Trump Signs Executive Order Opening More Land to Fossil Fuels

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that will reassess national monuments — potentially opening up even more federal lands for drilling, mining and other fossil fuel development.

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The review process will be conducted by the Department of the Interior’s Ryan Zinke, who will look at all monument designations allowed under the 1906 Antiquities Act. The move is seen as a way to roll back President Barack Obama's environmental protections implemented during his two terms.

Native American leaders and climate activists are worried about the move, having fought for years to gain monument designations for lands across the country in order to protect them from the fossil fuel industry. Those defending North Dakota lands from the Dakota Access Pipeline through most of 2016 also sought to designate that region as a monument.

“Donald Trump’s latest Executive Order furthers his vision for our public lands: a polluted wasteland crammed with oil rigs and strip mines as far as the eye can see,” Lukas Ross, climate and energy campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. “In his first 100 days in office Trump is determined to turn our public lands and waters into energy sacrifice zones. Americans have already deemed these places as too beautiful, too fragile and too unique for extraction. It would be unconscionable if we let Trump hand them over to his polluter cronies and campaign contributors.”

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Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, also weighed in, saying, “This is another Trump action that is another act of aggression against the inherent sovereign rights of our Native Nations to protect the traditional cultural areas and sacred places of American Indian and Alaska Native people.”

“There are many areas in this country, outside of our reserved lands that are of vital importance to our Indigenous peoples’ identity and rich cultural and spiritual history,” he continued. “The frontline Indigenous communities in our network see Trump's actions as a way to open up fossil fuel and extractive mineral development within these national monuments designated under the 1906 Antiquities Act. Trump's action must be stopped.”

Trump’s justification for the order was that Obama's use of the 1906 Antiquities Act to create monuments marked an "egregious abuse of federal power." He said the order would give "power back to the states" to decide what areas of land should be protected and which should remain open for development.

Still, Zinke said he would seek local feedback before making his recommendations, and added any move by Trump to ultimately reverse a monument designation could be tricky.

"It is untested, as you know, whether the president can do that," Zinke said.