Word: monumentous
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Bill Clinton has always had a problem with time. There he was in April, standing in a grove of 3,000-year-old giant sequoias in central California, about to declare them a national monument as part of his green legacy. But the Secret Service told him he had only 10 minutes for a "hike in the woods." Clinton bounded off through the sequoias, fascinated by the 300-ft. skyscrapers that spring from a seed smaller than a rice grain. He returned, behind schedule, to make his designation speech before zipping off by helicopter to a fund raiser in southern...
Nature operates on a less hurried time scale. Some of the sequoias Clinton preserved in the 328,000-acre monument are only the third generation since the last Ice Age, part of a family of trees that has endured fires, earthquakes, storms and every change of political leadership since human history began. "I am not a tree hugger, but these sequoias evoke an almost religious feeling in me," says Joe Fontaine, 67, a retired schoolteacher from Bakersfield who has campaigned for 40 years to stop logging near the sequoias. Sequoias themselves are too brittle for timber yards, but if trees...
...pristine tundra in northeast Alaska populated by vast herds of caribou and other wildlife. Clinton vetoed a 1995 bid by Republicans to open the refuge for oil drilling. But despite strong campaigning from conservationists, he never gave the 1.5 million-acre ANWR coastal plain the protection of national-monument status. While the refuge would be in no danger from a Gore presidency, George W. Bush has already said that as President he would open up the area for drilling...
...Clinton found a way to expand his environmental role beyond vetoing Republican proposals. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt introduced him to the glories of the Antiquities Act, which allows the President to declare an area of historic or scientific interest a national monument without having to go through a potentially hostile Congress. Roosevelt used the act in 1908 to protect the Grand Canyon. Standing on his predecessor's shoulders, Clinton chose the South Rim of the Grand Canyon as a backdrop for his declaration in 1996 of the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah...
Western Republicans are infuriated by Clinton's new habit of flying out to some picturesque site in the West and unilaterally declaring it a national monument with a sweep of his hand. "Environmental law has become an oxymoron. It just serves whatever angle the Democrats are pushing," complains James Buchal, a Portland lawyer and author of The Great Salmon Hoax. Property-rights advocates accuse the Administration of carrying out land grabs. A series of lawsuits has been filed challenging the designation of national monuments throughout the West, including the sequoia forest. And vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney has said...