DONALD TRUMP: NOT MY PRESIDENT NOW….NEVER WILL BE!

…Can you imagine President Trump removing the protections of this national monument?

 

The president wants to scale back on our national monuments.

 

Americans are able to see our American presidents, and how they will act as the stewards of our country’s vast natural resources.

 

President Theodore Roosevelt preserved the Grand Canyon because in the rugged chasms carved by the Colorado River, he saw a landscape that echoed the wild character of our growing nation.

 

In creating the largest marine protected area in the world at the time, the Papahanaumokuakea Marine Reserve in the northwest Hawaiian Islands, even the Texan President, George W. Bush spoke of a moral call to conservation and a “duty to be good stewards of the Almighty’s creation.”

 

But where earlier presidents have shown such respect for our commitment to our future, President Trump is displaying a disgusting hollowness of spirit and a contempt for future American generations.

 

Trump has lashed out at communities such as Baltimore and Charlottesville that had decided to remove 20th-century monuments erected to glorify the Confederacy and thus its slavery.  These are monuments that white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis are fighting with more than deadly force to preserve.

 

Per the president: “It’s sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” Trump wrote this in one of his Twitter storms.

The president has now made it clear that “history and culture” worth protecting to him, do not include the archeological sites that are sacred to Native Americans.  This even includes the mountains where Geronimo and Billy the Kid took refuge.  But it also includes areas of ocean canyons and coral reefs that are only haunted today by sharks and shipwrecks.

 

Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has recommended that the president should scale back on our national monuments. And because the process has been mostly secretive, we do not know all the details of what that means exactly.  However, based on the reports from those briefed on the recommendations, we do know that being pushed by Trump, Zinke is now proposing getting rid of large portions of our national monuments in Utah, Oregon, California and New Mexico, and also in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

 

The administration is also pushing to allow logging in a national monument in Maine and commercial fishing in currently protected marine areas.

 

Trump and Zinke are pursuing the largest-ever elimination of protected areas in US history.  In so doing, he would be breaking the American promise from many presidents before, that national parks, wilderness areas and national monuments were to be permanently protected for future generations.

It is impossible to overstate the massive damage the Trump administration’s attack on national monuments will cause to US cultural artifacts. and thus to the local economies that depend on these protected public lands.

 

Zinke reportedly wants nearly 90% of the Bears Ears National Monument to be eliminated, which amounts to removing protections of an area nearly the size of Delaware.  There is an estimated 100,000 archaeological sites that are etched in a landscape that is sacred ground to Native American tribes, including the Navajo, Zuni, Ute, Ute Mountain and the Hopi nations. This will put sacred sites at renewed risk of grave-robbing, looting, and destruction by drilling and mining operations that basically, “don’t give a damn!”.

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Business owners in Las Cruces, New Mexico, are bracing for an economic hit if sections of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument are closed and visitors turn to other destinations for their hunting, fishing and hiking adventures.  These businesses are not alone, Taos, New Mexico; Escalante, Utah; Ashland, Oregon; and communities across the West also stand to lose their edge in the fast-growing, outdoor recreation economy that is now valued at over $887 billion per year.

 

In Utah, this is all due to a handful of local “Clive Bundy type politicians”.  You know, those right-wing militia types and fossil fuel industrialists that are surely cheering this assault on our public lands.  In this selling out of our natural heritage, the administration is ignoring the facts that more than 2.8 million public comments have been sent and received at the US Interior Department, including those views from traditional conservative hunters and anglers in the West.

Ultimately, these decisions are about more than who is for, and who is against, this approach to our national monuments.  At their core, this reflects our moral commitment to our children and their children’s children. No former president has ever thought it wise to chop up a national monument so that a few oil and gas companies could make a quick buck.  All this, while destroying something that has been preserved for future US citizens.

 

Imagine if Ronald Reagan had withdrawn the protections for Natural Bridges Monument in Utah. Or if Bill Clinton were to sell off the Muir Woods. The very idea that any president would get rid of the protections for places that unite and define us as a nation, that is simply un-American.  But we are talking about the multi-bankrupted, Donald J. Trump!

 

Evidently, that is not the case for a Queen’s born, city-slicker kid that is now our President Trump.   It is not in in Trump’s eyes or in his mind to keep these places that are sacred for many of the American public.

 

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,” conservationist John Muir had said, “places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.”   That is more true today than it was back in Muir’s time.

This unprecedented attack on national monuments and Trump’s total defense of Confederate statues tells us way too much about Trump’s lack of soul, and his disgusting vision of who he thinks we are as a nation.

 

As I have said before, and will continue to say:  This man is not my president.  Never has been, never will be.

Copyright G.Ater  2017