The Trump administration touched off consternation and confusion over the weekend, issuing, and then apparently rolling back, an announcement implying the president had rescinded his predecessor’s order creating two popular national monuments in California.
The confusion arose over a bullet item referencing President Trump’s rollback of the monument designations in a White House fact sheet posted Friday detailing the reversal of various Biden administration policies. On Saturday, the reference to monuments was dropped without explanation.
The change left unclear the fates of the Chuckwalla National Monument adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument in Northern California.
But the expectation that Trump intended to roll back the status for the two California monuments led to immediate reaction from their supporters, among them conservation and environmental groups, tribal leaders and local and national elected officials.
“Trump’s gutting of the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments is a gruesome attack on our system of public lands,” said Ileene Anderson, California desert director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“Both these monuments were spearheaded by local Tribes with overwhelming support from local and regional communities including businesses and recreationalists,” Anderson said. “This vindictive and unwarranted action is a slap in the face to Tribes and all supporters of public lands.”
Anticipation of potential rollbacks was fueled by a Feb. 3 order by Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directing his assistant secretaries to “review and, as appropriate, revise all withdrawn public lands.”
The directive was part of a sweeping secretarial order, called “Unleashing American Energy,” that seeks to boost resource extraction on federal land and water.
Sáttítla, which spans more than 224,000 acres of lush forests and pristine lakes near the Oregon border, has been explored for geothermal energy development.
Located south of Joshua Tree National Park, 640,000-acre Chuckwalla could be targeted for water beneath the rugged desert floor, Donald Medart Jr., former councilman for the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, told The Times earlier this month. His tribe was among those that led the push for the monument designation.
“To extract all that groundwater would leave a devastating effect on our area,” said Medart, now a tribal engagement specialist for Onoo Po Strategies, a consulting firm.
Supporters of the two new California monuments see any extraction as a bad trade-off.
“Any tiny amounts of minerals in these areas aren’t worth the destruction of priceless wildlife habitat, sacred Tribal lands and world-class recreation,” Anderson said.
The chain of events began Friday when the White House website posted a fact sheet summarizing an executive order signed by Trump undoing “a second round of harmful executive actions issued by the prior administration, continuing his efforts to reverse damaging policies and restore effective government.”
The New York Times reported on a blog post Saturday that the White House had confirmed that Trump rescinded President Biden’s proclamation creating the two monuments. The report did not link to a specific Trump order. The Washington Post reported Saturday that the White House confirmed that Trump “plans” to rescind the orders.
The National Parks Traveler posted a copy of the original fact sheet, showing that the first of six bullet points cited “Terminating proclamations declaring nearly a million acres constitute new national monuments that lock up vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production.” That bullet point was not on the fact sheet Saturday.
Though the item did not name the two monuments, the acreage figure roughly fits the two new ones in California.
Attempts to alter monuments in California and elsewhere would almost certainly be met with lawsuits, conservation and environmental groups warned.
“This is straight out of the Trump playbook to create chaos and confusion,” Anderson of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a follow-up email. “If Trump does put these beloved California monuments on the chopping block, we’ll be there to defend them. This administration has grossly underestimated the depth of public support for these and other protected public lands.”
The administration’s legal authority to reverse a predecessor’s monument designation remains unclear after Trump, in his first term, reduced the boundaries of two monuments in Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — and stripped protections from a marine monument off the coast of New England to allow commercial fishing.
Litigation challenging the reductions was still pending when Biden reversed the changes, and the matter was never settled.
California is home to 21 national monuments, more than any other state — spanning rugged coastlines, stately sequoia groves and striking desert canyons. They include the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument near Los Angeles and the Sand to Snow National Monument east of the city, as well as the Lava Beds National Monument in the far northeastern part of the state.
