President Barack Obama and the first family are celebrating America’s cherished natural heritage, making a weekend tour marking the 100th anniversary of the nation’s vaunted national park system.
Obama, also using the occasion to tout his record on the environment, is the first sitting president since John F. Kennedy in 1962 to visit Yosemite National Park.
Obama has made protecting nature areas one of the hallmarks of his presidency.
Since 2009 he has set aside as protected areas more than 265 million acres of public lands and waters (100 million hectares) across the country, which is more than any of his predecessors did. A large part of that involves a marine sanctuary around islands and atolls in the Pacific.
In doing so, he relied on the Antiquities Act, a law signed in 1906 by then president Theodore Roosevelt, a fervent advocate of preserving the country’s natural resources.
For Obama, who has made the fight against climate change a priority of his two terms in office and complains of systematic obstructionism by the Republican controlled Congress, the law has been a good way to get around his opponents on environmental issues.
It allows the president to move swiftly to preserve threatened areas, which can be transformed into national parks if Congress gives the go ahead.
The Grand Canyon, Death Valley and vast swathes of Alaska have benefited from the law.

Source: Arab News