‘I have a bone to pick with your President Trump’ said my friend from South Africa on the phone today. (She is an enthusiastic outdoors person). Yes, I said: I think I know what you mean.
From the New York Times: Trump sharply reduced the size of two national monuments* in Utah on Monday by some two million acres, the largest rollback of federal land protection in the nation’s history. The administration shrank Bears Ears National Monument, a sprawling region of red rock canyons, by 85 percent, and cut another monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante, to about half its current size.
*National monuments are lands that are protected from development by law. They are roughly analogous to national parks, but while national parks are created by Congress, national monuments are created by presidents through the Antiquities Act.
Observers say this order by Trump will precipitate a legal battle that could have far-reaching implications for the course of American land conservation, and for national monuments.
