Historic preservation rule changes threaten more than just monuments

The Trump administration finally realized that it would take too long to destroy our nation’s historic landmarks with bulldozers and blue paint. Last month, the federal historic preservation agency voted to completely overhaul its regulations. Contrary to the agency’s congressional mandate to promote the preservation of historic places, this overhaul will threaten historic sites in every community, in every state.  

I should know. I was the last Senate-confirmed chair to lead that agency — the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation — and I’m currently building the first public, interactive map of designated historic sites, the National Preservation Atlas. It is heartbreaking to contemplate how much is at risk as a result of this single action.  

The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation administers Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, a regulatory process applied annually to around 120,000 federal agency undertakings, including construction, funding private projects and issuing permits for private parties to extract natural resources from federal land. It requires agencies to stop, look and listen before taking an action that would negatively affect historic properties on or eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.  

The new rules would shrink the scope of protection and will result in the Trump administration being able to greenlight federal permits for surface mining, fossil-fuel networks and other extractive projects. That’s because the new rules would protect only sites that are “geographically compact,” meaning that many archaeological sites, cultural landscapes and areas of historic or religious importance to Indian Tribes, Native Hawaiians and Alaska........

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