The Interior Department stonewalled The New York Times when it made an open records request to review internal emails related to the shrinking of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. So, the newspaper sued, with the assistance of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale University Law School. That gave it access to 25,000 Interior emails. Eric Lipton and Lisa Friedman write:
The debate started as early as March 2017, when an aide to Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, asked a senior Interior Department official to consider reduced boundaries for Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah to remove land that contained oil and natural gas deposits that had been set aside to help fund public schools.
“Please see attached for a shapefile and pdf of a map depicting a boundary change for the southeast portion of the Bears Ears monument,” said the March 15 email from Senator Hatch’s office. Adopting this map would “resolve all known mineral conflicts,” the email said, referring to oil and gas sites on the land that the state’s public schools wanted to lease out to bolster funds.
The map that Mr. Hatch’s office provided, which was transmitted about a month before Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke publicly initiated his review of national monuments, was incorporated almost exactly into the much larger reductions President Trump announced in December, shrinking Bears Ears by 85 percent.
Last May, at the beginning of his Pr*sident Trump-ordered review of 27 national monuments, Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke said during a tour of Bear Ears that he had not predetermined a conclusion about downsizing that monument or any of the others and might even recommend an addition. That, of course, didn’t happen. During his tour of numerous national monuments, the secretary reiterated repeatedly that he was eager to hear all sides in order to deliver a fair review. But most of his meetings on the issue took place with energy and other special interests behind closed doors. Secrets are a big thing with him.
Ultimately, Zinke recommended a gigantic reduction in Bears Ears, a move now being litigated in the courts. It was reduced to 16 percent of the size that President Barack Obama had designated for the scenic and culturally unique monument in 2016. Zinke also recommended that another monument in Utah, Grand Staircase Escalante, be reduced by nearly half.
Like the whacking of Bears Ears, this wasn’t done on aesthetic grounds. Once again, an extractable resource was a crucial element in the decision. Grand Staircase as originally designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996 included the Kaiparowits Plateau. It is estimated the plateau contains massive amounts of coal, 11.36 million tons of the stuff, according to an Interior Department memo early last year. Much of Kaiparowits was removed from the monument in the reduction.
Next to flattering Trump at every opportunity, helping their pals in the fossil fuel industries seems to be the prime directive at the White House, something well known before the Times brought these emails into the light. But always good to have suspicions definitively confirmed.
Environmental advocates are hopeful the courts will interpret laws governing national monuments—primarily the Antiquities Act of 1906 and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act passed 70 years later—to preclude the Trump regime’s decision to shrink the monuments. Most legal experts who have weighed in on the matter give the plaintiffs reason to be optimistic. But because neither law has been tested in a relevant court case, the outcome remains uncertain.