It is no easy feat to preserve land in New England, whose every square foot has been trod upon or paddled over in the 400 years since the Pilgrims landed.
Until this summer, it had been two decades since the federal government stepped in to protect some of the region’s most important natural areas. The Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge was created in 1992, and the Sylvio Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge along the Connecticut River five years later. With just months left in his presidency, Barack Obama changed that.
Like many of his predecessors, Obama is adding to his legacy by using the century-old Antiquities Act to confer near-permanent protection to lands and waters important to the nation’s history and the health of the environment. His acts are controversial.
Last week’s announcement of the creation of the 4,913-acre Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a biologic and geologic wonder southeast of Massachusetts’s Nantucket Island, has infuriated the fishing industry.
To the north, timber interests and foes of federal land ownership are incensed by the president’s designation of 87,000 acres in north central Maine as the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. That vast stretch of land was assembled by Roxanne Quimby, a co-founder of Burt’s Bees, and given to the government along with a $20 million endowment to contribute to the park’s maintenance.
We applaud the president’s decision and hope that he’s just getting warmed up.
Much more of America and its waters are in dire need of protection. Yes, some industries will suffer a bit, though not nearly so much as they claim. Plenty of Maine remains open to logging, an industry that’s suffered from foreign competition, cheap natural gas and the advent of synthetic materials.
As for the laments of fishermen in southern New England, climate change is a far bigger threat. None of the world’s oceans are warming faster than the Gulf of Maine, whose temperature is rising by a stunning half a degree per year. The lobsters the fishermen won’t be able to catch after the six-year grace period ends are already moving north, as are the gulf’s shrimp, cod and other groundfish. The fishing is likely to be better in the areas around the reserve, which will serve as a nursery and allow more fish to mature to the age of maximum reproduction.
We describe the protection accorded presidentially designated monuments as near permanent because one president’s executive order can be reversed by a subsequent president. That seldom happens, but all bets could be off if developer Donald Trump is this year’s victor.
We hope that the president is only getting started, because so much is endangered.
In Pennsylvania, yet another developer wants to capitalize on the flow of tourists to the hallowed Gettysburg battlefield by building a shopping center between it and a restored Confederate field hospital just outside the national park’s boundaries. Minnesota’s fabled Boundary Waters Canoe Area is threatened by a plan for a giant metals mine on its border that would produce sulfurous emissions. Drilling and mining threaten to change the landscape around the Grand Canyon, Grand Teton National Park, Carlsbad Caverns, Glacier National Park, Dinosaur National Park and many more. That would be a loss for the environment and coming generations.
The people whose livelihoods are harmed by the protection efforts should be given help, but continued exploitation of unique lands and waters is not in the public or the planet’s interest.
When the Earth’s population was a few billion, the landscape seemed boundless. Now that it is 7 billion, en route to 9 or 10 billion, everyone will have to play by new rules to prosper or, perhaps, just to survive.