A week after taking office, Biden set a goal of conserving 30 percent of America’s land and water by 2030—a plan called “30 by 30.” Currently, about 12 percent of the nation’s land and 25 percent of its waters are permanently protected from new development or resource extraction.
Biden took a large step towards his goal last week when his administration announced that the federal government would restore three national monuments to their Obama-era boundaries. During his tenure, Trump had substantially reduced two monuments in Utah–Bears Ears by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante by 50 percent—and opened up Seamounts Marine National Monument off the coast of Massachusetts to commercial fishing.
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) spearheaded the effort to restore the boundaries. After Biden’s announcement, she said,
Some of America’s most iconic landscapes are safe again. I commend President Biden for rescuing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante from the threat of mining and fossil fuel development.
This move closes more than two-million acres of land from “the threat of mining and fossil fuel development”—i.e., actions that produce resources necessary for human life.
Closing land to development isn’t about conservation. It’s about preservation—preserving nature and leaving it untouched by human activity. Pristine nature, not human flourishing, is the goal. However, human life requires us to transform nature. The values which sustain our lives must be produced, and production requires using raw materials—including ores and fossil fuels—to produce the values that life requires.
The world envisioned by environmentalists is not one of abundance and happiness for human beings. It is a world filled with deprivation and misery. It is a world in which mankind returns to the Pleistocene.