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Toward A National Conservation Network Act: Transforming Landscape Conservation On The Public Lands Into Law, Robert B. Keiter
Toward A National Conservation Network Act: Transforming Landscape Conservation On The Public Lands Into Law, Robert B. Keiter
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
The United States has made a remarkable commitment to nature conservation on the federal public lands. The country’s existing array of national parks, wilderness areas, national monuments, wildlife refuges, and other protective designations encompasses roughly 150 million acres, or nearly 40 percent of the “lower 48” federal estate. A robust land trust movement has protected another 56 million acres of privately owned lands. Advances in scientific knowledge reveal that these protected enclaves, standing alone, are insufficient to protect native ecosystems and at-risk wildlife from climate change impacts and unrelenting development pressures. Abetted by existing law, conservation policy is now focusing …
Up For Grabs: The State Of Fossils Protection In (Recently) Unprotected National Monuments, John C. Ruple, Michael Henderson, Caitlin Ceci
Up For Grabs: The State Of Fossils Protection In (Recently) Unprotected National Monuments, John C. Ruple, Michael Henderson, Caitlin Ceci
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
On December 4, 2017, President Trump removed 2 million acres of land from the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. President Trump justified the reductions in part by claiming that many of the objects contained in the original monuments were already protected by other federal laws, and that the protections previously afforded to sixty-three percent of the land in the two original monuments were “unnecessary for the care and management of the objects to be protected within the monument[s].” This article explains why, contrary to the President’s assertions, plant and invertebrate fossils on the more than two million acres …
A Response To Dismantling Monuments, John C. Ruple
A Response To Dismantling Monuments, John C. Ruple
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
This article refutes the main arguments made in Dismantling Monuments, which recently appeared in the Florida Law Review. It shows that national monument designations have been used to protect large landscapes for more than a century, and that no legal challenge to a monument’s size has ever succeeded. It then explains why the weight of evidence suggests that Congress, in passing the Antiquities Act, intended to endow the President with the power to designate national monuments; but that Congress did not intend to vest the President with the power to dramatically reduce them. It also dispels notions that in reducing …