When President Joe Biden first sat down in the Oval Office a year ago, the nation’s environmental regulatory framework was in shambles. His predecessor, Donald Trump, had put tremendous energy into shrinking national monuments, eviscerating environmental protections and removing so-called “regulatory burdens” from the back of extractive industries.
As a lame duck, Trump intensified his environmental rampage by selling drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, removing critical habitat protections for the northern spotted owl, allowing industry to kill migratory birds without consequence, approving a four-lane highway through a southwestern Utah desert and finalizing a deal that handed over Apache homelands to a global copper-mining company.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-joe-biden-bidens-herky-jerky-first-year-on-western-issues