As a bit of context for why this is big news in the US, you need to understand how they see their national parks and national heritage.
As we all know the USA is a very young country. This means they don’t have much built heritage of the kind Europeans love to list, protest and visit with gran – literal monuments to the past, built by people (usually men as it happens, but that’s another matter). So what they define as national heritage is monuments of nature. These are the oldest things in the country and because of dominant views of nature, and the way North America as a continent was seen as terra nullius (land belonging to nobody), Americans revere pristine landscapes.
This is obviously very different to how our national parks work, which are have long been working landscapes. We use and protect our national parks very differently to the US, and when humans impact ‘nature’ so blatantly it goes against the fundamental principles of how Americans understand their natural heritage.