Linda Nelson Nash
The House on Fire ruin at Bears Ears National Monument, Utah.
Many visitors to U.S. national parks and monuments—a record 331 million in 2016—seek a hiatus, however fleeting, from the daily grind. But increasingly, they may find themselves face-to-face with some of the things they are trying to escape.
The Trump Administration’s quick-step public lands agenda for 2017 includes budget cuts, expanded resource extraction (mining, logging, drilling, and grazing), shrinking national monument boundaries, and a relaxation of restrictions on problematic activities like the use of plastic bottles.
At Dinosaur National Monument, for example, the Bureau of Land Management plans to auction public land for oil and gas drilling. The drilling site is near the park’s entrance road and will be visible from the visitor center. The BLM says it will take steps to minimize the impact, including light shields, noise mufflers, and “placement of exhaust systems to direct noise away from noise sensitive areas” and “avoiding unnecessary flaring of gas.”
But Mike Murray, who worked as a national park administrator and ranger at Dinosaur National Monument for thirty-four years, calls the decision to auction drilling rights there “indefensible.” The monument’s pitch-black night skies and silent soundscapes have been protected by the Park Service since Woodrow Wilson's presidency, Murray says in an interview. Visitors, he notes, will now witness “oil rigs instead of a pristine landscape.” And the Trump team’s “total priority” on mining and drilling threatens other values, like “protecting parks for future generations and for wildlife.”
The Vernal, Utah, field office of the BLM, as well as its offices in Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C., declined to comment, as did the Washington office of the Interior Department.
Murray is currently a spokesman for the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, a group of Park Service retirees that advocates for national parks and programs. Last month, the coalition sent a letter to Ryan Zinke, Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, signed by 350 former employees, including many administrators, objecting to proposed oil and gas leases at parks including Zion National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, Hovenweep National Monument, and Fort Laramie National Historic Site.
“Your review of national monuments marks a dismal day in the history of public lands conservation in the United States.”
“We join many others who strongly oppose your calling for the significant reduction or removal of protections for the natural and cultural resources, including many remarkable landscapes, currently protected in our national monuments,” the letter said. “Your review of national monuments marks a dismal day in the history of public lands conservation in the United States.”
The National Park Service reports 11 percent fewer employees today than in 2011, while visitation has increased 17 percent. But Trump’s 2018 budget proposes an additional 10 to 12 percent overall budget cut, including additional staff cuts of more than six percent.
Overcrowding at park trails and facilities has accelerated to what some describe as a mounting crisis. A few parks have discussed limiting entrants, perhaps on a reservation system, as Yosemite National Park already does at peak seasons. The Trump Administration’s solution for a $12 billion deferred maintenance problem at national parks is a massive fee increase for Yellowstone, Yosemite, Arches, and Rocky Mountain among other parks, in order to provide funding.
At other parks, the proposed Park Service budget cuts would close campgrounds and other facilities, while cutting hours of operation and visitor services, according to Park Service analysis. The adjustments would eliminate thousands of seasonal employees and leave key positions unfilled.
“National parks are similar to towns and counties,” Kristen Brengel of the National Parks Conservation Association says in an interview. “They have road systems, sewer systems, water systems, hotels and housing. This administration seems to have a strong desire to critically reduce the funding and staffing, which will have a massive long-term consequence for visitors, for conservation, and for historic preservation.”
At Trump’s request, Zinke has drawn up recommendations to lift restraints on industrial activities at national monuments, as well as to reduce their size. Trump referred to some monuments as “another egregious abuse of federal power,” and a “massive federal land grab.” The resulting recommendations have not yet been officially made public.
Zinke has also reportedly considered a historically unprecedented reduction to the Bears Ears monument, the home to thousands of cliff-dweller ruins, burials, and rock art displays dating back to the last Ice Age. He discussed with aides a shrinkage of about 88 percent of its land area.
Linda Nelson Nash
Wolfman Rock Art panel, Bears Ears National Monument. Bullet holes scar the petroglyphs, just one treasure that will be even more vulnerable when monument status is rescinded by the Trump Administration.
Nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, created in 1996 during the Bill Clinton administration, is also in the crosshairs. It’s the largest of all terrestrial national monuments and Trump has already announced he plans to cut it by half. Those cuts are likely to open up the massive Kaiparowits Plateau coal beds for mining. The monument has brought new prosperity to this isolated area through accelerating tourism, however, and Chamber president, Suzanne Catlett, told me that 51 of the 52 members of the local Chamber of Commerce have declared their opposition to any changes in the monuments boundaries.
In a memo to the White House that was leaked to the press, Zinke asserted that “traditional uses of the land such as grazing, timber production, mining, fishing, hunting, recreation and other cultural uses are unnecessarily restricted” at the national monuments.
When Zinke isn’t trying to shrink public lands, he is mandating environmentally degrading policies within them. A Park Service policy, supported by many superintendents, allowed twenty parks to ban sales of plastic water bottles due to a tsunami of plastic litter that made additional work for park employees. The policy was recently overturned.
At a meeting of oil industry executives in late September, Zinke groused that he has to cope with dissension in his own ranks over such policies. “I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag,” he told the American Petroleum Institute. Zinke compared the Department of the Interior to a pirate ship, apparently helmed by him and by Trump.
“Teddy Roosevelt would roll over in his grave if he could see what Donald Trump and Ryan Zinke are trying to do to our national treasures today,” Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat and a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement about the recommendations. “Secretary Zinke’s secret report to the President is the latest step in a rigged process to try and turn over our public lands to oil and gas companies.”
“Teddy Roosevelt would roll over in his grave if he could see what Donald Trump and Ryan Zinke are trying to do to our national treasures today.”
At Maine’s Katahdin monument, Zinke recommends logging—unprecedented in a Park Service-managed national monument. The land was donated, “and yet this administration is trying to push logging into this monument,” Brengel says. “They’re for people to enjoy and not to start tearing them apart and gutting them.”
Zinke also recommends that commercial fishing be allowed in about 600,000 square miles of marine national monuments where it is currently outlawed for conservation. He also wants to investigate the possible creation of four new, much smaller, national monuments.
Sally Jewell, Interior Secretary in the Obama Administration, says in an interview that her Zinke, her successor, “looks like he’s basically the Secretary of Extractive Industries—both in terms of the words that he uses and the actions that he takes.” She predicts that some of the new public lands energy development moves, which undo Obama-era, long-negotiated agreements with industry, will result in litigation that will hurt industry initiatives, and set back oil and gas developments for years.
“They do have to abide by the laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, to strike the right balance,” Jewell says. “Supporting economic development, but in a way that does not irreparably harm the environment or places that are worthy of protection for any number of reasons.” Hunting and fishing are already allowed in most of the national monuments, she notes.
Zinke’s remarks about federal employees and disloyalty “made me sick to my stomach,” Jewell says. To suggest that many of them don’t respect the flag is “outrageous to people who have devoted their lives to their public service, through Republican and Democratic administrations.”
Stephen Nash's book Grand Canyon for Sale: Public Lands versus Private Interests in the Era of Climate Change was published this fall by the University of California Press. He is a visiting senior research scholar at the University of Richmond.