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Interior Secretary Proposes Shrinking Four National Monuments
BEARS EARS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Utah — Parts of this sprawling region of red-rock canyons and at least three other national monuments would lose their strict protection and could be reopened for new mining or drilling under proposals submitted to President Trump by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Thursday, according to congressional aides and others who have been briefed on the report.
Environmentalists, ranchers, tribal governments and Western lawmakers had been watching closely to see if Mr. Zinke would propose changing the borders of the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument, which President Barack Obama established at the end of his term, and other scenic and historic areas under federal protection.
Shrinking the monuments would be widely seen as a direct blow to Mr. Obama’s environmental legacy, and would probably prompt the first major legal test of a century-old conservation law.
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The Antiquities Act, signed into law in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt, gives presidents the power to designate national monuments that safeguard “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures and other objects of historic or scientific interest.” Sweeping landscapes like the Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado and ocean areas like the Mariana Trench in the Pacific have been protected under the law, along with sites like the Statue of Liberty.
Past presidents have altered the boundaries of national monuments, including about 19 occasions when acreage was removed from them, according to federal data.
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Gee, let me guess. There wouldn't some kind of mineral deposit or some other resource that Corporate America would like to get their hands on for profit? Of course not.