Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has recommended to President Trump that 10 national monuments be modified, though the administration has kept his memo secret.
A leaked copy provided to the Washington Post found that Zinke has recommended boundary adjustments to four land and two water national monuments – including Utah’s Bears Ears – while suggesting others be reopened to activities like commercial fishing and timber harvesting.
‘The Trump Administration does not comment on leaked documents, especially internal drafts which are still under review by the President and relevant agencies,’ White House spokeswoman Kelly Love told the Post, as the document was labeled ‘Draft Deliberative – Not for Distribution.’
President Trump (left) tasked Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (right) to look at nearly 20 national monuments designated since 1996, to assess whether they should stay the same size
President Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended that the size of Bears Ears in Utah be trimmed, according to a leaked document given to the Washington Post
The oldest national monument that the review focused on was the 1996 designation of Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, which the Interior secretary thinks should be shrunk
Gold Butte, designated a national monument on December 30, 2016, as President Obama was leaving office, is one of four monuments Secretary Zinke recommended be resized
The final monument Secretary Zinke set his eyes on resizing is Cascade-Siskiyou, located in Oregon
The documents are the result of a four-month review process looking into nearly 20 of the largest national monuments, those over 100,000 acres, and designated as such since 1996.
In April, President Trump made a special trip to the Interior Department in order to sign an executive order, green-lighting this review to be done.
‘The Antiquities Act does not give the federal government unlimited power to lock up millions of acres of land and waters and it’s time we ended this abusive practice,’ Trump said at the time, calling the practice a ‘massive federal land grab.’
In the order, Trump had given Zinke 45 days to turn in a preliminary assessment and then 120 days to let the president know ‘if a monument should be rescinded, resized [or] modified in order to better manage our federal land,’ the interior secretary explained at the time.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended that Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks be open to more activities like hunting and fishing
The documents handed to the Washington Post were dated August 24, meaning they had been submitted just in time.
The main takeaway from them is that Zinke believes President Trump’s most recent predecessors, including Republican President George W. Bush, designated too much land in these national monuments by using the Antiquities Act, while limited their use.
‘It appears that certain monuments were designated to prevent economic activity such as grazing, mining and timber production rather than to protect specific objects,’ the report says.
‘No president should use the authority under the act to restrict public access, prevent hunting and fishing, burden private land, or eliminate traditional land uses, unless such action is needed to protect the object,’ it also warns.
In his recommendations,Zinke has pinpointed four national monuments for boundary modifications including Bears Ears and also Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, Gold Butte in Nevada and Cascade-Siskiyou in Oregon.
President Trump’s Interior secretary made similar recommendations for resizing the Pacific Remote Islands and Rose Atoll, suggesting they also be opened to commercial fishing.
He also thought that the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts national monument, located 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, be open to commercial fishing as well.
Allowing ‘active timber management’ was among the ideas for Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters, as it used to be private land, which was often used for snowmobiling too.
The memo suggests locals worry that the national parks distinction, made in August 2016, will bar those activities on those lands.
The documents also suggest a broader set of activities should be permitted in New Mexico’s Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks and Rio Grande del Nort.
Conservationists haven’t been happy with this idea to begin with, and were displeased with what they saw when the memo leaked.
The moves ‘represent an unprecedented assault on our parks and public lands,’ Jamie Williams, the president of the Wilderness Society, told the Associated Press.
‘This callous proposal will needlessly punish local, predominantly rural communities that depend on parks and public lands for outdoor recreation, sustainable jobs and economic growth,’ Williams added.
Kieran Suckling, the executive director of the environmental group, the Center for Biological Diversity, pointed to Zinke’s so-called love for Teddy Roosevelt when she spoke with the AP.
‘If Teddy were alive today, he’d declare political war on Zinke and Trump,’ she said.