Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.Photo: George Frey/Getty. Inset: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty
PresidentJoe Bidenis making some of the country’s wide open spaces even wider.
The White House announced plans on Thursday to protect the country’s first marine national monument and to restore the boundaries of national monuments in Utah that the Trump administration slashed in thelargest national monument reductionin U.S. history, which Trump argued was to correct government “overreach.”
Biden, 78, will sign proclamations on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument in the Atlantic on Friday as part of his administrations “effort to better protect, conserve, and restore the lands and waters that sustain the health of communities and power our economy,” the White House said.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, thefirst Native American to hold a cabinet-level positionin any administration, visited the sites in Utah earlier this year and was instrumental in the decision to restore the public lands.
Halaand tweeted Friday about her visit to Utah and her recommendation to restore the protections.
“While in Utah, I had the honor of speaking with so many who care deeply about this land. The historic connection between Indigenous peoples and the land surrounding Bears Ears and the power of the landscape to the Tribal and local communities is undeniable,“she wrote.
The White House touted the decision as a campaign promise kept to uphold “the longstanding principle that America’s national parks, monuments, and other protected areas are to be protected for all time and for all people.”
Bears Ears National Monument.eorge Frey/Getty
The “world-class geological objects of historic or scientific interest” within the restored 1.87 million acres of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument include “vast paleontological objects including significant fossils of marine and brackish water mollusks, turtles, crocodilians, lizards, dinosaurs, fishes, and mammals, as well as a host of cultural objects associated with both ancient indigenous cultures and early Latter-Day Saint pioneers, including, but not limited to, petroglyphs and pictographs, occupation sites, campsites, granaries, and trails,” according to the announcement.
Map of Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.NOAA
PresidentBarack Obamacreated the first marine national monument in 2016, which protected the waters of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Units, which areroughly the size of Connecticut.
source: people.com
