The Antiquities Act Analysis

Smoke filters through tree branches, enveloping the forest canopy in a thick cloud of toxicity, as caustic apparatuses below cut into the earth and slash through trees, destroying fragile ecosystems and cultural sites. America is facing a crisis; our land is not only rich with biodiversity, but with natural resources that attract big oil, timber and natural gas corporations. These corporations don’t give thought to preserving land and preventing the extinction of countless species, but only care about making a profit through draining environments of their resources. This corporate greed has been a constant threat to the wellbeing of the environment, but as of recently, the GOP has encouraged drilling and timbering through their efforts to
Senator Lee and other puppets for big natural resource corporations often place financial gain above all else, and cannot look past their own greed to see that the world is being depleted of resources and gradually destroyed due to the negative ideology of anti-environmentalists. These opposers to environmentalism are largely made up of Republican law makers who “intend to remove both this power and this land from the federal government in order to restore it to the people of Utah and Nevada” ( DeSanctis, 6). To appeal to Americans, politicians such as Lee back up their agendas by stating that federal control over land should be revoked, because it takes power from the states and limits the usage of land by private parties, including civilians. These arguments incite anger and distrust of the federal government on false pretenses, because the end goal for many of the politicians united behind revoking the land protected by Obama is to exploit the land for financial gain. The federal protection over national monuments only limits the destructive use of the land, pertaining to hunters as well as mining, drilling
The finite resources that could be drawn out of the land are not worth the permanent damage their removal would cause, turning sacred, beautiful, culturally significant, land with thriving ecosystems into barren wastelands in the name of corporate greed. To preserve Americas natural environment, the Antiquities Act must be preserved, so that more national monuments can be created, and so our national monuments and parks remain under protection from the exploitation of drilling and timbering companies. If there is any hope of halting the initiatives that are being enacted to exploit and destroy American land, it is up to the American people to properly research, vote for and elect non-corrupt politicians who are not influenced by big oil and other natural resource businesses, so that the destructive, money driven influence of these companies is not conveyed through the government onto our irreplaceable