THE LIGHTBULB
Pilot Rock rises into the clouds in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument near Lincoln, Ore. (AP Photo/Jeff Barnard, File)
President Trump told an audience in Salt Lake City in January that he was shrinking the size of two national monuments in the state so that Utah's natural resources were no longer “controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington.”
But in the months leading up to that proclamation on the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments, Trump's own political appointees back east were themselves deciding what should be done with public lands now under their control.
Documents recently released by the Interior Department under the Freedom of Information Act on Monday reveal Trump officials' intentions: More logging, more fishing and more ranching.
For example, The Post's Juliet Eilperin reports that Katherine MacGregor, acting assistant secretary of lands and minerals management, asked in July 2017 what would happen if Trump reversed President Barack Obama's expansion of Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.
Bureau of Land Management acting deputy director John Ruhs suggested it would be good news for loggers. “Previous timber sale planning and development in the [expansion area] can be immediately resumed,” Ruhs wrote in response.
And two months later, the staffer leading that national monument review, Randal Bowman, suggested deleting language that said that most fishing vessels near another national monument considered for reduction, Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument in the Atlantic Ocean, “generated 5% or less of their annual landings from within the monument.”
The reason? That language “undercuts the case for the ban being harmful.”
The emails show more candid conversations than ordinary FOIA releases because the Interior Department sent out the unredacted correspondence by accident. “Interior’s FOIA office sent out a batch of documents to journalists and advocacy groups on July 16 that they later removed online,” Eilperin wrote.
Democrats took the opportunity to lambast Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. "The fact that the Trump administration places no value on the booming recreation economy that generates over $887 billion annually is no surprise to those of us who have been watching their shameful record of exploiting our public lands over the last two years," Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement.
The release is sure to fan the flames of environmentalists, Native Americans and others angry with Trump's decision in Utah. The Trump administration's removal of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from special protection was one of the more tangible environmental rollbacks of Obama-policy policy.
From Friends of the Earth:
.@SecretaryZinke's dismissal of evidence showing the benefits of national monuments proves what we've known all along: This administration sold off our public lands to benefit Trump's Big Oil allieswashingtonpost.com/national/healt…
From Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:
Oops! @Interior officials accidentally released documents showing how hard they were working to reduce public lands. Then retracted them. #toolate washingtonpost.com/national/healt…
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