Aug 18, 2017 05:00 AM
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ry/537216/
EXCERPT: On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump announced his unequivocal support for preserving statues of Confederate generals and leaders [...] In full, his tweets read: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson—who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns, and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”
It was not the first time he had spoken about monuments—national or otherwise. In April, Trump ordered the Department of the Interior to review whether every national monument created since 1996 should be eliminated or shrunk from its current size. His order put protections for tens of millions of acres of public land in doubt.
These are not the same type of monuments, of course. [...] The national monuments of Trump’s April executive order [...] are areas of federally owned land set aside for their natural beauty or cultural significance. [...] One of the sites most likely to be downsized is Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, which was created by the Obama administration in December of last year. It encompasses more than 2,000 square miles of wilderness—desert, shrub, canyon, and peak—including two enormous buttes that give the area its name. Since the late 1990s, some Republicans, especially in the West, have argued that national monuments created by the Clinton and Obama administrations were too large and exceeded the Antiquities Act’s authority....
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ry/537216/
EXCERPT: On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump announced his unequivocal support for preserving statues of Confederate generals and leaders [...] In full, his tweets read: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson—who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns, and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”
It was not the first time he had spoken about monuments—national or otherwise. In April, Trump ordered the Department of the Interior to review whether every national monument created since 1996 should be eliminated or shrunk from its current size. His order put protections for tens of millions of acres of public land in doubt.
These are not the same type of monuments, of course. [...] The national monuments of Trump’s April executive order [...] are areas of federally owned land set aside for their natural beauty or cultural significance. [...] One of the sites most likely to be downsized is Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, which was created by the Obama administration in December of last year. It encompasses more than 2,000 square miles of wilderness—desert, shrub, canyon, and peak—including two enormous buttes that give the area its name. Since the late 1990s, some Republicans, especially in the West, have argued that national monuments created by the Clinton and Obama administrations were too large and exceeded the Antiquities Act’s authority....
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ry/537216/