New Orleans      The courts keep telling Trump to stop his White House ballroom madness, even as excavators and cranes keep beeping and buzzing.  The classic problem of how to put Humpty-Dumpty back together is front and center here.  In classic developer mode, Trump’s strategy is clearly to present a fait accompli, making it hard to undo or redo what’s already been done.

The ballroom is a scandal, but for better or worse, it’s not permanent, even if costly.  More troubling is what Trump and his people are doing to public lands around the country.  I send a couple of dollars every year to a group in southwestern Utah whose mission is protecting the public lands in the state from exploitation.  Currently, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance  is preparing to sue to try to stop Trump’s illegal order to eliminate huge parts of the Bear Ears and Escalante monument areas in order to allow mining.  Within days, eight or nine different mining companies filed claims on the unprotected areas.  Maybe the courts will stop this, but in these fragile and beautiful areas, who and what will stop the miners if they start digging?  As we know from coal mining reclamation efforts in the arid west, it can take generations for the land to recover and often the scars never disappear.  Anyone who has ever traveled in the desert US West has seen the tracks of the wheels of Conestoga wagons more than 150 years ago.

Utah and these parts of Colorado are of course just one example.  Under Trump, parts of the Alaska wilderness areas have been opened, commercial timber interests have been given more leeway in national forests, and there are even announcements about using public land for data centers in order to avoid citizen protests and concerns.

Utah has long been ground zero for conservative commercial interests trying to seize federal land.  The most specious arguments by many of these outfits, formerly known as part of the Sagebrush Rebellion, is that federal lands should be “returned” to state supervision and control in order to allow more development.  These lands were never private or state properties, but always federal, public lands ever since the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the national government’s wresting western lands from native tribes with forked tongue assurances and treaties.  In some cases, tribes have righteous claims and are making them, but state governments have none.

All of which might be unspoken, but this is what allows Trump to waive his royal specter to open land that the federal government stewards for all of the American people to commercial interests.  Ridiculously, sometimes the claims are based on some declaration of an emergency for national security, even though the US is now a major oil exporter and the mining is being driven by the soaring market for gold and precious minerals.

Ballrooms can rise and fall based on White House whims, but once the land is ravished and taken away from public use, the damage is lasting for us and generations to come.