Monumental disgrace

Yesterday Interior Secretary Zinke made some kind of draft report to 45 concerning the status of the 27 National Monuments he's been "reviewing" for the last two months. The report is maddeningly imprecise. Although the existence of none of the monuments will be challenged, some boundaries may be constricted and some rights of access expanded. One doesn't know whether to be glad or angry.

Let's assume the worst, since this administration elsewhere has so amply demonstrated its contempt for people and law. Let's assume the whole review has been driven by the current terrible feedback loops of money and politics, and by politics I mean the incessant attempt to get elected and stay elected, with ideology justifying every action, and that ideology is really just rich white men and their incessant attempts to stay rich and get richer, using individual freedoms, state rights, public access, whatever crappy phrase you want to use, to fund the politicians who in turn will provide access to the places for rich men to plunder. In the case of national monuments, it's mostly about extraction industries, with a little recreation and grazing thrown in to appease the hoodwinked locals. Let me repeat: this review is about mining.

I'm the first to admit that extraction industries have made possible the present comforts of life, and will do so for a long time. But technology is on the verge of making new mines unnecessary. Why should we desecrate in order to profiteer?

Here in Maine, I'm happy that Katahdin Woods and Waters is probably spared. Elsewhere, especially in the West, I find it a disgrace that the glories of wilderness and the health of children are subject to the greed of rich white men, that the honorable roots and traditional meanings of the very words "conservative" and "Republican" are forever traduced.