Biden to review Trump s changes to national monuments
by Brady McCombs And Patrick Whittle, The Associated Press
Posted Jan 20, 2021 2:23 pm EDT
Last Updated Jan 20, 2021 at 2:28 pm EDT
SALT LAKE CITY President Joe Biden said Wednesday he plans to review the Trump administration’s downsizing of two sprawling national monuments in the American Southwest, including one on lands considered sacred to Native Americans who joined environmental groups in suing when the boundaries were redrawn in 2017.
The new Democratic president also plans to ask the Department of the Interior to reassess a rule change that allowed commercial fishing at a marine conservation area off the New England coast. The move was heralded by fishing groups and decried by environmentalists.
The move Biden can make to reverse centuries of exploitation of Native Americans washingtonpost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from washingtonpost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Source: Salt Lake TribuneNews|December 26, 2020
Weeks before the November election, a Utah agency leased 33 units of land to mineral and hydrocarbon companies.
The offerings are a routine practice for the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), which uses the money raised to help fund public schools. But environmentalists criticized the October sale’s inclusion of four oil-gas leases in San Juan County that overlap with the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument, as they were designated by President Barack Obama in 2016, and could potentially complicate a future land exchange.
Obama’s 1.3 million-acre national monument was created at the request of five Native American tribes with ties to the region, and it included hundreds of thousands of cultural sites dating back 10,000 years. Proponents of the monument, including the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, have argued that the area’s rich natural and cultural resources make it incompatible with