As a person, and as an American, I love our park system - local, state, and national. Along with National Parks, there are National Seashores, National Forests, National Marine Reserve area, and National Monuments. All areas designated as National property are protected from being sold, from development, from mining, from drilling, from having the bones of the earth removed, defaced, or desecrated. Many National Monuments contain sites that are sacred to Native Americans, and, at times, multiple tribes and peoples have worked together to produce an agreement regarding the saving of ancient grounds.
Most areas of land east of the Mississippi River in our country are heavily inhabited and developed and there is very little space left that can be saved and preserved, as it is now, or as it was in the past. This is not true of the western part of the United States. The west still has wide open spaces, where the land is not good for intensive farming, where there are deserts and mountains where one cannot produce enough food to feed oneself. There are many amazing things that can be seen - the geysers of Yellowstone Park, the tremendous height of the Rocky Mountains, ancient Native American rock art and petroglyphs, cave systems, coral reefs, and many other delights for the eye and mind.
Yesterday, the circus peanut signed an executive order to allow national monument designations to be completely rescinded or to reduce the size of these sites, in order to allow the federal government to open those lands for oil and gas drilling, for mining, and for other types of development. This order is an effort to reverse environmental protections from three previous Presidents that the current administration claims is hobbling economic growth.
This executive order will allow 45's appointed Secretary of the Interior, Zinke, to pick and choose where he feels the government can make a profit from the land. Industry is cheering this order, but conservationists are outraged.
The Antiquities Act was passed by Congress in 1906 and gives the sitting President the authority to create National Monuments from federal lands in order to protect and save significant natural, cultural, or scientific features. There is no wording in the Act regarding rescinding a previous designation. So far in our history no President has ever rescinded a national monument designation. (However, in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson did reduce the acreage in the Mount Olympus National Monument, arguing that the United States was in need of the timber.) Many legal actions by environmental groups are anticipated to fight this executive order.
In announcing this order, the tangerine tyrant stated that President Obama's use of the 1906 Antiquities Act to create national monuments was an "egregious abuse of federal power" that allowed the federal government to "lock up" millions of acres of land and water. "Today we're putting the states back in charge," he said. He also added that each state should decide which land is protected and which is open for development.
Federally owned land is overseen by five agencies - the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the Department of Defense. (The DoD owns 11.4 million acres.) The United States government owns only 4% of the land east of the Mississippi, but, overall, it owns 27.9% of land in the United States. The states with the least amount of federal land are Connecticut and Iowa (0.03 %) and Kansas with 0.05 %. The federal government owns 9.9 % of Virginia. Out west, the federal government owns 85 % of Nevada, 69 % of Alaska, 57 % of Utah, 52 % of Oregon, 45 % of California, and 35.9 % of Colorado.
The executive order signed yesterday is aimed specifically at 24 National Monuments created since January of 1996 that are larger than 100,000 acres in size. The three Presidents who designated these monuments were Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Eyes are trained on the Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument in Utah that has a large vein of high-grade coal running through it, and the Bears Ears National Monument, also in Utah, for which five Native American tribes worked together to have the plans approved. Bears Ears is a site that has drawn intense interest from oil companies who wish to drill there.
Here is a listing of the twenty four National Monuments targeted by 45 and his plunder-monkey minions:
1. Grand Staircase - Escalante in Utah
2. Grand Canyon - Parashant in Arizona
3. Grand Sequoia in California
4. Vermillion Cliffs in Arizona
5. Handford Reach in Washington
6. Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado
7. Ironwood Forest in Arizona
8. Sonoran Desert in Arizona
9. Upper Missouri River Breaks in Montana
10. Carrizo Plain in California
11. Papahanaumokuakea Marine in Pacific Ocean
12. Marianas Trench Marine in Pacific Ocean
13. Pacific Remote Islands Marine in Pacific Ocean
14. Rose Atoll Marine in American Samoa
15. Rio Grande del Norte in New Mexico
16. Organ Mountains - Desert Peaks in New Mexico
17. Basin and Range in Nevada
18. Berryessa Snow Mountain in California
19. Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine in Atlantic Ocean
20. Mojave Trail in California
21. Bears Ears in Colorado
22. Gold Butte in Nevada
23. Sand to Snow in California
24. San Gabriel Mountains in Cakifornia
Showing posts with label mining. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mining. Show all posts
Thursday, April 27, 2017
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Unite Against Mining Historic Apache Site!
I just read the following article and it made me terribly upset. If you agree this is a travesty, and an act against our Native Americans, please contact your Senators and Congressmen, and President Obama. We, Americans, do not need copper so badly that we destroy the sacred places and historic sites of our native peoples - people who welcomed the white-skinned strangers from across the sea, offered them food and shelter, and then stole their native lands, homes, and hunting grounds. It's just sickening! The article is titled:
"Planned Arizona Copper Mine Would Put a Hole in Apache Archaeology
"Planned Arizona Copper Mine Would Put a Hole in Apache Archaeology
Archaeologists and Native American tribes are protesting language in a Senate bill that would approve a controversial land exchange between the federal government and a copper mining company—a swap that may put Native American archaeological sites at risk. The bill is needed to fund the U.S. military and is considered likely to pass the Senate as early as today.
The company Resolution Copper Mining hopes to exploit rich copper deposits beneath 980 hectares of Arizona’s Tonto National Forest. The land, however, also contains important archaeological sites and places sacred to local Native American tribes, especially the Apache. “This is the best set of Apache archaeological sites ever documented, period, full stop,” says John Welch, a former historic preservation officer for the White Mountain Apache Tribe and a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.
Archaeologists fear that the standard process for approval of a land exchange is being sidestepped. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) lays out a process to determine a land transferal’s potential impact on the environment, archaeological and historic sites, and places sacred to Native Americans. The language inserted into the defense spending bill states that the land will be transferred to Resolution Copper 60 days after an environmental impact statement, part of the NEPA process, has been completed. That prejudges the outcome of the evaluation, says Jeffrey Altschul, president of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in Washington, D.C. “The bill says that Congress has already decided that the land swap will take place,” he says, “so we’ll do the land swap and then we’ll do NEPA.”
Resolution Copper has pointed out that there will be an environmental review in any case. In a statement published in 2013, the company says that the NEPA review will take place “[u]nder any circumstances,” including if work on the exchange begins at the same time.
The swap has been controversial for years. Between 2005 and 2011, bills proposing it diedin committee five times in the House of Representatives and six times in the Senate, says David Lindsay, SAA’s government affairs manager, who tracks legislation for the organization. Those bills faced determined opposition from Native American tribes. Attaching the land exchange rider to the defense spending bill is a way to circumvent that opposition, says Michael Nixon, an environmental lawyer who works with the Maricopa Audubon Society and has fought the land exchange since the beginning. “Stuffing riders into... bills that are not germane to the subject is undemocratic,” he says.
What is at stake is a landscape that has remained essentially unchanged, except for a few modern roads, since the Hohokam people lived there more than 500 years ago, says J. Scott Wood, an archaeologist for the Tonto National Forest. The area was once a trade center where the Hohokam exchanged goods from as far away as the Pacific Coast. It also preserves a full range of Apache archaeological sites, which are rare. Little is known about Apache history prior to contact with Europeans.
The most important historic site is called the Apache Leap, where a group of Apache who were being pursued by U.S. cavalry plunged off a cliff to their deaths rather than be captured. The land exchange rider exempts Apache Leap from becoming part of the copper mine, but it’s right next door, says Vernelda Grant, who is the tribal historic preservation officer for the San Carlos Apache Tribe. She says that having a working copper mine next to the site will change how people experience it. The same holds true for other culturally sensitive sites nearby, such as a place called Devil’s Canyon “where the spiritual beings that represent healing live,” Grant says. “We have songs and ceremonies that are sung there—it’s a place to just pray and pray for healing.”
The Senate is expected to pass the defense spending bill as early as today; the House has already passed it. Next, it will go to the White House for President Barack Obama’s signature, and archaeologists don’t think there is much chance of changing or removing the rider. “They should be going through the standard process that everybody else uses to get a mine going,” says Simon Fraser University’s Welch. “It’s really suspicious to be coming up with new laws every time somebody wants to put in a mine.”
***Please, if you love history, archaeology, and/or the American West - contact your US government representatives and say that this proposal is unacceptable!!! ***
Apache Mountain, where warriors plunged to their deaths rather than surrender to the US Cavalry, could soon overlook an open copper mine.
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