President Bill Clinton created California’s Giant Sequoia National Monument on April 15, 2000 | Wikimedia Commons
President Bill Clinton created California’s Giant Sequoia National Monument on April 15, 2000, and protected approximately 327,769 acres of federal land in the southern Sierra Nevada. The monument included 34 giant sequoia groves and surrounding forest, at a time when many of the groves outside national parks were exposed to commercial logging. Giant sequoias already had substantial protection inside Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Yosemite National Parks by 2000, and the problem was that many other groves stood on national forest land, where surrounding forest could still be managed for timber. President Bill Clinton created California’s Giant Sequoia National Monument on April 15, 2000 | Wikimedia Commons Giant sequoias grow naturally only along a narrow section of California’s Sierra Nevada, and the U.S. Forest Service currently estimates roughly 65 to 75 natural groves, depending on how groves are defined. The species occupies a relatively small geographic range, with the larger concentration of groves in the southern Sierra Nevada, and Clinton’s administration described the new monument as protecting 34 groves and the forest around them.
Clinton used the Antiquities Act to withdraw the federal acreage from activities including new mining claims and commercial timber disposition, and the proclamation said that the protected area was the smallest area that would be considered compatible with caring for the scientific, historic, and ecological resources identified in the order. At the time, the White House said those groves represented a substantial share of the remaining giant sequoia population.
