The Trump regime’s unprecedented, cruel, and wholly unnecessary slashing of Grand Staircase Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments in Utah — the second such evisceration of these monuments in nine years — marks the largest rollback of federal public lands protection in our nation’s history. It also undoes the restoration of both Monuments’ footprints after they were restored by President Biden, to immense popular support and celebration, shortly after he took office in 2021.
Those days of restoration seem like a long time ago.
At the signing ceremony that sealed the fate of Grand Staircase Escalante and Bears Ears on Monday, Trump was surrounded by the nine duplicitous Utah politicians who cheered the move and even lied to their own constituents about their plans to do so, including Governor Spencer Cox and the state’s entire GOP congressional delegation, particularly long-time public lands enemy Senator Mike Lee, who grinned and cackled like it was Christmas morning while Trump lied about imaginary restrictions on access and the ability to “walk” in National Monuments, as though Monuments are fenced off by barbed wire. Nothing could be further from the truth. They and other National Monuments are, in fact, open to all. But they’ll be fenced off from everyone soon enough, nature and MAGA alike, once they’re being drilled, mined, logged, and desecrated by Trump’s allies.
Trump and the Utah Republicans’ destruction of Grand Staircase Escalante and Bears Ears ignores the wishes of 74 percent of Utahns, and over 90 percent of Americans, who want the Monuments preserved at the sizes they were established. Trump’s proclamation also ignores the Monuments’ role as outdoor destinations popular with hikers, backpackers, and hunters throughout the west, and the contributions they make as regional economic engines. And Trump’s move spits in the face of the thousands of citizen and community groups, Tribes, and individual Americans who volunteered for hours over the course of decades to protect these public lands for posterity, nature, conservation, and in the great American preservation tradition.
Not that Trump and his friends care. There’s bigger money to be made for their benefactors in destroying the ecosystems, habitats, and species that Grand Staircase Escalante, Bears Ears, and other National Monuments were wisely and carefully set aside to protect from gross exploitation in the first place.
In fact, Grand Staircase Escalante recently survived a Mike Lee-led attempt in the Senate to gut it via the seldom-used Congressional Review Act, which was used earlier this year to decimate protections for Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Wilderness to make way for a Chilean-owned copper mine. It’s astonishing how, a full three decades after Grand Staircase Escalante was designated in response to multiple citizens groups that had long wanted the area protected, the modern MAGA Republican Party — once the party of outdoorsmen like Mark Hatfield and Barry Goldwater, along with faux outdoorsmen like Ronald Reagan — now loathes the idea of conservation or public lands protection at all.
On an even more tragic note, the first-of-its-kind Bears Ears Intertribal Commission — made up of a coalition of the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Ute India Tribe — that served as a co-management partner for the National Monument was dissolved with the stroke of a Sharpie as part of Trump’s executive proclamation. Trump’s duplicity stabs the five Utah Tribes in the back, and further defiles and whitewashes the Native American legacy behind Bears Ears’ designation.
Iconic American locales like Joshua Tree, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, and Olympic National Parks were all first protected as National Monuments in the 1930s, and eventually became National Parks by way of congressional action in subsequent years. Pinnacles National Park in Monterey County is even older, having first been set aside as a National Monument by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. Imagine a post-1945 president meddling with the size and footprint of those monuments decades after the fact, just as Trump has done now in decimating Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, 10 and 30 years old respectively.
Throughout their time as National Monuments, there has never been a public outcry or groundswell of support for reducing or eradicating the boundaries of Grand Staircase Escalante or Bears Ears — only calls for their preservation. Only the same deadbeat Republicans, shilling for the same deep-pocketed resource extractors, have worked for the last decade to ensure their destruction. They are of the same mindset as those who drove John Muir to his grave when his beloved Hetch Hetchy at Yosemite National Park was desecrated by the construction of O’Shaughnessy Dam in 1914 (the dam is still there today), and are the ideological descendants of the lawless railroad, timber, and cattle barons of the Old West that nearly eradicated the American buffalo from existence, shooting them for sport while aboard luxury locomotives speeding across the Great Plains. They are also the reason why cooler heads began to set aside federal public lands for preservation, starting with the revolutionary idea of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, and eventually, the formation of the National Park Service in 1916.
So why are Trump and his GOP allies doing this? Because Trump and the modern GOP loathe preservation, if not life on earth altogether. They reject the legacy of American conservation, and see National Monuments and other protected American public lands as impediments to their resource extraction benefactors being able to mine, drill, and log at will. Since Trump was inaugurated for a second term, he and his anti-conservation allies have been moving at light speed to undo every major American environmental accomplishment of the last 70 years. And now they’re hoping to reach even further back into U.S. history.
With the 90 percent slashings in size of Grand Staircase Escalante and Bears Ears, Trump and his Project 2025 benefactors at the Heritage Foundation hope to prompt a court challenge in which they can ultimately litigate the 1906 Antiquities Act before the Supreme Court. Signed into law 120 years ago by President Theodore Roosevelt to enable presidents to quickly designate National Monuments on federal public land when Congress is moving too slowly — or deliberately dragging its feet — to pass National Park legislation for areas facing imminent threats, the Antiquities Act has long been a target for right-wing extremists, weird fringe groups like the Heritage Foundation, and anti-public land zealots like Mike Lee.
And while the implementation of federal agency management falls under the purview of the executive branch, there’s no reason you can’t put pressure on Congress to push back against the Trump regime’s move. Congress should offer congressional ratification of these now-reduced Monuments at their original size, or develop new preservation proposals like National Park or Wilderness designations. Call and write your two U.S. senators and your U.S. representative today, and put the goddamn pressure on. Let them know this move by Trump and his corporate bootlickers is reprehensible, and that policy must immediately be pursued to undo it.
Photos of Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument © 2023 Fred Rogers, all rights reserved. Not for reproduction.
