By Gregory Scruggs
OREGON, Jan 7 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – One year after U.S. President Donald Trump declared the biggest rollback of public land protection in the country’s history, conservation groups have rallied to protect other at-risk places.
In December 2017, Trump announced that Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments would be shrunk by 2 million acres (809,000 hectares), from a combined 3.2 million acres, to expand hunting and grazing.
The Department of the Interior (DOI) then recommended cutting by an unspecified amount another four protected sites, including Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, a biodiversity reserve on the Oregon-California border.
That followed a seven-month DOI review of 27 monuments that had been established or expanded since 1996. The review was part of a broader push by the Trump administration to reopen areas to drilling, mining and other development.
Unlike national parks, which require an act of Congress, national monuments can be designated unilaterally by presidents under the century-old Antiquities Act, a law meant to protect sacred sites, artifacts and historical objects.
Public land advocates have challenged the administration in federal court over the legality of removing protection from sites that had been designated under the act.
Monuments for All, which defends national monuments but is not involved in the court case, said that more than 500,000 comments were submitted in support of the Utah monuments during a public comment period that closed in November 2018.
Terry Dickey, chairman of the Friends of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which supports the court case, said “an attack on one monument is an attack on all monuments”.
“Because it’s the same national law that governs those monuments as well as our one small monument,” Dickey told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
