At the very top of the Interior Departments list of priorities is to create a conservation stewardship legacy second only to Teddy Roosevelt.

Its a vow that dates back to former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. In December 2017, after less than a year on the job, Zinke declared that goal complete, publishing an extremely thin list of actions that he believed rivaled those of his hero and Americas conservation president. Upon resigning from the administration in January 2019, Zinke claimed , among other things, that the Trump administration is one of the leading conservationists .

David Bernhardt, who replaced Zinke atop the federal agency, has carried the torch forward, just not for himself. One of the presidents priorities is to strive to ensure a conservation legacy second only to Theodore Roosevelt, he said during his Senate confirmation hearing in March 2019.

Environmentalists, outdoor sporting groups and even a great-grandson of Roosevelt himself have repeatedly blasted the Trump administration for invoking and comparing itself to the 26th president. And a new analysis from the Center for American Progress shows just how wildly off the mark the administration is.

By the numbers, Trump is the most anti-nature president in U.S. history, the left-leaning think tank found.

If the Trump administration aspires to build upon Teddy Roosevelts conservation legacy, they may want to consider stopping their attacks on the very system of public lands that Roosevelt helped build, said Jenny Rowland-Shea, CAPs senior public lands policy analyst and a co-author of the report. The numbers reveal an administration that has handed extractive industries access to public lands at a scope and scale weve never seen before.

Trump is the only president to strip protections from more acres of public land than hes protected, according to the analysis. The administration has weakened or is in the process of rolling back protections for nearly 35 million acres of federal land, an area roughly the size of Florida.

That includes slashing protections for 10 million acres of greater sage grouse habitat in seven Western states to allow energy and mineral development; a directive to greenlight logging on more than 9 million acres of Alaskas Tongass National Forest, the planets largest remaining intact temperate rainforest; and carving more than 2 million acres from a pair of protected national monuments in Utah Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante the largest rollback of national monuments in U.S. history.

The 35 million acre figure does not include the more than 24 million acres of public lands that the Trump administration has offered at auction to oil and gas drillers or its controversial offshore drilling plan that could open up nearly all U.S. waters some 1.5 billion acres to fossil fuel development.