Dear Guardian,

The National Monuments Act (aka the Antiquities Act) has had an enormous impact on our national heritage for more than a century, protecting incredible natural, cultural, and scientific sites from harm when Congress has been unwilling to respond to threats to these places. The Act has protected many of our nation’s most awe-inspiring public lands for our children and our children’s children.

Yet today the Monuments Act is under attack like never before. In April, President Trump directed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to provide recommendations for shrinking or axing national monuments designated by the three previous Presidents. Those recommendations, which were recently leaked to the media, would shrink the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon and California, and Nevada’s Gold Butte National Monument.

Zinke has also recommended slashing protections on ten monuments in order to prioritize resource extraction, such as grazing and oil and gas drilling. Among the ten are the four above and Rio Grande del Norte and Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks monuments in New Mexico.

It is important to remember that an attack on one monument is an attack on all. If Trump’s initial action is allowed to stand it will serve as precedent for future, similar efforts to gut our national monument legacy.

Guardians is committed to fighting this assault on public lands and we are asking for your help. We will notify you as soon as Trump takes any formal action to shrink our monuments or open them up to development.

We fully anticipate taking Trump to court over this. We are working with a coalition of partners to refine our legal strategy. To present the strongest overall legal challenge, Guardians itself may not sue over each of the monuments that Trump reduces or opens up to more development, but we assure you our coalition will be fighting every single move in court.

Guardians’ Climate and Energy Program is committed to defending all monument lands that Trump opens to new oil, gas, and coal leasing and development. Lands within Grand Staircase-Escalante, especially, will be at risk to exploitation by the fossil fuels industry. We intend to lead this work across the West.

And we will be asking you, our members and activist base—including the 10,000+ new activists that signed our monuments petition earlier this summer—to mobilize when the time comes.

For now, we’re asking you to thank two stalwart defenders of our national monuments for speaking out on the importance of protecting our public lands legacy: U.S. Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. Please take a minute to let them know that we appreciate their public statements against Trump’s efforts to gut our monuments.

For the wild,

 

Greg Dyson
Wild Places Program Director
WildEarth Guardians
gdyson@wildearthguardians.org

photo credit: Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, New Mexico, BLM Flickr