Utah is an amazing, gorgeous state with incredible National Parks, Monuments, Wilderness, and abundant public lands. Sadly, it is also where best conservation practices go to die.
Echoing alert language issued by our friends with the Conservation Lands Foundation, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), and Monuments for All, Utah Senator Mike Lee and Representative Celeste Maloy of Utah’s 2nd congressional district have introduced a long-threatened joint resolution to gut the management plan of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument with the use of the rare and seldom-utilized Congressional Review Act (CRA). If enacted, the results would be very bad for habitat, species, and public access.
Fresh off Republicans’ use of the CRA to poison the Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota, Utah’s entire congressional delegation introduced a “resolution of disapproval” last month under the CRA that would require a simple majority vote to eradicate Grand Staircase-Escalante Nation Monument and prevent the BLM from issuing a similar plan to restore the Monument in the future, thereby undoing the protections for endangered species and fossils that Grand Staircase-Escalante was established to protect in the first place. This sets a terrible, frightening precedent for Republicans to decimate long-standing conservation policy across the country.
According to a March 4th article in the Salt Lake Tribune, “If the resolution passes with a simple majority vote within the next 60 days, Congress will throw out the [management] plan and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) cannot replace it with a plan that is substantially the same. This will mark the first time the Congressional Review Act (CRA) is used to overturn a National Monument plan.”
Please take action NOW to prevent this, either by utilizing the Monuments for All action alert linked here or by copying and pasting the letter below in an email to your congressperson urging them to vote NO on this use of the CRA to reverse the Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan. Look up your U.S. senators and congressperson and send your note to their email addresses, then call their offices. Voting on this is imminent, so please take action quickly!
Dear ______________ ,
As an American with family, friends, and neighbors that care deeply about National Monuments and other protected public lands, I’m writing to urge you to vote NO on any Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to overturn the 2025 Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument management plan.
Using the CRA to overturn National Monument management plans sets a dangerous precedent that puts every National Monument in America at risk and wipes out the stable “rules of the road” that communities and stakeholders rely upon, replacing sustainable, balanced management with uncertainty, conflict, and instability for everyone — from recreation businesses, guides, hunters, anglers, and ranchers to local governments.
The economic impacts of this terrible move will ripple far beyond the Monument’s boundaries. Invalidating the management plan immediately calls into question all outfitting and guide permits in the Monument, threatening the livelihoods of local communities and jeopardizing public access.
Most egregious is if the National Monument management plan is eliminated by use of the CRA, the Bureau of Land Management will be barred from issuing another plan that is “substantially the same” in the future. Such an act would sow chaos, and no doubt become a template for undermining the management of National Monuments across the country. What a terrible precedent.
Please listen to your constituents who rely on these public lands for their livelihoods, way of life, and clean air and water. Vote NO on ANY attempt to use backdoor measures like the Congressional Review Act to destabilize stewardship, sell off public lands, and gut protections.
Thank you for your kind consideration.
Once you send your emails, share my alert page or a similar one with friends and family in other states and congressional districts. Believe me, politicians don’t know there’s problem until they hear THEIR VOTERS telling them about one! To quote the great conservationist Harvey Manning:
Well-informed letters about the wildland are crucial. Your feet, taking one step at a time at a studiously slow pace, know the land better than the heads of any elected officials. Insert into those heads what your feet know. Your feet have information, direct boot-on-the-ground knowledge of the earth.
As I wrote in my Jan. 24th piece A Crescendo of Environmental Destruction Underway in Congress, a management plan is a guiding document for day-to-day operations at a National Monument, from the protection of landscapes to the location of new campgrounds. Overturning the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument plan overrides years of public input and collaboration, and puts the Monument in harm’s way from oligarchal land speculators, anti-public lands advocates, and those who want to privatize all federal land to be sold to the highest bidder for destructive exploitation, or turned into private hunting reserves, golf courses, and third or fourth homes for the wealthy.
If Congress can invalidate a National Monument’s management plan through this process, then no National Monument or protected area is secure. That even includes Wilderness, where the concept of land “untrammeled by man” is now being threatened in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois with a radical prescribed fire strategy. If the scheme in Utah is passed, the modern GOP — which still holds a tenuous majority in the House and loathes public lands and conservation — can move forward with plans it’s been fashioning for well over a decade to undo conservation management and take away the public lands held in trust for the American people by our federal government.
It’s easy to see how passage of the CRA is quite possible, especially with the help of just a few extra anti-environmental or blissfully unaware Vichy Democratic votes. Its impact, and the precedent it would set, will have devastating consequences for America’s outdoors and public lands.
As to why Utah Republicans are so hellbent on eradicating Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, I can’t say. GOP legislators have been trying to undo the Monument since it was established 30 years ago in 1996 during the Clinton administration, per the president’s authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act that gives presidents the ability to establish National Monuments. Despite the fact Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and its surrounding public lands have been a fuel injector for southern Utah’s outdoor recreation economy for decades, the state’s all-Republican delegation still appears unhappy the Monument’s conservation-minded management blocks their ability to ride destructive thrillcraft through its valleys, clearcut its native pinyon-juniper forest, or burrow out new mines for wealthy campaign contributors.
Please share this page with your friends and family in other congressional districts and states and tell them to take action NOW by writing their congressperson!
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument photos © 2023 Fred Rogers, all rights reserved. Flyer courtesy of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA).
