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President Biden is expected to restore two national monuments in Utah and a separate marine conservation area in New England on Friday after former President Trump removed all three environmental protections under his administration.
Biden is expected to sign three proclamations restoring protections for Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts national monuments. In doing so, Biden “fulfills a key promise and upholds the long-standing principle that America’s national parks, monuments and other protected areas must be protected forever and for all people.”
The restoration of the Bears Ears National Monument brings back the limits set by former President Obama in 2016 and retains the protection of an additional 11,200 acres added by Trump in 2017. This action will ensure that the total protected area of the Bears Ears National Monument covers 1.36 million hectares.
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Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, was disappointed with Biden’s decision to restore the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments, which the Trump administration significantly reduced in 2017.
This July 15, 2016, file photo shows “Moonhouse” in McLoyd Canyon, near Blanding, Utah, during the tour of US Home Secretary Sally Jewell. (AP Photo / Rick Bowmer, file)
Grand Staircase-Escalante was first protected in 1996. Biden’s decision restores the protected area to 1.87 million acres.
The monuments cover vast expanses of southern Utah where red rocks reveal petroglyphs and rock dwellings and distinctive knolls rise from a grassy valley. Trump used the Antiquities Act to cut 2 million acres (800,000 hectares) from the two monuments, calling restrictions on mining and other energy production a “massive land grab” that “doesn’t should never have happened “.
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His actions reduced Bears Ears, on land considered sacred by Native American tribes, to just over 200,000 acres (80,900 hectares) by 85%. They cut Grand Staircase-Escalante by almost half, leaving it at around 1 million acres (405,000 hectares). Both monuments were created by Democratic presidents.
The Upper Gulch section of the Escalante Canyons in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument features steep sandstone walls, sometimes broken up by tributary canyons.
(AP Photo / Douglas C. Pizac)
The Trump administration’s cuts to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante have paved the way for possible coal mines and oil and gas drilling on land that was previously off-limits.
And in New England, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument in the Atlantic Ocean, southeast of Cape Cod, will return to its original protections under Obama in 2016. Under Biden’s order, recreational fishing ” can continue “. Trump had changed the rules under his administration to allow commercial fishing at the marine monument. The monument is made up of 4,913 horizontal square miles.
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The restoration of the protection of the monuments conforms to the recommendations of the Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.
The White House has said that Biden’s protection of monuments is just one of a series of steps the Biden administration has taken to restore protection to some of America’s “most cherished lands and waters, many of which are sacred to the tribal nations “.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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