‘America the beautiful’: how Biden is conserving land and water as Trump looms | Biodiversity

A week after taking office as president, Joe Biden cited the climate and biodiversity crisis as a reason to set a sweeping new goal of conserving at least 30 percent of America’s vast lands and waters by the end of the decade.

Three years later, new protect have encouraged significant progress towards the 2030 target.

These efforts extend from glacial lakes inland Minnesota to tribal lands in the drylands New Mexico to vast spaces of the cold Arctic and to archaeological sites on the doorstep El Paso, Texas.

However, the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House now looms ominously over hopes of preserving further land and seascapes.

What has Biden accomplished so far?

When Biden took office, about 12% of US land had been protected by previous administrations.

About 41 million acres, an area slightly larger than Florida, have been placed under some form of new protection on public and private lands during Biden’s tenure, according to the White House, meaning about 13 percent of U.S. land now considered protected, up about 1%.

A much smaller portion of US waters were recently protected under Biden, but the water side of the goal is closer with 26% currently protected and with new designations planned for territories in the Pacific to push the total over the 30% target.

The US is on track to meet the goal known as 30×30 or America the beautiful, the White House insisted, which it says makes Biden a historic conservation leader. “President Biden laid out the most ambitious land and water conservation agenda in American history, and he’s delivering on it, already cementing a legacy as one of the nation’s strongest conservation presidents,” said Brenda Mallory, chair of the Administration’s Quality Assurance Council. environment. “It protects places that are just too special to be developed.”

The global impact

Biden’s embrace of 30×30 resonated globally, according to Sally Jewell, who served as Secretary of the Interior under Barack Obama. Scientists long ago interceded the need to set aside large areas for development to protect against an unfolding extinction crisis and global warming – biologist EO Wilson suggested half the world to be protected in this way – and in 2022 the governments too agree at a UN gathering to collectively adopt the 30×30 goal.

“In doing so, the U.S. has had a huge impact on the conservation narrative in countries around the world,” Jewell said. “Thirty percent is not a magic number, maybe a data point in a journey, but it provides something important to rally around.

“We’re on a pretty devastating trajectory with our ecosystems and climate change, and 30×30 is something people can think about. The target is a high bar, it will be hard work, but huge progress has been made.”

What would a Trump victory in November mean?

With at least half of the ground target still unmet, the 30×30 target could be missed if Trump wins the November presidential election. The supposed Republican has vowed to unleash a wave of new oil and gas drilling and, when he was president, opened up new areas, including the Arctic, to the fossil fuel industry.

Trump also took the unprecedented step of shrinking national monuments, which are protected sites that the president has unilateral authority to designate when sliced Bears Ears National Monument in Utah with a whopping 85%, and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, also in Utah, with almost half in 2017.

A policy plan laid out for a potential new Trump term, called Project 2025, foresees that the president should repeal the goal and “eliminate management decisions that advance the 30-for-30 agenda,” complaining that it unfairly removes lands from industrial activity.

“If we spend four more years in exactly the wrong direction on conservation, it’s hard to see how we’ll realistically meet the 30×30 goal,” said Dan Hartinger, senior director of policy advocacy at the Wildlife Action Fund. “We would fight this fossil fuel agenda of Trump and his allies, but I’d rather not have to.” The stakes for the election are high.”

Do experts think the 30×30 goal is useful?

The 30×30 frame itself is somewhat contested from the start, about what counts as protected, how success is measured and questions about local government rights. For some experts, the sheer volume of protected land alone is not the key metric, given that a small urban park or a modest site of great cultural significance can provide more benefits than adding a much larger area to an already protected area. desert.

“I think it’s a good conversation starter,” Christophe Nolte, a conservation expert at Boston University, of the 30×30 goal. “But the deeper reasons why we’re doing this and whether we’re moving in that direction, I think, are what we should really be looking for.”

The Biden administration has made climate change, protecting wildlife habitats and corridors, and giving more space to “nature-deprived communities” its core mantras, and many of its actions have included reversing Trump’s own policies.

A total of 10 national monuments have been created, restored or expanded, including restoring the original boundaries of Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and another marine monument off the coast of New England that was scaled back by Trump. The new monuments range from nearly 1 million acres of tribal land bordering the Grand Canyon to a much smaller five-acre site in Mississippi that commemorates Emmett Till.

In Alaska, 9 million acres of the vast Tongass National Forest were deemed off-limits to new roads, upsetting Trump orderwhile another 13 million acres of the far western parts of the state and 3 million acres of the Arctic Ocean were protected from oil and gas drilling.

New conservation district near the Everglades, meanwhile, will help protect species like the Florida black bear and panther, a half-million-acre swath of Nevada that contains Joshua trees and gilla monsters is already protected, and Biden has signed nine other protected areas passed by Congress , mostly in the western states.

Many of these places resonate beyond their area. “Bears Ears hold deep spiritual and cultural significance and are rich in ancestral history,” said Craig Andrews, vice chairman of the Hopi Tribe and co-chair of the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition. “The entire landscape contains countless cultural assets that are vital to the preservation of our way of life as Hopi people.”

Trump can change much of that, but Biden has tried to make deeper-rooted changes that the administration is confident will last, such as recent move to place conservation as an equal priority with activities such as grazing and logging on areas controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres of land, primarily in the western United States.

Moving away from viewing public lands as simply sites for industry to exploit will “redress the balance” and help combat the climate crisis, according to Deb Haaland, the interior minister. The move paves the way to protect at least 30 million acres of prime ecosystem habitat on BLM land, according to Hartinger, who called it a “massive cultural shift” in how public lands are viewed.

Republicans are much less keen. “With this rule, President Biden is allowing federal bureaucrats to destroy our way of life,” said John Barrasso, a senator from Wyoming who has vowed to repeal the new plan. If Trump wins office in November, he will likely have presidential support in doing so.

How much land in the US does the federal government control?

Conservation is not entirely up to the federal government, which controls about one-third of all U.S. land. The rest, split between states, tribes and private owners, will continue to have various conservation initiatives regardless of the election, with money from legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act helping fund projects that help prevent certain forests from being cut down or filled in on wetlands. About 5 million acres of private land have been protected since Biden took office, some using federal assistance.

Jewell, a former Obama interior secretary, said she’s confident Trump won’t stop this conservation work, which is as important for its quality as its sheer quantity. “30×30 is a catchphrase, but not all acres are created equal – protecting high alpine cliffs is not as valuable as protecting wetlands, which are critical habitat for wildlife,” she said. “Biden has made good progress unlocking money to protect private lands, and he’s targeting the right places to do it.”

After leaving her position as Secretary of the Interior, Jewell took a road trip with her husband to stop at some of the wildlife refuges and protected areas that dot the US, many of them much smaller than the stunning, sprawling monuments and national parks that capture the public imagination.

“We’ll handbrake as soon as we see a brown sign and go to these little pocket wildlife sanctuaries,” she said.

“A lot of people would say why save these, there’s nothing there. But if you’re an animal, a migrating bird, or maybe a monarch butterfly, they’re critically important oases as you fly above all that human crap. These are postage stamps on the ground, but vital postage stamps.