National monuments "sham" review

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke just got caught red-handed. Now there’s proof that his review of national monuments was a sham.

New records show Zinke and the Trump administration concealed documents from the public that emphasized the value of protecting Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. Trump then slashed more than 2 million acres from them.

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And we only know this because Interior officials, responding to public records requests, accidentally released thousands of pages of unredacted emails and other documents.

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They show Zinke’s team dismissed data from his own Bureau of Land Management staff showing that monument protections had safeguarded archeological treasures and boosted tourism. Zinke ignored science, economics and millions of public comments on his way to implementing the largest rollback of public lands protections in the nation’s history.

The internal documents confirm that the true motivation behind Trump and Zinke’s unrelenting attacks on public lands is to reward mining, logging, fossil-fuel and livestock interests.

We knew from previous internal emails that oil and gas exploration was behind their decision to shrink Bears Ears. Others documents show uranium mining interests were involved, too.

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The fix was in. The results of Zinke’s monument “review” were decided before it began.

  The Hill

What a surprise.

In April, President Trump signed an executive order instructing Zinke to review 27 national monuments established over 21 years, arguing that his predecessors had overstepped their authority in placing these large sites off limits to development.

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On July 3, 2017, Nikki Moore, an official at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), wrote to colleagues about five draft economic reports on sites under scrutiny, noting that each contains a paragraph about “our ability to estimate the value of energy and/or minerals forgone as a result of the designations.” That reference to each site’s energy potential was redacted on grounds that it could “reveal strategy about the [national monument] review process.”

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Aaron Weiss, a spokesman for the advocacy group Center for Western Priorities, said in an email that the “botched document dump reveals what we’ve suspected all along: Secretary Zinke ignored clear warnings from his own staff that shrinking national monuments would put sacred archaeological and cultural sites at risk.”

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The inadvertently released documents show that department officials dismissed some evidence that contradicted the administration’s push to revise national monument designations, which are made under the 1906 American Antiquities Act. Estimates of increased tourism revenue, analyses showing that existing restrictions had not hurt fishing operators and agency reports finding that less vandalism occurred as a result of monument designations were all set aside.

  WaPo

Make America Great Again - back to 1905.

Department officials also redacted the BLM’s assessment that “it is unlikely” that the Obama administration’s establishment of the 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument “has impacted timber production,” because those activities were allowed to continue.

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On Sept. 11, 2017, Randal Bowman, the lead staff member for the review, suggested deleting language that said most fishing vessels near the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument “generated 5% or less of their annual landings from within the monument” because it “undercuts the case for the ban being harmful.”

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“Trying to hide those warnings from the public months later is disgraceful and possibly illegal,” Weiss added.

Everything about this administration is disgraceful and possibly illegal.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.