Executive Order 13792: Review of National Monuments

What the Executive Order says

This Executive Order (EO) is entitled "Review of Designations under the Antiquities Act".  The EO argues that in a number of cases, areas have been designated as National Monuments under the Antiquities Act both as an act of overreach as well as in face of significant and valid objections of local citizens and governments.  It concludes that a number of National Monuments are hindrances to the desired land use by locals and therefore should be reduced in size or abolished entirely.

Section 1

This section of the EO defines what the policy of the administration is with regards to National Monuments.  This references 54 USC 320301 to 320303 and asserts that some of the recent National Monument designations that have been made did not meet the correct balance between the protection of landmarks, objects and structures vs. land use of designated lands and adjacent private land.  Looking at the text of 54 USC 320301, it would actually seem that designation of areas as National Monuments on the basis of the argument that they are unique and therefore protectable ecologies is incorrect.  Let me be clear: I am not saying it would be morally incorrect to save unique ecological areas, but that using 54 USC 320301 to do it is legally indefensible.  In 320303, it states that there are Regulations to be issued that govern the implementations of the chapter of the USC, I have not looked these up.

Section 2

This section has multiple subsections.  In Subsection (a), it sets forth criteria for a review to be made of designations by Presidents under 54 USC 320301.  These reference the law and also add in some general criteria of a partisan nature which is sufficiently vague such that any designation can get included where desired.
Subsection (b) call for the Secretary of the Interior to co-ordinate with other departments of the Federal Government while Subsection (c) calls for consultation with local, state and tribal governments.
In Subsection (d), it requires that the Secretary of the Interior provides an interim report to the President within 45 days.  In recent days, there have been new stories suggesting impending rule-making  to decertify or modify the boundaries of 27 different National Monuments which includes one in Oregon.  This story notes that the regulations website which accepts comments on proposed rules will open May 12th, 2017 for comments about this topic.  Clearly, it is too soon for an interim report as required by this subsection, but someone at the Department of the Interior has been thinking about this for months even before the EO was issued.
The last subsection calls for a final report of recommended actions which are consistent with the policy of the administration as expressed in section 1 to be issued within 120 days of the EO.  It is to include Presidential actions, rulemaking and legislative recommendations.  Stepping back to gain some perspective, I don't really understand why all of this kind of thinking had not been done during the transition period and why it seems that this President and his team are only now starting to think about how to turn some vaguely enunciated policy into an implementation of laws and regulations.

Section 3

This section is boilerplate caveats that are required to assure the constitutionality of the Executive Orders.

My comments

There is a continuum on humankind's relationship with the biosphere: humans should exploit it to the fullest extent being at one end and that humans should preserve it to the fullest extent being at the other end.  Intermediate positions rest on some informed notion or definition of what would be considered fair and responsible use of environmental resources.  I doubt very much that most people do not realize that humans have an impact on the environment and that either the environment can absorb that impact or it cannot.  The most egregious domestic example of the inability to absorb the impact is Love Canal.  To some extent accurate predictions can be made ahead of time to determine whether an ecosystem can absorb the impact of some specific human activity.  But the imperfection of the predictions gives rise to two schools of thought:  those that think that if there are large margins of error, exploitation should be started and adjusted after damage starts to appear; and those that think where this is some chance of damage, activity should be curtailed as any damage is undesirable.
Clearly the current administration is staking out positions on the exploitation end of the continuum.  This does have some risk.  Clearly the chances that another environmental disaster along the lines of Love Canal have risen in the past 100 days due to the actions taken by this administration.  The failure at the Federal level can be mitigated by State, local and tribal protections.  However, these additional burdens to local governments exacerbate their fiscal positions with so many other issues involving transfers to States being on the table already.  But, as citizens, all we can do is start at the local levels and voice our informed notions of where to draw the line on reasonable exploitation of natural resources.