The New York Times reported Thursday that President Joe Biden is planning to expand a pair of national monuments in California by roughly 130,000 acres, citing two people familiar with the plans.
“The San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument will each get new boundaries designed to protect land of cultural significance to Native American tribes,” the Times revealed.
The two monuments were established by President Barack Obama using the 1906 Antiquities Act. The century-plus-old law allows the commander-in-chief to unilaterally place additional public lands under enhanced federal protections by executive order.
While a national park is a large swath of land protected by an act of Congress, land with a “national monument” designation protects a “specific natural, cultural or historic feature.” The 1906 law, however, requires that the area preserved must be “the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
President Obama had a habit of violating the law’s mandates to establish quasi-national parks without congressional approval. President Biden is carrying on the tradition.
The San Gabriel monument, established east of Los Angeles in 2014, already covers more than 340,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest and more than 4,000 acres of the adjacent San Bernardino National Forest. If the monument were one of the 63 national parks, it would already rank 23rd in size, even larger than Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Biden, according to The New York Times,
