Antiquities Act

I suspect that it will eventually reach the Supreme Court.

And there will be some kind of ruling that will affect the way the Antiquities Act is implemented.

And I think everybody's tired of this being a back and forth political football sort of thing.

I think there's going to be two things going on.

And it's great to not be host and let you take all the heat for everything.

But the Antiquities Act was actually passed in 1906, I think, Teddy Roosevelt.

And he was the one that pushed it through.

He was really Mr. Eco and conservation back in the day before it was cool.

Is that a fair argument, do you think, Mike?

Absolutely.

You know, to be fair, in full disclosure, the Antiquities Act sometimes, you know, is abused, right? You know, you're supposed to use it to protect the smallest area necessary to protect that item that you are trying to protect.

And it is blowing up.

Education is important, but they are utilizing the existing legal infrastructure that we have to fight these things legally so that we can prevent them from taking over.

They're battling against the Antiquities Act, which, as you guys mentioned, is being completely abused, and that's what's happening.

There's other great organizations out there that do lots of cool things about education, and I think that that's important because we want user groups to be better educated and take better care of the land.

But at the end of the day, these are legal battles that have to be faced, and they need financial support to do it.

He understood they were never two subjects.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 is what allowed Roosevelt to protect the Grand Canyon, but he couldn't have done anything for the region because the dunes had already been purchased by the industrialists of the time.

Today, the capital is committed, and the government holds a share to keep it committed.

What remains is the decision of what to buy.

Grant.

Most people think that the Antiquities Act, the act that allowed the president to nationalize or to effectively memorialize any federal land, was used.

But the Antiquities Act didn't come around until 1906 with Theodore Roosevelt when he actually created the National Park Service.

But it was a specific act called the Yellowstone Park, the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, signed on March 1st, 1872.

And it was very politically difficult then for President Grant.

This land is our land now.

They call it the Antiquities Act.

You know that Teddy Roosevelt, the racist land protector, the false hero, like so many American presidents, but by precedent left a good idea behind while society climbed towards better ideals.

Is it better to be idealistic than to be so specific that all this land is to conquer? Because what if we want to prosper? What if we want to encourage thinking, not the drinking of this orange-faced Kool-Aid? Drop it if you think this is just political.

In nineteen six, he designated the area a game preserve, largely aimed at protecting deer, though this did little to slow private land acquisition.

Then, on January eleventh, nineteen eight, Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act of nineteen six to designate more than eight hundred thousand acres as Grand Canyon National Monument.

It was, at the time, an enormous exercise of presidential authority, and it set off exactly the fight you would expect.

Cameron's lawyers sued, arguing that a monument that large exceeded what the Antiquities Act actually allowed.

The law specified monuments should be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care of the resource, and eight hundred thousand acres did not sound small to Cameron's legal team.

The case reached the Supreme Court.

Scott Braden with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance says that law doesn't give presidents the power to roll back monuments created by their predecessors.

We believe the 1906 Antiquities Act gives the President of the United States the authority to create national monuments, not to reduce or destroy them.

A White House spokesperson said in a statement that previous Democratic administrations, quote, "abused the Antiquities Act" and that Trump's cuts are restoring common sense land use in those areas.

For NPR News, I'm Chris Clements in Flagstaff.

This is NPR News.