President Donald Trump may shrink the boundaries of two more national monuments, a day after rolling back protected areas in Utah, The Hill informs. According to a study into national monument declarations conducted by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Trump should shrink Oregon and California’s Cascade-Siskiyou and Nevada’s Gold Butte national monuments by small amounts.
Zinke has also recommended Trump change management plans for six other monuments, allowing for additional grazing, ranching, fishing, hunting and other activities in those locations. “I will be in the president’s office multiple times going through specifics of it as time passes,” Zinke noted.
Trump on Monday signed proclamations slashing the borders of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments in Utah, reducing them by about 50 percent and 84 percent respectively. Environmentalists and tribes have already sued over that decision, arguing the federal Antiquities Act does not give the president the power to reduce previously declared monuments.
However, the Trump administration insists the president can do that, and Zinke stressed that Trump was correct to order a review of 27 large monument declarations dating back two decades.
“The Antiquities Act was designed to protect rather than prevent, and no president, under the authority of the Antiquities Act, has the authority to arbitrarily remove the public from their lands, reduce public access, reduce hunting and fishing and reduce traditional uses, unless those uses threaten the object,” Zinke said.
The reductions Zinke announced on Tuesday are smaller than those Trump approved on Monday. At Gold Butte, a 300,000-acre monument in southern Nevada, Zinke proposed reducing some of the designated area near a water district used by local residents to allow for repairs and infrastructure upgrades.
According to Zinke, federal agencies are still considering what to do with Cascade-Siskiyou, which stretches over the Oregon-California border. Officials believe some of the protected land should be legally set aside for logging rather than monuments, Zinke said, and they’re considering what to do about private land within the monument borders.
The draft recommendations are likely to anger opponents of Zinke’s monuments review, who argue reducing borders and changing management plans will eventually lead to development on protected land, The Hill notes.
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