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As Interior officials target national monuments to downsize or eliminate, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is trying to rewrite the history of the Antiquities Act, according to reporting from Chris D'Angelo and Roque Planas of Public Domain. The Antiquities Act is a law passed in 1906 that presidents of both parties have used to designate more than 160 national monuments.
Last Friday, Burgum said, “About 25 years ago, there was an idea that somehow this could be a precursor to creating a wilderness area or creating a national park, and you just needed a stroke of a pen of a president to say these vast swaths of land become a monument.”
But it was over 100 years ago, in 1908, that the Antiquities Act was used by then-President Theodore Roosevelt to protect more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon in Arizona as a national monument. A decade later, Congress established Grand Canyon National Park, spanning more than 1 million acres.
“The monument, designated with the stroke of Roosevelt’s pen, was literally a precursor to the Grand Canyon National Park that we cherish today,” D'Angelo and Planas write. Other popular parks also started as national monuments, including Olympic, Arches, and Zion national parks—all of which where originally protected using the Antiquities Act over 100 years ago.
Burgum makes these comments as Interior officials are currently looking for national monuments to shrink or eliminate in order to lease national public lands to President Trump's billionaire benefactors. The administration is doing this despite 89 percent of Western voters saying they support keeping national monument designations in place.
All authors working on flagship U.S. climate report are dismissed
On Monday, the Trump administration dismissed the hundreds of scientists working on the National Climate Assessment—the government's flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The report, which is released about every four years and is required by Congress, looks at how rising temperatures will impact human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, energy production, and more.
It remains unclear what will happen next with the assessment—because the report is still required by Congress, some fear that the administration might try to write an entirely new report that downplays the threat of the climate crisis.
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There may well be a sixth National Climate Assessment. The question is whether it is going to reflect credible science and be of real use to our communities as they prepare for climate change.”
