The New York Times: Oil Was Central in Decision to Shrink Bears Ears Monument, Emails Show.
“Even before President Trump officially opened his high-profile review last spring of federal lands protected as national monuments, the Department of Interior was focused on the potential for oil and gas exploration at a protected Utah site, internal agency documents show.”
Link via MetaFilter.
NBC News: Tourism to U.S. under Trump is down, costing $4.6B and 40,000 jobs.
“International tourism to the U.S. began to wane after Trump took office, leading to a so-called Trump slump. Experts say that Trump’s proposed travel bans and anti-immigration language have had a negative impact on the U.S.’s attraction for foreign visitors, in addition to a weaker dollar and heightened security measures.
“It’s not a reach to say the rhetoric and policies of this administration are affecting sentiment around the world, creating antipathy toward the U.S. and affecting travel behavior,“ Adam Sacks, the president of Tourism Economics, told The New York Times.”
Link via MetaFilter.
The Washington Post: Nearly all members of National Park Service advisory panel resign in frustration.
“More than three-quarters of the members of a federally chartered board advising the National Park Service have quit out of frustration that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had refused to meet with them or convene a single meeting last year.
The resignation of 10 out of 12 National Park System Advisory Board members leaves the federal government without a functioning body to designate national historic or natural landmarks. It also underscores the extent to which federal advisory bodies have become marginalized under the Trump administration.”
Update:
NPR: Majority Of National Park Service Board Resigns, Citing Administration Indifference.
“”The President still hasn’t nominated a director for the National Park Service and Secretary Zinke has proposed tripling entrance fees at our most popular national parks,” [Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell] said. “His disregard of the advisory board is just another example of why he has earned an ‘F’ in stewardship.”
“To not have any meetings, to not have their phone calls returned, to not have any opportunity to have an audience with the officials at the interior department is really a slap in the face and I think sometimes you have to make a statement,” Sally Jewell, the secretary of the interior during President Obama’s second term, told NPR’s Here and Now on Wednesday.
“They were being ignored, and I have to believe that’s consistent with what this administration has done with other advisory boards and councils in other agencies, as well,” she said.
Since taking office, President Trump has sought to roll back protections of national parks and public lands under the auspices of the Department of the Interior. The administration has ordered a dramatic downsizing of two massive national monuments in Utah and has announced plans to open up oil drilling in protected areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic.
“If we lose the people with the knowledge and the ability to educate the next generation of young people, to appreciate our history, our culture, our natural world,” Jewell said, “then we lose the value of the national parks.””
The Economist: The strange reinvention of Icelandic. “A language both ancient and modern.”
“In perhaps their most famous example of purist creativity, when a word for computer was needed in the 1960s, the planners coined tölva, combining tala (“number“ ) and völva, an old word for prophetess. When doctors started talking about AIDS using the English acronym rather than its long, literal Icelandic translation, heilkenni áunnins ónæmisbrests [spoken], the committee coined two shorter alternatives: alnæmi [spoken], something like “all-susceptibility“ , and eyðni, which sounds like the English term, but comes from the Icelandic eyða, meaning “to destroy“ . When Icelanders started saying “podcast“ , the council quickly responded with hlaðvarp [spoken], from roots meaning “charge“ (squint and you can see hlaða as a distant cousin to “load“ ) and “throw“ .”
The Washington Post: Trump shrinks two huge national monuments in Utah, drawing praise and protests.
“Trump’s move to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by more than 1.1 million acres and more than 800,000 acres, respectively, immediately sparked an outpouring of praise from conservative lawmakers as well as activists’ protests outside the White House and in Utah. It also plunges the Trump administration into uncharted legal territory since no president has sought to modify monuments established under the 1906 Antiquities Act in more than half a century.
His decision removes about 85 percent of the designation of Bears Ears and nearly 46 percent of that for Grand Staircase-Escalante, land that potentially could now be leased for energy exploration or opened for specific activities such as motorized vehicle use.
Trump told a rally in Salt Lake City that he came to “reverse federal overreach“ and took dramatic action “because some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They’re wrong.“
“They don’t know your land, and truly, they don’t care for your land like you do,“ he added. “But from now on, that won’t matter.“ “
Read Garret’s opinion on the matter over at dangerousmeta: Ignore the Administration. Ignore the media.
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