Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
Credit: Gage Skidmore/flickr

In April, Donald Trump released an executive order calling on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review the national monument designations ordered by various presidents over the past two decades, to determine if those decisions were “made without adequate public outreach and coordination with relevant stakeholders.” On Sunday, The Washington Post leaked the memo that Zinke wrote, post-review, to the White House, which the administration has so far declined to release.

Reading the draft memo, what quickly becomes clear is that the only people Zinke considers “relevant stakeholders” when it comes to national monuments are various extraction industries, from timber to oil and gas to commercial fishing. Local residents, Native American tribes, businesses that rely on the tourism industry, environmentalists and future generations of Americans can all go jump in a polluted lake.

“It confirmed our suspicions that this will be the largest rollback of protections for public lands in American history,” said Kate Kelly, the […]