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In January, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called
the recently designated Bears Ears National Monument in his state a
“travesty.” Hatch vowed to work with President Donald Trump to reverse
the December 2016 designation, a stance that many other Utah Republicans
have taken in recent months. Utahns like Hatch say the effort is meant
to give states control over their own natural resources.
Conservationists call it an attack on some of the nation’s most beloved
landscapes. The attempt to abolish Bears Ears and other national
monuments is part of a fresh tack in the larger push by conservative
lawmakers to purge federal management from public land in the West.
...“I think it’s harder for Republican state legislatures (to push land
transfer) when you have the Trump administration, their friends, who are
in charge of these federal land agencies,” says Steve Bloch, legal
director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “They’re not the
enemy the way the Democrats were. (Interior Secretary) Ryan Zinke is a
Montana Republican; Utah politicians don’t see him as very different
from them.” Though the GOP official platform
last year still included language to promote a massive transfer of
federal land to state control, Trump has indicated he does not support
such a move. Zinke explicitly opposes a transfer.
...Trump and Zinke, on the other hand, haven’t been vocal about their
plans for national monuments, or for the Antiquities Act. Last week, a
former member of Trump’s transition team told E&E News that the president may be considering executive orders to “clarify” use of the act and “something on monument designations.”
...Kayje Booker of Montana Wilderness Association says she’s seeing another
shift in tactic away from wholesale land transfer, with the same goal
of undermining federal control: transferring management but not title.
“Some of the folks that had been pushing for (title) transfer are now
pushing for management transfer as a foot in the door strategy,” Booker
told HCN. Last year Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, proposed a bill to do something similar: making counties primary managers of certain federal lands.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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