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Sunday, December 3rd, 2017

Trump Is Vandalizing Our Wild Heritage

Author:     BRUCE BABBITT
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     DEC. 1, 2017
Link: Trump Is Vandalizing Our Wild Heritage
Stephan:  

Maybe it's because wilderness areas have been a big part of my life, and many of my most cherished memories occurred on backpacks, canoe trips, rock climbing, or just hiking in protected areas where the land exists much as it always has. Whatever the reason I find the assault on these protected areas by Trump and his zombie Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, particularly offensive.

Bruce Babbitt was the secretary of interior from 1993 to 2001 and the Democratic governor of Arizona from 1978 to 1987, and the hallmark of his career has been the protection of these wild areas. He knows whereof he speaks, and here is his view of these developments.

A reservoir in Blanding, Utah, just outside Bears Ears National Monument.
Credit: KC McGinnis/ The New York Times

America’s wild places survive by the grace of a human promise. For more than 150 years, it has been an article of collective faith and national pride that once we protect a wild place, it is to be safeguarded for all time.

But in the coming days, President Trump will try to shatter that promise.

The president is expected to travel to Utah on Monday to announce that he is repealing protections for as many as two million acres of public land in the American West, an area more than six times the size of Grand Teton National Park, including vast portions of two national monuments in the state, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Mr. Trump’s plans add up to the largest elimination of protected areas in American history. He is a vandal in our midst, coming in person to lay waste […]

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