National Monuments From Mr. Obama

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/opinion/national-monuments-from-mr-obama.html

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Bill Clinton was like a kid with a new toy when, fairly late in his presidency, and to the great annoyance of Congress, he discovered his powers under the Antiquities Act to create national monuments with a stroke of the presidential pen — and then busily set about protecting areas of great scenic, environmental or historical significance that might otherwise be ignored by Congress or threatened by development. President Obama, to the delight of conservationists, is now very much on the same schedule.

On Wednesday, a day before the 100th birthday of the National Park Service, Mr. Obama designated 87,500 acres of Maine’s north woods as a national monument, to be added to the park system and protected by the service against commercial exploitation. The transaction cost the government nothing. The land belonged to Roxanne Quimby, who lived in the Maine woods before making a fortune as a co-founder of Burt’s Bees and accumulating property with the idea of turning it into a national park. Her family also provided an endowment of $20 million for maintenance.

Then, on Friday, Mr. Obama used the same authority to greatly expand a national marine monument (established a decade ago by President George W. Bush) off the coast of his native Hawaii. The monument will encompass 582,578 square miles of land and sea, and provide protection from commercial exploitation for an estimated 7,000 species that are increasingly stressed by climate change.

Both designations drew criticism — from timber interests in Maine, fishermen in Hawaii and officials in both places who resent federal stewardship. Though neither designation will impose economic hardship, there is invariably complaining whenever Washington asserts a public interest in land that states and private interests think should be theirs. But if presidents waited until there was complete agreement, Teddy Roosevelt would never have protected the Grand Canyon and Franklin Roosevelt would never have protected Joshua Tree National Park.

It is our hope that Mr. Obama will continue to seek out good candidates for monument designation, regardless of the political opposition. One controversial but indisputably compelling candidate is known as Bears Ears, an area of about two million acres in southeastern Utah of great natural beauty and rich in Native American artifacts that are increasingly at risk from the kind of thievery and destruction that inspired the Antiquities Act in the first place.

A second candidate is a monument proposal from Representative Raúl Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, that would permanently forbid mining in 1.7 million acres adjacent to the Grand Canyon. A third, which is rapidly gaining support among Northeastern politicians, would protect a dramatic group of underwater canyons and mountains rising as high as 7,000 feet off the ocean floor and located about 150 miles southeast of Cape Cod. Known as the New England Coral Canyons and Seamounts, the monument would be the first in the Atlantic Ocean.

Much of Mr. Obama’s late-blooming enthusiasm can be traced to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who oversees the Park Service and who, like her predecessor, Ken Salazar, has been a strong defender of public lands and the chronically underfunded parks system. But she has some unfinished business of her own: dying coral reefs in Biscayne National Park off Miami that need to be put off limits to recreational fishermen, Reagan-era oil and gas leases adjacent to Glacier National Park that need to be canceled, and a leasing plan that seeks to minimize development near Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah that needs to be made final.

To build on what is becoming a strong environmental record, Mr. Obama will need help from the people around him. But ultimately, it’s not his personal legacy that’s at stake. It’s what this generation leaves for the next.