Biden Orders Review of Trump’s “Assaults on America’s Natural Treasures.”

He has vowed to reverse his predecessor’s dismantling of national monuments.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.Anita Sagastegui/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Biden administration says it has begun reaching out to elected officials, Native American tribes and other stakeholders as part of its review of the Trump administration’s controversial rollback of national monuments, kick-starting a process that is widely expected to result in President Joe Biden fulfilling a campaign promise to restore the protected sites.

As part of a sweeping first-day executive order to “protect public health and the environment and restore science,” Biden ordered the Interior Department to review President Donald Trump’s proclamations to dismantle three protected monuments, two in southern Utah and one off the Atlantic coast. Biden has slammed the monument cuts as among Trump’s “assaults on America’s natural treasures.”

In 2017, the Trump administration launched a review of recent national monument designations made under the Antiquities Act of 1906. That process featured administration officials cozying up to monument opponents, cherry-picking data and dismissing overwhelming public support for maintaining protected sites, and ended with Trump carving more than 2 million acres away from two sites in southern Utah.

The boundary of Bears Ears, a 1.35 million-acre landscape that several tribes consider sacred, was cut by 85 percent. Nearby, Grand Staircase-Escalante, a sweeping 1.87-million-acre monument rich in dinosaur fossils and archeological sites, was cut roughly in half. Later, in June 2020, Trump opened the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a 4,900-square-mile protected site off the East Coast, to commercial fishing.

Now, in a swing of the political pendulum, the Biden administration is reviewing the Trump-era changes. The Interior Department said Tuesday that discussions with stakeholders, including elected officials, tribal nations and the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, would begin shortly and will help the administration determine whether the monument boundaries and protections should be restored.

Biden’s executive order gave the Interior Department 60 days to submit a report with its findings and recommendations. The agency is conducting its review alongside the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce and the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate