On his first day in office, President Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered his department to review national monuments across the country. The review could include the Carrizo Plain National Monument in San Luis Obispo and Kern counties.
The call to review monuments (SO 3418 – Unleashing American Energy, Section 4c) is easy to miss—among a laundry list of dozens of ways to expand fossil fuel production on federal lands, it orders agencies to “review and, as appropriate, revise” certain public land protections. However, the order cleverly avoids using the words “national monuments” while citing the legal code for the Antiquities Act, the law that authorizes Presidents to establish national monuments.
The order applies to hundreds of national monuments managed by the Interior Department. Reviewing and revising monument proclamations could eventually result in shrinking the amount of protected land for particular areas, or removing them from maps and eliminating their protections entirely. It could also prompt a rewrite of management plans for particular lands to allow more fossil fuel drilling or logging.
While the order doesn’t call out specific national monuments for review, many of California’s seventeen national monuments are vulnerable. Chief among them are two national monuments established in the final days of the Biden administration – Chuckwalla National Monument and Satittwa National Monument.
The Carrizo Plain National Monument—proclaimed by President Clinton in 2001—is also considered at risk. The Carrizo was one of forty that former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke identified to be “rescinded, resized, or modified” in 2017. It was ultimately spared from boundary adjustments, but changes to its management plan were recommended. Those changes could have opened the door to oil drilling, but thankfully they never materialized.
The Carrizo Plain lies adjacent to one of the country’s largest oil deposits, and includes two small oil fields within its boundaries. These relics of a bygone era were grandfathered in when the Carrizo Plain became a monument, but the rest of the area was withdrawn from fossil fuel extraction and mining. The plan calls for the eventual phase-out of oil drilling in the monument. However, an oil company owns claim to thousands of acres of underground oil deposits within the Carrizo Plain National Monument boundaries and could benefit from any rollbacks of protections.
The review is eerily similar to one conducted under the first Trump presidency. That earlier review identified the Carrizo Plain National Monument for amending its management plan, potentially resulting in weaker protections for the land and many species of rare plants and animals that call it home.
The Carrizo Plain is home to one of the largest concentrations of rare plants and animals in all of California, including the San Joaquin kit fox, burrowing owl, giant kangaroo rat, blunt-nosed leopard lizard, and San Joaquin antelope squirrel. The area is an especially popular destination during spring wildflower season when it bursts into fields of yellow, orange, and purple as far as the eye can see.
ForestWatch is monitoring the administration’s decisions that affect public lands along the central coast. We will oppose any legislation that aims to diminish the ability of a President to designate national monuments. We also plan to fight any effort to reduce or rescind the Carrizo Plain National Monument. Continue to check our website for updates about this and other issues affecting our public lands.
This Order is an attack on public lands and an affront to millions of Americans who live, work, and play in these spectacular landscapes. We stand ready to defend the Carrizo Plain National Monument from any misguided efforts that would make these lands more vulnerable to development. We filed a formal Freedom of Information Act request for all records pertaining to any review of the Carrizo Plain National Monument, and will post those records here upon receipt.
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