June 14, 2021 — Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has recommended in a confidential report that President Biden restore full protections to three national monuments diminished by President Donald Trump, including Utah’s Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and a huge marine reserve off New England. The move, described by two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was not yet public, would preserve about 5 million acres of federal land and water.
A broad coalition of conservationists, scientists and tribal activists has urged Biden to expand the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, which were established by Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, respectively, to their original boundaries. Trump cut Bears Ears by nearly 85 percent, and Grand Staircase-Escalante almost in half, in December 2017. A year ago, he permitted commercial fishing on the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which removed most of the monument’s protections.
The White House is still deliberating, according to these people, but Biden favors the idea of overturning Trump’s actions. Employing the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president broad latitude to protect threatened land and water, ranks as one of the easiest ways for Biden to conserve areas unilaterally.
All three areas have been embroiled in legal fights for years. Fishing operators challenged Obama’s 2016 decision to restrict commercial activities for 4,913 square miles off Cape Cod, Mass., which banned seabed mining and some fishing activities immediately while giving lobster and red crab operators seven years to stop fishing there. The region is home to many species of deep-sea coral, sharks, sea turtles, seabirds and deep-diving marine mammals, as well as massive underground canyons and seamounts that rise as high as 7,700 feet from the ocean floor.
“This area is very important to us,” Jim Budi, an official with the American Sword and Tuna Harvesters, said in an interview. He added that his members brought in about 25 percent of their annual catch from the region last summer after Trump lifted commercial fishing restrictions. They’ve sustainably caught swordfish by staying below limits set by federal regulators, he said.
Reviving the Obama-era limits, Budi said, “doesn’t do any conservation good, whatsoever.”
Still, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. gave some conservatives hope three months ago when he sharply criticized the expanse of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument. Noting that the law was initially aimed at protecting Pueblo artifacts in the Southwest, he said the accompanying protected land must “be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
“A statute permitting the President in his sole discretion to designate as monuments ‘landmarks,’ ‘structures,’ and ‘objects’ — along with the smallest area of land compatible with their management — has been transformed into a power without any discernible limit to set aside vast and amorphous expanses of terrain above and below the sea,” Roberts wrote, as the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a lower court decision on the monument. “The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument at issue in this case demonstrates how far we have come from indigenous pottery.”
Atlantic Red Crab Company owner Jon Williams, who has intervened in an ongoing lawsuit to defend Trump’s changes to the monument, said he wouldn’t hesitate to challenge the administration should it reimpose restrictions there.
“I’m already standing by,” he said. “And we’ve already been given a road map to the Supreme Court.”