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JAKARTA, Indonesia - The closest most people will ever get to remote Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, is a computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains where the American company mines the world's largest gold reserve. With a few taps on a keyboard, satellite images quickly reveal the deepening spiral that Freeport has bored out of its Grasberg mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. They also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the New Orleans-based company has...

The Biden administration has revoked more of former President Donald Trump’s executive orders, including the “Preventing Online Censorship” and “Protecting American Monuments” orders from last May and July. The administration also revoked the Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes, Rebranding United States Foreign Assistance To Advance American Influence, Building the National Garden of American HeroesBuilding the National Garden of American Heroes, and Protecting Americans From Overcriminalization Through Regulatory Reform executive orders. ..... Snip.... Trump’s order about preventing online censorship stated that “free speech is the bedrock of American democracy. Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First...

....Significant changes are also in the works at the Interior Department, where Biden instructed the agency to review three national monuments that were altered during the Trump administration. The review of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments -- where former President Trump reduced the amount of protected land -- and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monuments, which Trump opened to commercial fishing, is supposed to determine whether it “would be appropriate” to restore the previous “boundaries and conditions.”... ....The Biden administration has also listed dozens of Trump-era environmental rules across several agencies that it plans to review,...

USA Today - headline and link only

President Donald Trump announced Friday that he would donate his salary for this financial quarter to the National Park Service for the restoration of America’s national monuments. The president announced the news on Twitter, together with an image of the $100,000 check. “I promised YOU I would not take a dime of salary as your President. I donate the entire $400,000!” Trump wrote.

Today marked an important moment as President Donald Trump made much-needed changes to sweeping land use designations made under previous administrations. The Trump administration listened to the combined voices of individual citizens, tribal members, small communities, and elected officials from the county, state, and federal levels. In doing so, Trump has responded to Utahns’ calls by dramatically reducing the size of both the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, which had a combined land mass larger than the state of Connecticut. This is a good step forward in reforming a law that has too easily been abused to drown...

The President Stole Your Land In an illegal move, the president just reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. This is the largest elimination of protected land in American history.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended Tuesday that President Trump shrink two more national monuments and change how six others are managed, expanding the administration’s effort to roll back what it sees as excessive use of presidential authority to protect public lands. Zinke, a day after Trump signed proclamations reducing the size of two Utah national monuments, urged the president to cut Nevada’s Gold Butte and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou.

During a speech Monday, the president said he is signing two proclamations which will shrink the Bears Ears National Monument and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. He called the measures a reversal of federal overreach, and says the move will restore the rights of land to the people of Utah. The president says the residents of the state know how to protect and conserve their own land, and Washington politicians do not. He added, lands must be protected and now will be protected by this new measure.

Former Navy SEAL and current Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke delivers brief remarks at the Capitol Building in Utah. Prior to President Trump signing a national monument proclamation, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told a packed-house crowd the Antiquities Act, an obscure law that Barack Obama used to broaden federal monuments in Utah, ‘was never meant to prevent. It was meant to protect.’ “Our public land is for the public to use,” Zinke said.

SALT LAKE CITY — President Trump is expected to announce a historic reduction to Bears Ears National Monument on Monday, a sprawling region of red rock canyons in Utah that has been at the center of a national fight over how much land a president can legally set aside for protection. The Trump administration plans to announce that he will shrink the monument by between 77 and 92 percent, according to statements from the office of Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah. It would be the largest reduction of a national monument to date, and it comes as the administration...

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has recommended scaling back 10 of the 27 national monuments under a review directed by President Trump. The scale of the monument changes was disclosed in a draft memorandum obtained by several news services on Sunday night. The White House said in a statement that it does not comment on leaked documents. According to the memo, Zinke would shrink 4 of the monuments on the list, and significantly alter the rules of land use for the remaining six. The memo went to President Trump last month but the administration would not disclose which monuments would be...

In a report Zinke submitted to the White House, the secretary recommended reducing the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, as well as Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, according to multiple individuals briefed on the decision. President Bill Clinton declared the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996, while President Barack Obama designated the 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears last year. Cascade-Siskiyou, which now encompasses more than 113,000 acres, was established by Clinton shortly before leaving office and expanded by Obama in January.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke visited Bunkerville, Nevada over the weekend and spoke with reporters of his support for the national monuments. In April, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Secretary to review all monuments since 1996 that included more than 100,000 acres. Zinke visited the Gold Butte and Basin and Range National Monuments as part of his review. Zinke told reporters that he is an advocate for monuments. “I am an advocate for public access,” he said. Zinke also said that he is in favor of the traditional uses, specifically citing ‘ranching’ as a part of the culture...

It seems you can’t get anything done in California these days unless you can portray it as some element of the movement to RESIST Trump. (Well, you can try to put everyone on a single payer health plan which cost more than twice the value of the entire state’s economy, but that’s an exception.) The latest brainstorm comes to us from the state’s attorney general, who for some reason believes that the President of the United States doesn’t have any authority to modify national parks or monuments, though where he cooked up this idea remains unclear. (LA Times) California’s attorney...

"Any perceived benefits from the designation of huge landscape monuments need to be weighed against the impacts suffered by those who have traditionally used the lands," Kathleen Clarke, the former Bureau of Land Management director and now head of the Utah Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, told a House Natural Resources subcommittee. "Landscapes don't disappear, but jobs and artifacts do." {snip} The testimony comes as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, as ordered by President Donald Trump, is reviewing the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase designations and other national monuments named in the past 21 years. Zinke must report back recommendations by...

Over the last 20 years, presidents from both sides of the aisle have used the stroke of a pen to lock up hundreds of millions of acres using the Antiquities Act, but none more egregiously than President Obama. In 2014, then-President Obama said, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone. And that’s all I need.” This braggadocious one-liner was the basis for devastating monument designations by the Obama administration. President Trump’s recent Executive Order directs Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review national monuments created by the Antiquities Act since 1996 that exceed 100,000 acres and to...

Obama sidestepped Congress to declare 33 national monuments by executive order under the Antiquities Act of 1906 After eight years of oppressive restrictions on every facet of the mining industry from coal to gold, miners are finally beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel. President Donald Trump today signed an executive order to review national monument designations made under the Antiquities Act by former President Barack Obama.

A new legal analysis concludes that President Trump could undo the Bears Ears National Monument. The analysis from the Pacific Legal Foundation finds that a president can revoke a national monument if they determine the areas under protection are "illegally large." The analysis was conducted by Todd Gaziano and John Yoo. From E&E News: Yoo and Gaziano argue, however, that even if a president does not have a "general discretionary revocation power," Trump could seek to revoke monuments by declaring them overly large. "The Congress that enacted the Antiquities Act did not intend monuments of that size to be established...

A coalition of commercial fishing groups filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to challenge the creation of a national monument off the coast of New England. President Barack Obama created the monument in September using executive authority under the Antiquities Act. The monument is called the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, and it is made up of nearly 5,000 square miles of underwater canyons and mountains. The creation of the monument closed the area to most commercial fishing and has been opposed by fishing groups for months. A coalition of the groups filed their lawsuit Tuesday in federal court....