When President Donald Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act in August, he touted himself as the White House’s greatest champion of the environment since Teddy Roosevelt.
It was a gag-worthy comparison, given Trump’s assaults on environmental regulations across the board, and now his administration has further revealed what a lie it was.
It did so by — wait for it — gutting the same Great American Outdoors Act that Trump had signed.
On Nov. 9, while no one was looking, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt signed an order giving governors and local jurisdictions the power to veto federal land acquisitions made under the measure. More specifically, the order applied to acreage purchased under the decades-old Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which had received permanent funding under the Great American Outdoors Act.
Cue the lighting of cigars by Big Oil, the timber industry, real estate developers and so forth. The order gave business interests a wide-open door to lobby county commissioners to prevent land from being conserved and instead keep it available for commercial purposes.
The order was also a big win for the sovereign citizen movement, the violent extremists who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the federal government and believe all public lands overseen by the feds should be returned to the states.
It’s one thing to allow state and local officials to scotch a federal project that could adversely affect the environment and public health — the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository jumps to mind.
But Trump’s action flies in the face of the intent of the longstanding LWCF, which uses royalties from fossil fuel operations on public lands to establish and protect parks, wildlife refuges, national forests and so forth. In Nevada, the LWCF has provided nearly $14 million for an array of outdoor sites: the Red Rock and Lake Mead national conservation areas, Valley of Fire State Park, Sunset Park and the Springs Preserve in Las Vegas, the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and more.
It’s easy to see how the veto power could kneecap the LWCF as short-term political issues take precedent over the need for long-term preservation. Business interests will no doubt argue that the prospect of job creation and tax revenue from commercial projects would outweigh the benefits of conserving land. For commissioners in cash-strapped rural counties, those arguments could be particularly persuasive. And the ability for locals to derail purchases breeds corruption: If an official can’t be won over, can they be bribed instead?
Our wild areas are not assets to be exploited by a single generation — they are assets that need to be preserved and managed for future generations as well. Putting the politics of the moment into play is a formula for long-term disaster.
The Trump administration’s subterfuge was upsetting, because the Great American Outdoors Act was a true step forward as it was originally intended. The bipartisan legislation was described as one of the most significant conservation measures in a decade, as it contained $9.5 billion in funding for outdoor areas and provided $900 million in annual funding for the LWCF.
But with Bernhardt’s order, it became clear that Trump’s intent in signing the act was to greenwash his environmental record to appeal to moderate voters, not to conserve land.
Trump, who previously had tried to gut the LWCF, also may have been fluffing up a couple of Republican senators who were seeking re-election: Steve Daines of Montana and Cory Gardner of Colorado. He mentioned both of them during the signing ceremony, giving them credit for steering the measure through Congress even though both had previously tried to either water it down or gut it. (For the record, Daines won and Gardner was defeated by former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper.)
All of this highlights the exact problem with the current move: The lens needed to properly manage our wild lands must have a longer focus than the lens of a politician looking for votes in the next election cycle.
As one conservationist told the Huffington Post, “Once the election was done, it was open season on land protection.” And now that Trump lost the vote, it appears Bernhardt is “going to throw as much sand into the gears as he can on his way out.”
Let’s be clear: The Great American Outdoors Act was a terrific piece of legislation in its unmolested form. It’s critical for the nation to preserve its ever-shrinking areas of wild country, to provide outdoor activities for Americans, protect the environment and ensure that future generations can experience these national treasures.
The good news is that there’s a new administration on the way, which can hopefully restore the legislation. Better yet, Congress should amend the act to expressly exclude veto power.