The Trump administration, aided by a willing but slim majority in Congress, began to comprehensively dismantle public lands protections in 2017. The regulatory results were fairly astonishing. They amount to an unprecedented rollback of conservation norms that date back to Theodore Roosevelt, who made the preservation of natural resources national policy more than a century ago.
Trump’s disassembling of public lands protections include drastically slashing the size of national monuments in Utah, opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, jettisoning protections for sage grouse throughout vast areas of the arid West and taking a headlong dive into increased fossil-fuel production. The latter involves ending moratoria on coal and oil-and-gas leasing, terminating methane emission controls, scuttling hydraulic fracturing regulations and eviscerating federal consideration of the long-term costs of carbon emissions on the planet’s environment...