Obama Administration To Protect More Than 240,000 Acres Of American Treasures

Rio Grande del Norte in New Mexico

President Obama plans to use his executive authority to permanently protect five new national monuments next week.  This marks a significant step for the administration: It is now willing to step in and protect special places when Congress refuses to act.

The new monuments will be:

-  Rio Grande del Norte, in New Mexico

-  San Juan Islands, in Washington

-  First State, in Delaware

-  Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad, in Maryland

-  Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers, in Ohio

Of particular note is Rio Grande del Norte, which at 240,000 acres is the largest monument that the administration has designated thus far.  Also, First State National Monument in Delaware will change the fact that the state is the only one in the U.S. without a national park unit.

The announcement of these designations under the 1906 Antiquities Act fits well with President Obama’s challenge to Congress during his State of the Union address:  “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.”  The last Congress was the first since World War II that failed to protect a single new acre of parks, monuments, or wilderness, despite millions of acres proposed for protection by adjacent communities.  As John Podesta, Chair of the Center for American Progress put it, “The last Congress was the most anti-environmental in history, so President Obama is right to respond to the calls of local communities that want their public lands protected.”

The permanent protection of hundreds of thousands of acres is also critical because it is the administration’s next step towards putting the conservation of public lands on equal ground with energy development. In the president’s first term, he leased 6.3 million acres of public lands to oil and gas companies, while only 2.6 million acres were protected by Congress and the executive combined.   Last month former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt called on the administration to permanently protect one acre for each one drilled.

Today’s news is welcome for any American who see the economic, health, and other long-term benefits of protected public lands, and is an important advancement for the president in the establishment of his conservation legacy.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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Paul Ryan Budget Contemplates Selling Off ‘Millions Of Acres’ Of Public Land

This morning House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) offered his fiscal year 2014 budget, which the Wall Street Journal called “almost identical” to the Romney-Ryan presidential platform last year.  In addition to cutting taxes for the rich and preserving tax breaks for Big Oil, the budget offers an extreme and flawed view of public lands and energy development.

For example, in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal last night, Ryan offered a confused vision of government programs designed to purchase lands from willing sellers:

America has the world’s largest natural gas, oil and coal reserves—enough natural gas to meet the country’s needs for 90 years. Yet the administration is buying up land to prevent further development. Our budget opens these lands to development, so families will have affordable energy.

In actuality, there are only limited instances in which the federal government buys land, which can occur via two programs.  First, the Land and Water Conservation Fund uses receipts from offshore oil and gas drilling (not taxpayer dollars) to purchase inholdings from willing sellers within national parks, monuments, and other areas.   As an example, a piece of the Flight 93 Memorial was protected through an LWCF land acquisition.

Additionally, there are already statutes and regulations in place that allow the government to sell or dispose of certain public lands (see, for example, Sections 203 and 209 of the Federal Land and Policy Management Act).  Importantly, there must be willing sellers before the government purchases additional land to make it public, and so it is unclear what Ryan means when he says the administration is trying to “prevent further development.”

And, despite the fact that we already have a program in place to sell and dispose of federal lands, the Ryan budget explicitly calls for selling off public lands:

In the last year alone, Republicans put forth proposals to sell unneeded federal property.  Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah has proposed to sell millions of acres of unneeded federal land… Such sales could also potentially be encouraged by reducing appropriations to various agencies.

Selling off public lands to then be used for extractive purposes is not supported by the American public.  Indeed, a recent poll from Colorado College State of the Rockies project determined that only 30 percent of voters in six western states agreed with the statement that “too much public land” is a serious problem.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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