Mike Costello, executive director of the West Virginia Wilderness Coalition, wants 123,000 acres within the Monongahela National Forest to become the Birthplace of Rivers National Monument, according to Belt.

Such a designation, Costello hopes, would spur more tourism throughout the state to boost and diversify the economy.

Currently, 138 national monuments are scattered across the country in 30 states and the District of Columbia. The president and Congress can both declare national monuments. The Birthplace of Rivers National Monument would be the first in West Virginia.

In 2012, travel revenue for the state was $5.1 billion, and travel spending in West Virginia has increased by 3.3 percent per year since 2000 when adjusted for inflation. Travel spending makes up about 3.2 percent of the state’s GDP.

Economic diversity, tourism or otherwise, is increasingly important to West Virginia as the state’s historical reliance on natural resources becomes less stable.

As of July 2015, West Virginia has the highest unemployment rate in the country, 7.5 percent. It’s been rising since December 2014, when unemployment was 5.9 percent.

A glaring problem has been the decline of coal. From 2005 to 2014, mining grew from 7.6 percent of GDP to 18.7 percent. When looking at the private sector, that number grows to 22.1 percent.

Coal isn’t the only declining industry, either. Construction and manufacturing have decline by 23 percent and 16 percent, respectively, since the recession, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Natural gas and oil has fueled job increases in the state, but coal mining has been growing in its dominance even as the outlook for coal diminishes.

That economic tension might threaten Costello’s goal of a national monument.

To conserve some of West Virginia’s nature, a national monument could prevent economic development by restricting resource extraction. The booming natural gas and oil industry, concentrated mostly in West Virginia’s northern areas, would be prevented from mineral extraction in the national monument region. It could also limit hunting access in the area, though U.S. Agriculture Department Chief Thomas L. Tidwell told Belt that designations typically preserve management plans already in place.

Whether the national monument comes to fruition or not, economic pressures might force the state to diversify. The northern part of the state might weather the decline of coal better with the boom in natural oil and gas, but the southern part of the state will need jobs in other industries to combat the decline of coal and the threat to local budget revenue.