President Donald Trump has only been in office eight months, but when The Boston Globe published an article Monday announcing U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had recommended that Trump make significant changes to 10 national monuments, it felt like the oldest story in the book.
In his time in office, Trump has already rolled back a significant number of environmental rules and regulations, including approving the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, loosening regulations on the coal industry and, of course, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. These newly released recommendations are just the most recent item in a long list of actions by Trump’s administration that are short sighted, destructive and environmentally obtuse.
Two of these recommendations pose a threat to monuments right here in New England. The first suggests that in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument — 130 miles off Cape Cod — commercial fishing should be allowed in currently-protected waters. The second recommendation is less clear, stating that protection status of the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, some 87,000 acres in Maine’s North Woods, should be changed “to promote a healthy forest through active timber management.”
Both of these protections were put in place after many months of planning and research by the Obama administration. Now, they could be taken away in one relatively quick decision. This would be deeply destructive to these already fragile lands and waters.
Environmental advocates have said that if Trump were to put Zinke’s recommendations into effect, it would be “the largest attack on protected public lands in our nation’s history.” In the United States, we have a long tradition of presidents who actively work to further protect the environment — creating national parks and monuments, not destroying them. The fact that Trump would have any amount public support on this, even from the far-right, is absurd.
In the last several years, environmental sustainability has become a deeply partisan issue. This makes no sense. A few decades down the line, when the consequences of this blatant disregard for the environment become our harsh reality, one political party won’t be affected more than any other. We will all suffer, and badly.
The long-term consequences of these potential policies would not just be environmental, though. They would be economic too. Reinstating commercial fishing in the Cape would certainly create jobs in the short term, which Trump would undoubtedly check off as a win. However, sooner than people realize, the consequences of this small win are going to catch up with them in a big way.
It won’t just be a slow season or two for fishermen, or a few boats going out of commission — it will be a desolate wasteland in what used to be our oceans. The entire fishing industry here will cease to exist, and it will be entirely our faults.
Trump’s attempts to create jobs are incredibly misguided. He is constantly trying to resuscitate dying industries, ones that we as a society have outgrown. There is no need for this. In fact, what we need is the exact opposite. Trump must look to the future, and invest in industries that create sustainable jobs, industries that could add to our planet more than they take away from it.
There is something seriously wrong with the way that we are living on Earth. There are so many things that are contributing to our planet’s increasingly rapid demise, and all of them are caused by humans. When our president is spearheading a campaign of ignorance and intolerance about these issues, it is nothing short of deadly.
President Trump is fighting for an outdated generation of blue collar workers — Americans who mined coal, logged forests and fished oceans, not knowing about the destruction they were causing along the way. Modern generations didn’t grow up like that. They were raised to think about the environment and about the future. He needs to reject these recommendations, and take a small hit in PR in exchange for a big win for the future.
