If you follow leftist social media outlets, as I do, you’ll see that one of the latest outrages on the left is that Donald Trump is willfully destroying millions of acres of important protected land. The reality is a little different, revealing how Democrat presidents used proclamations to remove from production mostly barren land that has serious national security ramifications for America.
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In 1906, one of President Roosevelt’s crusades was to preserve for future generations uniquely American sites, a passion that reflected his concern that America’s rapid expansion and development might destroy the wonders he had seen during his years out West. The result of that crusade was the Antiquities Act, which gave the president the power to proclaim a national monument on federal land based on the site’s unique historic, natural, or scientific value to America.
Roosevelt’s interest in the West was apparent from his first designations: Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, an exceptional rock formation; El Morro in New Mexico, an important water hole on a trail traveled for centuries by Puebloans, Spanish explorers, and American soldiers, explorers, and emigrants; Montezuma Castle in New Mexico, home to ancient cliff dwellers; and the Petrified Forest in Arizona, a unique region filled with fossilized trees from the Mesozoic Era.
The act is now codified at 54 U.S.C. § 320301. The key language regarding the president’s proclamation power states that “The limits of the parcels shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” In other words, the president can protect Devil’s Tower, but he cannot declare all of Wyoming a sacred surrounding space.
Fast forward to Bill Clinton’s administration, when he created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996. The Utah-based national monument encompassed 1.7 million acres on federal land. To help put that size in perspective, East Coasters can think of it as larger than Delaware, while West Coasters can imagine an area five times the size of the City of Los Angeles. Clinton’s justification was that the whole vast area would be reserved for scientific study:
…this unspoiled natural area remains a frontier, a quality that greatly enhances the monument’s value for scientific study. The monument has a long and dignified human history: it is a place where one can see how nature shapes human endeavors in the American West, where distance and aridity have been pitted against our dreams and courage. The monument presents exemplary opportunities for geologists, paleontologists, archeologists, historians, and biologists.
Over the years, Congress steadily expanded the park’s boundaries through land exchanges and border rationalization, so that it eventually grew to 1.87 million acres—in essence, adding almost a whole city of Los Angeles to the mix.
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Twenty years later, in 2016, Barack Obama created Bears Ears National Monument on 1.35 million acres of federal land. His proclamation explained that this was being done to preserve a wide range of things associated with often-nomadic Native Americans: dwellings, ceremonial sites, petroglyphs (rock-carved images), trails, fossils, wildlife, firewood collection sites, etc.
In a way, both proclamations reflect the kind of overreach you see in declaring CO2 a greenhouse gas: its ubiquity allows you to extend federal authority to everything. With CO2, the government can control every aspect of human activity. And with designating millions of acres as natural and Native American preserves—things without clear, finite borders or unique features—you can take all the land you want and remove it from ordinary people’s use.
Thus, in both cases before the Antiquities land grab, ordinary people were leasing this land from the federal government. These sites had been used for livestock grazing (i.e., food for humans); recreational hunting, fishing, and camping; roads; mineral prospecting; and potential fossil fuel sites. Obviously, these last two points are of special interest to the Trump administration. The past few years have shown that, if America is to survive, it cannot be dependent on foreign, often hostile, nations for its energy and essential mineral needs.
Thus, yesterday, Donald Trump signed two very important national security executive orders: Modifying the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Modifying the Bears Ears National Monument. He removed 860,000 acres from the former and roughly 1 million from the latter. The remaining land is what Trump deems “the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
In his executive orders, Trump explains that the original proclamations were invalid because they far exceeded the scope of presidential power under the Antiquities Act, because they’re not “landmarks,” “structures,” or “objects of historic or scientific interest.” They are also not unique to the regions in which they’re located; they encompass sites already protected under other acts meant to preserve Native American sites; and—importantly—they remove from use “several resources that are vital to our economic and national security.”
Naturally, leftists are overwhelmed by the horror of it all:
Most Americans, though, if they were to understand the gross overreach that Clinton and Obama displayed, as well as the serious national security problems created with proclamations removing those lands from production, would not be horrified. So, if you hear from a normal American struggling with leftist propaganda about the changes Trump has wrought, maybe you can expose them to some useful facts.
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Bear Ears National Monument. Public domain image.