Zinke Claims He Wants To Create A New National Monument - In His Home State, Of Course

[hatrack]

And, for the record, it would be about 160,000 acres in extent - while he cuts 1.7 million acres from Grand Staircase-Escalante.

http://www.nbc11news.com/content/news/459942323.html

EDIT

Badger Two-Medicine is sacred to Kennerly's tribe, the Blackfeet Nation. It's part of their creation story. This summer Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended it become a new national monument, and President Donald Trump is expected to announce decisions about monuments in December. That designation would protect more than 200 square miles of federal land from any future oil and gas development.

But Trump called these large monuments "massive federal land grabs" by his Democratic predecessors, and Zinke recommended the president reduce the size of some of those monuments, including Bear's Ears in Utah and Gold Butte in Nevada. The interior secretary has yet to comment publicly on the newly proposed monument, and his spokesperson said the department has nothing new to say about it. So the recommendation has a lot of people scratching their heads.

EDIT

But Land Tawney, president of the Montana-based sportsmen's group Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, says it felt like Zinke was proposing a new national monument for more politically ambitious reasons. "I think the secretary has talked about wanting to come back to Montana after he's done being secretary and potentially run for governor," Tawney says.

Protecting public lands is a big issue in Montana. While Zinke has encouraged mining, drilling and reducing the size of national monuments elsewhere in the country, he's left existing national monuments in Montana alone and he's urged mining bans near Yellowstone National Park. Those proposals imply Zinke has protected public lands in his home state, according to Tawney.

EDIT

https://www.npr.org/2017/11/26/564918337/montana-monument-may-expand-under-trump-administration

[SharonAnn]

1. uIt's all patronage politics and economics now. "To the victor, go the spoils."