The reduction in size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah by President Trump represents the largest reduction of any protected area in the United States, according to a new study/Conservation International

For want of timber and other natural resources, the federal government during a three-decade period early in the 20th century steadily whittled away at Yosemite National Park, eventually carving off about a third of that icon of the National Park System. Leap forward to early in the 21st century, and for want of energy and multiple-use benefits, President Trump is trying to remove 85 percent of Bears Ears National Monument from within its original borders.

Ongoing litigation will decide whether Trump has his way, but for now the shredding of Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (from which the president has cut away 51 percent of the original monument), both in Utah, represents a staggering loss to U.S. protected areas -- national parks, forests, and other federal lands -- that play key roles in not just preserving biodiversity but as recreational outlets. More protections could be lost, too, if the president acts on altering the protections and/or size of nine other national monuments on land and in the oceans that former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke studied in 2017 after Trump signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to review the qualifications and sizes of national monuments designated by the last three presidents.

Worldwide, the actual, or proposed, loss of environmental safeguards for such protected places has accelerated since the arrival of the 21st century, according to a study out today. In sifting through 125 years of data on protected areas around the globe, the authors note that there have been nearly 4,000 reductions in protections for these special places -- actual or proposed losses either through regulatory relaxations or total removal of protected status -- and 78 percent of those have occurred since 2000 alone. 

In the United States, "90 percent of proposed rollbacks to U.S. protected areas happened since 2000, 99 percent of these are associated with industrial-scale development," according to the study. Along with the efforts to reduce the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, Congress two years ago OKed energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after 114 previous attempts launched over three decades failed.

“What we’re trying to do with this methodology is gather all these things together in one place so we can get a sense of them and continue to monitor them moving forward," Rachel Golden Kroner, the lead author of the report that came out today in Science, told the Traveler earlier this week.  

It was Golden Kroner who three years ago was the lead author on a paper that pointed out that during a 32-year-period early in the 20th century roughly one-third of Yosemite was removed from the park so the land could be opened to natural resource extraction.

“Over a century ago, Yosemite was set aside to be protected in perpetuity. Since then, protection has been maintained for some of it but not for all,” Golden Kroner, Conservation International Social Scientist, lead author of the study, and PhD candidate at George Mason University, said at the time.

Other units of the National Park System have seen their entire protection lost. Mackinac National Park in Michigan officially was the second national park designated in the United States, in 1875, under the oversight of the War Department. But 20 years later it lost that designation when the War Department proposed to abandon Fort Mackinac on the island. Since that move would leave the national park without a custodian, Michigna's governor at the time petitioned the federal government to turn the Mackinac National Park over to the state to be operated as a state park, which it did. 

Also gone from the park system is Fossil Cycad National National Monument. The monument, located in South Dakota, was created to protect and preserve an entire fossil forest of cycads, a type of tropical plant that resembles a fern or palm. While President Harding signed the necessary paperwork in 1922 to create the monument, illegal collectors had stripped away the hundreds of fossil cycads on the surface that had made the site worthy of national park status. By 1956, Congress agreed with the National Park Service to decommission the monument and turn the lands over to the BLM.

Tracking how governments around the globe carry through on their initial decisions to protect places as national parks and other protected areas is particularly key this year, as come 2020 the Convention on Biological Diversity will set new targets for how much land and water countries should protect for the sake of biodiversity.

"Most countries in the world are parties to it, but the U.S. is not officially a member," noted Golden Kroner this week. "The idea with the protected areas target is that countries, signatory countries, have agreed to set aside 17 percent of their lands and 10 percent of their national waters as protected areas. Those targets will expire next year and new targets will be set for 2020-2030, so we’re engaging with that process and wanting to ensure that people know about this, that protected areas can change in both directions, and most of the reductions have been related to industrial scale natural resources development activities."

Targets, of course, are just that. According to Golden Kroner's latest paper, The Uncertain Future of Protected Lands and Waters, not quite 15 percent of global lands and little more than 7 percent of ocean waters currently are protected for the conservation of nature. By promoting the losses since 2000, the paper's authors hope to foster a movement towards better tracking of how these places are added to, and subtracted from. Raising awareness of losses, she said, could perhaps lead to measurable and significant penalities against countries that continue to whittle away at protected areas.

"We are hoping to get this information into that discussion (of new targets), that process, start thinking about safeguards, incentivizing permanence of protected areas," Golden Kroner said. "We would like to see this phenomenon continue to be tracked more formally by governments around the world, and reported on, and also would like to think about if there’s lending, like the World Bank, and other lenders, would like to see them consider these rollbacks in decision making as well, to ensure that rollbacks are not being incentivized.”

According to the authors' counting, Australia leads the world in downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement -- a total loss of protection for an area -- events impacting protected areas, with 1,601 enacted events, and two proposed events, for a total of 1,603. India stands at No. 2, with 512 total, with the United States ranked third, with 1,006 events. However, 737 of the tallied events in the United States were proposed and haven't yet been acted upon.