Just four money-in-politics reforms remain in Democracy Madness

Last week, in his latest attempted liquidation of our shared heritage, President Trump signed two executive orders eviscerating protections for close to three million acres of our national monuments: Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. From the Oval Office, a president who has never even seen these sacred sites reduced them by roughly 90%, dwarfing his 2017 attempt at a similar land grab by about a million acres, leaving only 300,000 acres of protected land. These cuts will directly threaten critical wildlife habitats, put nearly 100,000 irreplaceable archaeological sites at risk of destruction, and fracture an interconnected indigenous homeland that has been stewarded by Native tribes since time immemorial. To Trump, it’s just another real estate deal.

The Trump regime has tried to portray this set-up to sell off as an effort to restore public access. During the Oval Office photo op where the president signed the proclamations, he said of the monuments: “You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing. You can’t do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it.” That is, to put it mildly, a malicious lie. All your favorite forms of outdoor recreation—from hiking and camping to fishing and hunting—are allowed there, which Trump might know if he had ever visited the land he decided is not worth preserving. In fact, the Antiquities Act doesn’t limit ordinary public use but rather the extent to which an area can be subject to mining and drilling. So much for the land of the free. Trump wants to make it a whole lot easier for extractive industries and private development interests to privatize and pillage these sacred lands for financial gain. Home of the brave? Not an ounce of courage to refuse the fuel lobby when it comes to our public lands. At least the law is on our side. As the President of the National Parks Conservation Association put it, this is both “a betrayal to the American people and illegal.”