Keep America Wild

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/opinion/trump-national-monuments-katahdin-woods.html

Version 0 of 1.

In 1846, when he was 29, Henry David Thoreau tried to climb to the top of Mount Katahdin in Maine. Living in Massachusetts, where the virgin forest was long since cut down, Thoreau had never seen true wilderness, and the sheer power of the wild Maine woods sent him into an ecstasy of spiritual overload.

“This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night,” he proclaimed, rejoicing in the “rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!”

Lost in fog at Katahdin’s upper altitudes and defeated by the rugged mountain, Thoreau never did reach the summit. But his words have lived on in the deepest parts of the American mind, shaping this country’s conscience toward nature. Last year, President Obama designated 87,563 acres of the land that so moved Thoreau as the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument — a win for the solid earth, the actual world.

In a few weeks, Thoreau will turn 200, giving the nation a cause for celebrating. But just in time for the bicentennial, the Trump administration is considering stripping Katahdin Woods and Waters of its new designation.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke visited Katahdin this week as part of a systematic review of more than two dozen national monuments being considered for delisting. He’s acting under the executive order of President Trump, who has called the creation of the monuments “abuses.” The president has set his developer’s eye on public property, promising to “free it up” and threatening that “tremendously positive things are going to happen on that incredible land.”

Other targets for possible delisting include Basin and Range in Nevada, Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado, Grand Canyon-Parashant in Arizona, Craters of the Moon in Idaho and Giant Sequoia in California. A few of those locations might arguably have some economic potential beyond their incalculable worth as tourist destinations. The oil and gas industries have begun circling around the culturally significant Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, for example, with hopes of fracking it. Many of the monuments also serve as battlefields in the longstanding ideological war between federal power and states’ rights.

But such arguments over cash or ideology make no sense in the case of the Maine woods. Far from being a federal land grab, the more than 87,000 acres of forest and waters around Mount Katahdin were donated to this country by private owners, along with $40 million earmarked for the land’s preservation and care in perpetuity. The land’s status as a public monument has already begun to return considerable economic value to the local tourist economy.

To his credit, Secretary Zinke concluded his visit to Katahdin by saying that he, at least, is comfortable with the site remaining in “public hands.” But the fight over this and other monuments across the country is far from over.

Paul R. LePage, the Republican governor of Maine, opposed President Obama’s creation of the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, and he continues to oppose it. His opposition seems little more than an attempt to incite partisan rancor and now to ingratiate himself with the Trump administration, with an eye to aggrandizing his own political future. The fight to deprive the country of this public treasure feels like pure tribalism, sticking it in the eye of the enemy, like a boy defacing a prominent hillside just to leave his mark.

No president has ever rescinded a national monument created by his predecessor, and a recent article in the Virginia Law Review contends that only Congress, not the president, has the legal authority to do so. But here we are, in a whole new country, where precedent, civil custom and the shared understanding of law is being challenged every week.

Mount Katahdin stands as the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, the arrival and departure point of that 2,200-mile trek through what remains of Eastern American wilderness. The mountain shook Thoreau to his innermost core, and it still rocks countless American visitors who each year make the journey to experience it. How can it threaten us, to care for such a prize and its surroundings in common? Once we “free it up” and spend these lands in the name of development, what then?

In “Walden,” Thoreau wrote that a “man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” For Thoreau’s 200th birthday, let’s let the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument — and all those other deeply treasured, absurdly beautiful American vistas — alone. We can afford to.

Let’s call these places ours, the solid earth, the actual world, held and revered and looked after in common, as common members of this magnificent country. Let’s make America rich again, as deliriously rich as it was on the day Thoreau tried to climb that wild mountain.