called for back in April. The executive order charged Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke with revisiting all 27 national monuments over 100,000 acres designated since 1996, parameters that targeted Grand Staircase and the large monuments that followed.

The decision was consistent with Trump’s embrace of unfettered fossil-fuel development and his distrust of environmental regulations and science. These values—which contradict numerous economic and scientific norms widely held today—hark back to the time when Hatch’s political career began.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2257446/trumps-public-lands-policy-favors-energy-extraction?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WYM-Saturday-11112017&utm_content=WYM-Saturday-11112017+CID_a5dac4156a25e829640d68e65783312b&utm_source=campaignmonitor%20outsidemagazine&utm_term=embrace%20of%20unfettered%20fossil-fuel%20development