A Monuments Fight By Katy Steinmetz

In the United States there are over 400 places that the National Parks Service (NPS) protects. In Katy Steinmetz’s article “A Monumental Fight” she give some background on how the dispute over the national funding of parks started. The dispute over national parks and their funding have been a debate for over a hundred years. It started in 1906 when Teddy Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to create eighteen national monuments. National monuments legally must have objects of scientific or historical value to become a monument. Over the years, presidents have declared 157 national monuments going from Montana to Manhattan (Steinmetz 32). Although some Americans are against the funding of national parks, they need federal funding because they

There are many explorations taken in the Grand Canyon trying to learn to learn more about the earth’s crust and how it is formed. In Timothy Egan and Casey Egan’s article they give evidence that science is helping us to understand the age of the earth, “The rock floor is around 1.8 billion years old. At the rim, the Kailbab formation is 270 million years old”(Timothy Egan and Casey Egan). Many scientists also go to parks like Yellowstone National Park and Yosemite National Park to study wildlife and different plant species. “Whether this park would continue to be a living thing, with its nearly 750 plant species, was perhaps out of our control”(Timothy Egan and Casey Egan).

Although national parks bring in many scientists, there are also many archaeologists and anthropologists that come to national parks to study the historical value that national parks have to offer. Linda J. Bilmes and John Loomis said it best in their article, “From Yellowstone to Ellis Island, the 412 places that NPS protects tells America’s story (Bilmes and Loomis). Bears Ears National Park is home to many historical artifacts that help us to understand the lives of indigenous people and the native americans that lived here before

“The previous administration used a 100­year­old law known as the Antiquities Act to unilaterally put millions of acres of land and water under strict federal control, Trump said” (qtd in Steinmetz 32). Some people think that the federal government was just trying to take more land some have even been calling it a “massive federal land grab”(Steinmetz 32). The expansion of these national parks under the Obama administration has left the citizens of these surrounding areas upset, such as the people of Blanding, a town near Bears Ears National Park, “They feel like they’re being told what to do by the feds­ that’s the mentality of the folks in Blanding, Doran says”(Steinmetz 32). The expansion of Cascade­Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon has put people in the logging industry out of jobs. “Critics argue that the action effectively banned logging on lands that Congress designated for timber production decades ago, depriving county governments of revenue they need for libraries and mental services”(Steinmetz