President Obama is using his Big Stick authority under the Antiquities Act---first used by Theodore Roosevelt to save Devils Tower and the Grand Canyon---to create 3 new National Monuments on Thursday, February 19.
From Think Progress
On Thursday, President Obama is expected to announce three new national monuments, adding to the 13 monuments he’s already designated during his presidency. Traveling to Illinois, Obama will officially proclaim the Pullman Historic District of Chicago, Browns Canyon in Colorado, and a former Honouliuli Internment Camp site in Hawaii to be national monuments.
Of the three National Monuments created by Obama on Thursday, perhaps the dearest to environmentalists and river rats is his creation of Browns Canyon National Monument in Colorado, saving an important stretch of the Arkansas River. From Outside:
The White House has announced that President Obama plans to designate Browns Canyon, a popular whitewater rafting spot in central Colorado, as a national monument this week, according to the Denver Post. Doing so would give the area another layer of federal protection to about 21,000 acres around the Arkansas River.
Obama is expected to make the announcement in person on Thursday in Chicago, when he will also designate sites in Illinois and Hawaii as national monuments. The Hawaii site will preserve an area where Japanese Americans were held in internment camps; the one in Illinois will honor the Pullman area in Chicago, an important labor civil rights location.
Last year, Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) and then-Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) tried to push a bill through Congress that would have protected a similar area near Salida, Colorado, but it failed to advance, the Denver Post reports. Bennet and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper then urged Obama to protect the area under the Antiquities Act, which gives the president the power to set aside federal land for protection without approval from Congress.
The Hawaii national monument designation has special historical significance:
From the Los Angeles Times
For more than half a century, what had once been Hawaii's largest and longest-operating internment camp was ignored and forgotten. To the hundreds of Japanese Americans who had been forcibly confined at the camp, the experience was a source of shame and rarely spoken of until it was rediscovered by historians more than a decade ago.
On Thursday, President Obama will designate the plot of land in western Oahu that was the site of the Honouliuli camp as a national monument, White House officials told the Los Angeles Times. The designation is intended to bring greater awareness to it and to Hawaii's distinct role in the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans and what the White House calls "the fragility of civil rights during times of conflict."
The announcement will come 73 years to the day after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the executive order paving the way for the internment of Japanese Americans, a few months after Japan bombed Hawaii's Pearl Harbor and drew the U.S. into the war.