Trump Dramatically Shrinks Bears Ears & Grand Staircase Monuments
Nearly 3 million acres gone in an afternoon. It's the largest rollback of protected land in American history. And the lawsuit it's designed to provoke is the entire point.
The Babylon Fire has been burning inside Bears Ears since late June. At more than 100,000 acres it's the largest wildfire in the country right now, big enough to close the monument and neighboring areas, big enough that the smoke off your own public land has hung over southeastern Utah for weeks. And this afternoon, in the Oval Office, with that fire still throwing ash across the very ground he was talking about, the president signed an order shrinking the monument anyway. Steve Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said it well when he told Backpacker Magazine, “The administration just has no shame that they would seize on the largest wildfire in the nation and the smoke and destruction that that fire is wreaking on the landscape, to leverage that opportunity to further attack and undermine the monument.”
By the administration's own count President Trump today stripped close to three million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, nearly ninety percent of the two monuments combined, leaving barely a tenth of what stood this morning. He broke the record he set himself in 2017, when he cut roughly two-thirds and left more than a million acres intact. This time he left almost nothing, and he did it while the ground was still on fire.
In 2017 Trump carved 85 percent out of Bears Ears and nearly half out of Grand Staircase-Escalante, the largest rollback of protected land in American history at the time, and steered the pieces toward the mining and fossil fuel interests that had lobbied for exactly that outcome for years. Biden restored both monuments before the drills arrived. Now the delegation that lost that fight, that lost Mike Lee's public-lands sell-off to bipartisan fury last year, that watched Celeste Maloy's attempt to claw back the Grand Staircase management plan die on a missed deadline this spring after hundreds of thousands of Americans flooded Congress, has found the one lever that doesn't require winning a vote. They had the president sign it away with a pen while a friendly crowd applauded.
The Resources
Under the Kaiparowits Plateau inside Grand Staircase sits the largest coal field in Utah, on the order of 62 billion tons, with the recoverable share valued by the Utah Geological Survey somewhere between $212 and $312 billion. When Bill Clinton designated the monument in 1996 the federal government bought out the eighteen existing leases to keep that coal in the ground, and when Trump carved the place up in 2017 the boundary Kane County drew for him excluded more than half a million acres of that exact coal field. The coal may never come out, because the Kaiparowits is remote and the cost of hauling it to market has only worsened as demand collapsed. But nobody drew those lines by accident, and nobody's drawing them by accident now.
Bears Ears is another story. When Obama designated it in 2016 the boundaries took in more than 350 uranium and vanadium claims, roughly a third of them held by a single company, Energy Fuels Resources, which runs the White Mesa mill six miles from the old monument line, the last operating conventional uranium mill in the country, and holds the idled Daneros mine on the monument's western edge. In the spring of 2017 Energy Fuels hired a coal lobbyist named Andrew Wheeler, who coincidentally later became Trump's own EPA administrator, and sent Interior maps marking the precise ground it wanted cut loose. Company executives got a meeting with Ryan Zinke's top staff before the review had formally begun. When Trump signed the reduction that December, the new boundary tracked the company's maps and left better than a hundred of its claims sitting safely outside the monument. Zinke told reporters at the time that Bears Ears "really isn't about oil and gas at all," and for once he was telling the truth. It was about uranium, and the uranium matters more today than it did then, because prices have climbed and the administration has spent the past year hunting domestic sources and calling it energy independence.
The Ultimate Prize for Utah
The uranium in Bears Ears will get a lot of attention from the supporters of this attack on the monuments. They’ll go on and on about how it’s critical to our national security and tell you all kinds of lies. But the real prize is something far more insidious.
What Utah's leadership actually wants out of this is much bigger than any single mill or seam, and they've said so out loud for anyone who cared to listen. The lawsuit Spencer Cox and the state filed against Biden's restoration was never really about acreage. Utah’s goal is to get the Antiquities Act in front of this Supreme Court. That's the prize Cox, Mike Lee, and decades of Utah anti-public lands fanatics have been chasing for years, steering a case toward the one venue where the law that guards every monument in the country might finally be broken, and on June 23 the Tenth Circuit handed them the opening, ruling two to one that a president's monument designations can be hauled into court after all and sending the case back down to be reheard under that looser standard. Utah Attorney General Derek Brown called the decision a win for every Western state tired of watching the Antiquities Act treated like a blank check. Mike Lee, who’s spent his entire miserable career in Congress trying to gut that same law through legislation and losing every round, now gets to watch it happen through the courts instead.
Chief Justice Roberts has already put in writing his disdain for the Antiquities Act and its power to set aside large landscapes without any discernible limit, and all but asked for the right case to come test it, about as close to an engraved invitation as a sitting justice ever sends. The Justice Department spent last May building the vehicle to answer it, issuing an opinion that overturned nearly ninety years of settled interpretation to declare that a president can erase a predecessor's monument by simply deciding the objects inside it were never worth protecting in the first place. Today's reduction is the case they've been waiting for. Cut the monuments deep enough, force the tribes and the conservation groups to sue, and let that lawsuit climb toward a Court that's been signaling for years that it would like to close the Antiquities Act era for good. Win there and it's over, not for two monuments in Utah but for every acre a future president might ever set aside, the next Grand Canyon and the next Grand Teton alongside the ones we already hold.
If you want to know how your own delegation has voted every time your land was on the line, we built the Congressional Public Lands Scorecard to show you in about thirty seconds.
The Absurdity of it All
Understand what you're being asked to swallow. Spencer Cox will go on camera and tell you, with the practiced calm of a man who has said it into a mirror, that all he's ever wanted is to keep public lands in public hands. This is the same governor whose state built the lawsuit designed to put the Antiquities Act on the block and hand the Supreme Court the knife. The same governor' whose state sued the federal government to seize control of 18.5 million acres of your public lands. It’s almost laughable the way they expect you to believe their practiced lies. And nearly the entire Utah delegation runs the same outrageous con. They couldn't win this in Congress or at any ballot box where the public got a say, so they went looking for the one room where the public isn't allowed. What you watched today was a handful of men who have long lost this argument deciding they no longer needed to win it.
Bears Ears is the ugliest part, because Bears Ears was different. Five sovereign nations — the Hopi, the Navajo, the Ute Mountain Ute, the Uintah and Ouray Ute, and the Zuni — did something this country had never once permitted. They came together and asked for a monument on their own ancestral ground, and for the span of a single presidency they were partners in governing land their people have walked for longer than there's been a United States to argue over it. Trump broke that promise the first time around. Today he broke it again, this time with a Justice Department opinion in his pocket assuring him it was legal and an appeals court ruling all but telling the tribes to go ahead and sue, so the case can climb toward a Court that's been waiting years for it. The people who'll pay first already know the shape of what's coming. The White Mesa Ute live in the literal shadow of the Energy Fuels mill, breathing what lifts off its stacks and hauling in bottled water because they won't drink what comes out of the tap, and they've spent years asking the state of Utah to care. Utah's answer, today, was to hand that same industry a wider opening, which tells you precisely who this was written for.
The Fight Goes On
This fight isn't over, whatever the smiling con artists in the oval office would like you to believe. The lawsuits are already written, and the last time this country was told a canyon was for sale it stood up loud enough to make even this delegation flinch. So stand up again. Learn the names of everyone who wanted this and everyone who'll pretend a year from now that they didn't, and keep those names close. We built the Congressional Public Lands Scorecard so you can see in about thirty seconds how yours voted every time your land was on the line, and the Threatened Public Lands Map so you can watch which place gets marked for the next knife. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase were never Trump's to give away, and never Cox's to trade, and they'll never belong to whoever holds the mineral lease when this is done. They belong to you, and to a kid in Blanding who isn't born yet and will inherit whatever we're willing to leave standing. The men who signed these monuments away today are wagering that you'll be worn down, or convinced it's already lost. Every generation before us was handed that same wager, and the only ones worth remembering are the ones who refused it. The refusing falls to us now, the way it always has, on ground that was never theirs to sell and never will be.
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Thanks for reading. Until next time,
-Jim
Even expected it still hurts like hell. What a sick bastard, a cheap-assed sell your own mother for a dollar president.👎🏿💩
By what authority? He has none. Only Congress can shrink or roll back what it creates. We are conditioned to avoid asking questions or source of authority.