Last week, President Biden announced the creation of two new national monuments.
The decision isn’t random. Biden wants to win back environmentalists he angered after approving the Alaska Willow Project.
The Avi Kwa Ame National Monument consists of over 500,000 federal land acres in Clark County, Nevada, while the proposed Castner Range National Monument near El Paso, Texas, will sit on roughly 7,000 public land acres. The order also directs Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo “to consider initiating a new National Marine Sanctuary designation” protecting all U.S. waters around Pacific Remote Islands within 30 days of the announcement.
Why monuments and why now? The White House claims the sites will bolster the administration’s 30-by-30 initiative to “conserve” 30 percent of waters and 30 percent of lands by 2030. The plan purportedly touts conservation yet fails to define it and insists on a whole-of-government approach to environmental stewardship. The ultimate goal is to rewild the entire U.S., which is infeasible and not conservationist.
National monuments permanently protect “antiquities”—namely objects, memorials, or sites for cultural, historic or scientific purposes—on public lands. Presidents have the authority to create, expand, diminish, or abolish them under the Antiquities Act of 1906. But the scope of presidential powers is rightly being challenged.
Section 2 of the law states presidents can create national monuments “confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”