Former North Dakota Governor and tech billionaire Doug Burgum was sworn in as the nation’s new Secretary of the Interior in January, doing so with intent to follow the newly elected President’s desire to ‘drill, baby, drill.’
It appears he will immediately be taking aim at ‘encouraging energy exploration and production on Federal lands and waters’ through ‘the removal of impediments imposed on the development and use of our Nation’s abundant energy and natural resources by the Biden Administration’s burdensome regulations.’ So sayeth he in order #3418 titled ‘Unleashing American Energy’ which was distributed to his department earlier this week.
In response, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) responded by listing several current national monuments as dictated by the Antiquities Act of 1906 that are now threatened under the order. That list includes not just areas designated by the Biden administration, but monuments (like Devils Tower) that have been on the books as far back as 1906 itself.
The list includes popular outdoor recreation meccas like Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, sacred tribal lands like Bears Ears National Monument and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument, and even the geographic marvel that is Dinosaur National Monument, among several others.
Burgum’s order, which instructs staff to use a 15 day window to review these locations for their possible caches of oil, gas, and minerals, seems to have a hyperconcentrated focus on the Colorado Plateau and the Colorado River itself, a drainage that serves over 40 million people across the American southwest and Mexico and irrigates some 5.5 million acres of agricultural land, per Utah’s Division of Water Resources.
Drilling and extracting out of these already protected areas would not only establish a(nother) dangerous precedent of the executive branch ignoring and overriding other branches of the federal government, but it could very well impact one of the single most fragile and depended upon water supplies in an otherwise arid region of the country. That, of course, is all aside from the fact that turning these places into fossil fuel mines destroys the natural habitat in which hundreds of species of flora and fauna exist (and in which humans looking to get outside like to recreate responsibly).
As the NPCA emphasizes, over 24 million acres of public land are already leased out to oil and gas companies for fossil fuel extraction with some 12 million of those already under active drilling.
The layers with which the new administration has begun to systematically dismantle the existing framework of our federal government are thick, with seemingly each and every existing department writing its own new set of rules under which they’ll operate. This, sadly, appears to be true of the Department of the Interior as well, and it’s an immediate threat to the protected and conserved lands established by the government of this same nation over the last 120 years.
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