In a quest to shrink national monuments last year, senior Interior Department officials dismissed evidence that these public lands boosted tourism and spurred archaeological discoveries, according to documents the department released this month and retracted a day later.
The thousands of pages of email correspondence chart how Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his aides instead tailored their survey of protected sites to emphasize the value of logging, ranching, and energy development that would be unlocked if they were not designated as national monuments.
Comments that the department’s Freedom of Information Act officers made in the documents show that they sought to keep some of the references out of public view because they were “revealing (the) strategy” behind the review.
Presidents can establish national monuments in federal land or waters if they determine that cultural, historical or natural resources are imperiled. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing Zinke to review 27 national monuments established over a period of 21 years, arguing that his predecessors had overstepped their authority in placing these large sites off-limits to development.
Trump already has massively reduced two of Utah’s largest national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, and has not ruled out altering others.
The new documents show that as Zinke conducted his four-month review, Interior officials rejected material that would justify keeping protections in place and sought out evidence that could buttress the case for unraveling them.
On July 3, 2017, Bureau of Land Management official Nikki Moore wrote colleagues about five draft economic reports on sites under scrutiny, noting that there is a paragraph within each on “our ability to estimate the value of energy and/or minerals forgone as a result of the designations.” That reference was redacted on the grounds it could “reveal strategy about the (national monument) review process.”
Officials also singled out BLM acting Deputy Director John Ruhs’s July 28 response to questions from Katherine MacGregor, acting assistant secretary of lands and minerals management, as eligible to be redacted.
MacGregor had asked about the logging potential of Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument if Trump reversed the expansion that Barack Obama carried out at the end of his second term.