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According to a White House spokesperson, President Donald Trump will sign on Friday a proclamation that restores commercial fishing access at a marine monument off New England.
The move aligns with the Trump Administration’s efforts to reduce regulations that it believes burden businesses and economic activity.
The proclamation will reopen the nearly 5,000-square-mile (13,000-square-kilometer) Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which was designated by former President Barack Obama in 2016 to protect species including deep-sea corals, sea turtles and whales.
Former President Joe Biden reversed the decision in 2021.
Officials at the White House said that this decision is in support of fishing communities and economic activity, as well as jobs.
New England Aquarium conducted an aerial survey on the monument, with the support of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found 600 animals including a bottlenose dolphin calf and a humpback calf, according to a Facebook post on Friday.
Peter Auster said that the monument is an important site to understand how human activities in the ocean impact marine life.
Auster stated that “without protected areas such as these, which exclude commercial scale activities from the sea, we cannot measure how human use elsewhere on the sea impacts biodiversity.”
Trump opened the monument for fishing in January, his second term. On April 17, he signed a document opening up 400,000 acres in the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument for commercial fishing.
The regulatory freeze by the administration
Chaos and uncertainty are injected into the system
The government has found that it sucked $320 billion worth of fishing revenue out of the country’s economy this spring when it delayed some East Coast fisheries opening and caused an overfishing problem of Atlantic bluefin. Reporting by Nichola Douglas, Jeff Mason, and Leah Douglas. Editing by Cynthia Osterman.
(source: Reuters)
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