This article was originally published on Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Some public lands are too important to lose to drilling rights, and those lands just so happen to be in Montana ― the home state of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. 

Montana won’t lose any acres or protections for its current national monuments, and the state may also get a brand-new 200-square-mile national monument. That could happen even as the ink dries on Zinke’s recommendation to open millions of acres of public land in other states to oil and gas interests.

Zinke, a former Montana congressman, grew up a couple of hours west of the area he has recommended protecting from drilling rights. But many speculate that his public-lands strategy is less about familiarity and more about political strategy. Tawney and others believe Zinke will run for governor of the state when he’s done serving Trump. “I think the people of Montana hold our special places very near and dear,” Tawney told NPR. “If you do not protect those places I think it’s a political nightmare for you in this state.”

Other states hold their special places near and dear as well. The White House hasn’t revealed Zinke’s recommendations for those sites. But in a memorandum obtained by The Washington Post in September, Zinke advised Trump to modify 10 national monuments, including shrinking at least four in Western states and dropping drilling protections for others.

Zinke advised shrinking Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, Nevada’s Gold Butte, and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou. The Utah sites alone comprise some 3.2 million acres. Zinke’s memorandum doesn’t specify how many acres might be cut. Reducing protections could also open up remaining land to commercial fishing, grazing, logging and coal mining.

In Zinke’s memo, he notes that the 130,000-acre Two Badger-Medicine site is sacred to the Blackfeet Nation. Bears Ears in Utah is sacred to the Navajo Nation, yet that’s on the chopping block. The other site in Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, includes some of the most important dinosaur fossil sites in the world.