Trump dramatically cuts size of two national monuments held sacred by tribes | Utah
Donald Trump has approved a sharp reduction in the size of two national monuments in Utah considered sacred by many Native Americans, in the latest move to open up U.S. public lands to corporate developers and the oil and gas industry.
Trump said at his executive order signing event on Monday that two monuments that eliminate protections established by former presidents would see a reduction of “about a million and a half acres each” in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
“They took the land from the people quite squarely,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “We give it back.”
The Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in southern Utah feature ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs and scenic canyons, as well as coal and uranium deposits that state officials want ready for development.
The executive order marked the second time Trump has made such an endorsement. The president also scaled back designations for national monuments during his first term in 2017; that effort was later reversed by the Biden administration.
“We believe it is very clear that under the Antiquities Act, these monument designations must be the smallest area possible to protect antiquities, and these multimillion-acre monuments that are larger than the state of Delaware simply do not meet that designation,” said Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah who joined Trump at the signing event on Monday.
The Antiquities Act gives presidents the power to grant legal protection to sites deemed historically, archaeologically significant or culturally significant. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was established by Bill Clinton in 1996. Barack Obama created Bears Ears National Monument in 2016 under a 1906 law.
The shrinkage, as expected, drew criticism from environmental advocates and tribal representatives who have fought for years to preserve the monuments. Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, said it would “take legal action to maintain the protection of these precious landscapes.”
“President Trump’s attack on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments is as unlawful today as it was in 2017,” Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountain office, said in a statement. “The Antiquities Act gives presidents the power to designate national monuments, not destroy them.”
“Today’s announcements are a slap in the face to visitors to public lands across the country, as well as to the local communities and tribes who have worked for years to protect these special places,” McIntosh added.
Davina Smith-Idjesa, a Navajo Nation citizen and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said tribal leaders have been preparing for the reduction since Trump was elected to a second term. He said Monday it was “heartbreaking” and accused federal officials of shirking their legal responsibility to consult with tribal nations that would be affected.
“From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not just federal public land,” Smith-Idjesa said. “This is a living cultural site that holds our history, ceremonies, traditional foods and medicines, and the footprints of our ancestors.”
The latest move comes as Trump and other Republicans are dramatically reshaping management of vast tracts of taxpayer-owned land concentrated in western states. Trump administration officials and Republicans in Congress have sought to expand drilling, mining and logging on public lands while stripping protections for endangered species and rolling back conservation rules.
Utah officials have long opposed the monument’s designation, arguing that the state should control its own land. Trump reduced their size during his first term and called their creation a “massive land grab.” All together, they cover more than 3.2 million acres (13 million hectares), an area nearly the size of Connecticut.
Bears’ Ears was the first national monument protected at the request of tribal nations that considered these lands sacred. The landscape includes ancestral villages, ceremonial and burial sites, and features of some tribes’ creation and migration stories. This designation honored five tribes in the area: Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute, and Uintah-Ouray Ute.
Bears Ears, home to hundreds of thousands of objects of cultural and scientific significance, is managed jointly through an agreement between tribal nations and federal agencies.
Grand Staircase-Escalante consists of cliffs, canyons, natural arches, and archaeological sites, including rock paintings. While uranium is found in the Bears Ears region, there are large coal reserves here.
National monument designation provides comprehensive protection not only for significant geological features or artifacts, but also for the surrounding landscape; It bans drilling, mining and new construction nearby. Proponents of Trump’s degrowth plan say protective limits are stretched too far and mining for critical minerals is blocked.
Biden designated or expanded more than a dozen monuments and had a goal of protecting at least 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.
Trump’s policies are largely the opposite: He wants to capitalize on the natural resource wealth of federal lands, which total more than 100,000 square miles (260,000 km2), and offshore areas under federal control, such as the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska.
This drew a harsh backlash from Democrats and environmentalists who warned against the wholesale disposal of valuable landscapes for commercial gain.
Doug Burgum. Trump’s interior secretary said last year that federal officials would review and consider redrawing the boundaries of national monuments as part of an effort to increase U.S. energy production.
Associated Press contributed reporting
