#resource exploitation

In January, the Pit River Tribe celebrated a victory decades in the making when Joe Biden granted federal protection to nearly 230,000 acres of forested lands with the creation of the Sáttítla Highlands national monument.

“The awe-inspiring geological wonders collectively described here as the Sáttítla Highlands have framed the homelands of Indigenous communities and cultures for millennia,” the proclamation reads, recognizing the area as “profoundly sacred”.

The tribe, along with environmental groups, had fought for years to safeguard the land from industrial energy development. The area just north of Mount Shasta, popular for recreation and some of the darkest nighttime skies in the US, is the site of the tribe’s creation story and regularly used for ceremonies.

The designation ensures no future energy development and mineral extraction can occur on the land while keeping it available for public recreation.

But then in March, Donald Trump said he would undo Biden’s action and roll back protections for Sáttítla and Chuckwalla national monument, which he argued “lock up vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production”.

Although legal experts say there is no clear mechanism for a president to rescind monument protections – only to shrink them – the justice department argued in a recent memo that it is in fact within Trump’s authority to “alter a prior declaration”, suggesting the administration will move forward with efforts to remove national monument designations for hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness.

The monument’s 224,676 acres include portions of the Modoc, Shasta-Trinity and Klamath national forests, are home to endangered and rare flora and fauna, massive underground volcanic aquifers that supply water to millions of people and store as much water as 200 of California’s largest surface reservoirs combined. Due to heavy snow, it’s largely only accessible by car for a few months of the year.

The landscape, with its islands of old-growth pine forests, snow covered mountainsides and scattered lakes, is stunning and otherworldly. It is filled with unique geological features such as ice caves, lava tubes and lava flows, Joslin said. Then there is the half-million-year-old dormant volcano, roughly 10 times the size of Mount St Helens, within the monument. Locals routinely camp, hike the hundreds of miles of trails or take boats out on Medicine Lake.

There are markers of human disruption. Checkerboard swaths of forest where trees have been clear cut, and large stretches of land with second-growth trees that look like toothpicks from the air.

Presidents have the authority to give protected status to land with cultural, scientific or historic resources of national significance, and Biden and other presidents have typically used it for conservation and to support tribes.

But Trump has taken a combative stance on national monuments as part of his pro-energy agenda, slashing the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments during his first term (a move that was later reversed by Biden). Earlier this month, the Department of Justice issued a memorandum opinion arguing that Trump has the authority to not only shrink but entirely abolish national monuments created by his predecessor.

But the legal argument for that position appears tenuous. Sivas said the Antiquities Act, the statute under which national monuments are designated, does not give the president the authority to do so.

“There’s no language in there that suggests that he could de-designate or roll back what prior presidents have done,” Sivas said. She added that the recent argument made by the administration was not particularly persuasive.

Given the lack of opposition to Sáttítla, the move seems designed to instead test the limits of the president’s power, Sivas said. If the administration does proceed with a rollback, legal action will follow, she added, which she expects will make its way to the supreme court.

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Congo is silently going through a silent genocide. Millions of people are being killed so that the western world can benefit from its natural resources. More than 60% of the world’s cobalt reserves are found in Congo, used in the production of smartphones. Western countries are providing financial military aid to invade regions filled with reserves and in the process millions are getting killed and millions homeless. Multinationals mining companies are enslaving people especially children to mine. #congoisbleeding