Trump team nears decision on national monuments (Science Magazine)

Science MagazineAugust 18th, 2017 1:53 pm...Mojave Trails National Monument, CaliforniaThis 1.6-million-acre site in Southern California is the largest of a trio of monuments Obama set aside in the Mojave Desert in early 2016.Earlier this week, Zinke excused the 154,000-acre Sand to Snow National Monument from his review. Castle Mountains National Monument, at just 21,000 acres, was not large enough to qualify for automatic inclusion in the Interior review.But the Mojave Desert site, with its lava flowers and sand dunes, is also involved in a debate over whether Cadiz Inc. will be able to build a proposed 43-mile-long pipeline to pump water from an aquifer under land its owns to 100,000 households in Southern California.The Trump administration has placed it on a list of infrastructure priority projects, which raised questions for now-Interior Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, who briefly led the Trump transition team. Before his confirmation to the Trump administration, Bernhardt was chairman of the natural resources department at the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. The firm's lobbying arm worked to advance the Cadiz project (Greenwire, April 6)."Diverse communities across the desert fought for over a decade to designate all three of our California desert national monuments," Mojave Desert Land Trust Executive Director Danielle Segura told the Highland Community News in California on Wednesday. "We encourage Secretary Zinke to recognize the public's will and the unique ecological and historical significance of places like Mojave Trails National Monument in his forthcoming recommendations"...Read Full Article