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On Friday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that shrinking national monuments is not a top priority for the Trump administration, despite internal documents that show otherwise.
Interior officials are looking closely at where they can abolish or greatly reduce the size of national monuments designated by previous presidents. At least six national monuments are under the microscope as of now, including Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni–Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument in New Mexico, and Chuckwalla National Monument in California. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, which President Trump illegally shrunk during his first term, are also on the list.
Conservation and Indigenous advocates argue that the monuments represent vital ecological and sacred cultural sites that local communities worked for decades to protect, and there is little demand to develop mineral resources within their boundaries.
Leaders in New Mexico are among those speaking out against attacks on national monuments. “The mining and energy extraction narrative is, I think, a distraction,” said Patrick Nolan, director of the nonprofit Friends of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks. “I think the true intention here is to dismantle the public lands system and signal this administration’s intention to roll back conservation lands.”
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Any president that would seek to undermine any national monument anywhere in America shows a lack of appreciation for the value that those protected lands have for those communities.”
