The protections put in place over the last half-century by both political parties to guarantee Americans clean air, clean water and bountiful open space have been coming apart at the seams since President Trump took office. The last few weeks have been particularly brutal for conservationists and, indeed, anyone who believes that big chunks of America’s public lands, however rich they may be in commercial resources, are best left in their natural state.
On Monday, Mr. Trump withdrew some two million acres of spectacular landscape from two national monuments in Utah designated by his Democratic predecessors. This followed the Senate’s decision last weekend to authorize oil drilling in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an area full of wildlife, of talismanic significance to environmentalists and of great economic importance to Native Americans.
The arguments in both cases were the same: America needs the energy buried beneath these lands — oil in the case of the refuge, coal in Utah. And both arguments were equally spurious: Coal is in free fall as an energy source, feared as a major cause of climate change and run off the market by cheaper natural gas. Oil, meanwhile, is in
