When the Trump administration moved to shrink Bears Ears National Monument from about 1.4 million acres to 220,000 acres in 2017, it was a clear sign that the feds were open to the area being used for purposes other than cultural or natural appreciation and recreation. Today, they made it official. After stripping monument status from 85 percent of those 1.4 million acres, the BLM would like to begin logging the remaining federally protected acreage, as well as open it to grazing and off-road vehicle use.
Bears Ears would become a monument “in name only,” according to Bobby McEnaney, senior deputy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Western Renewable Energy Project. “They chose the most permissible possible route when it comes to managing [Bears Ears] It’s hard to see this as a monument anymore.”
The plans, which you can read here, include “chaining” hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of acres of juniper forests. Chaining is a destructive though widely used method to clear forested areas for timber and to open space for grazing. Bulldozers drag heavy chains through trees, churning up the ground, which not only dramatically alters the landscape for decades, but destroys any archaeological sites in the chain’s path.
Off-road vehicle use is also on the table for the shrunken national monument, which would not be protected as wilderness under the new rules. Uranium mining and oil drilling are already underway in large parts of the Bears Ears area that were once federally protected.
This all on the heels of the BLM’s recent announcement that it would be relocating its headquarters from Washington, DC, to Grand Junction, Colorado. A move that many have assumed is an attempt to weaken the BLM’s control over public land by increasing state and local power over lands once looked out for by the federal government. Of course, the vast majority of land overseen by BLM is in the West, so the move makes a good deal of sense on the surface. Some fear, however, that state and local officials will have a great deal more influence over a decentralized BLM with less sway in Washington. The result may be more land giveaways, as we’ve seen at Bears Ears.
The new plan is open to a 30-day public protest period, the details of which can be found here. Different than a public comment, a public protest requires the filer to have a list of specific complaints tailored to which part of the plan they believe has been approved in error.
Top photo: Bureau of Land Management
You need something to read? We have something to read!
Adventure Journal’s print stories are only available in print. They are deeper, longer, and more nuanced than what you find online. Find out why 99% of subscribers renew every single year.
Order a subscription and current issue you today and most U.S. address will have their copy in three days. West Coast addresses it’s 1-2 days.
I see nothing wrong with this. They are prescribing chaining as a fuels reduction technique. Juniper great and all for a natural woodland look, but it must be thinned back in order to reduce likelihood of wildfires, especially in ecosystems such as this. In addition, they appear to be pretty restricted on where and when they would be actually administering treatments.
the notion that chaining is a “green” solution is just absurd. if the forest needs to be thinned then by all means let’s get some shovel ready jobs going to clear the underbrush. chainsaws don’t use that much fuel and you cut selectively. chaining is a horrible thing to do to the land. I’ve seen it first hand and it ain’t pretty.
Chaining eventually ends up causing a thicker juniper forest.
There’s very little science to support assertion that mechanical vegetation removal in p-j woodlands reduces wildfire risk or severity (and it can actually increase risk due to the introduction of invasive species). And chaining as a vegetation management tool is about as indefensible as it comes…although I’ll agree that it’s hard to burn a clear-cut forest.
The p-j fire cycle for the Colorado Plateau is also in the realm of hundreds of years, with stand-replacing fires being the norm. It’s not an ecotype that is subject to frequent, low severity fires. This report from the Wild Utah Project is informative:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57c5f6aa579fb31d71581457/t/5c746d0a9140b757cca49418/1551133978337/2019_MechVegTrt_LitReview.pdf
It’s not hard to burn a clear cut forest at all. At least not a clear cut PJ forest. Look at Nevada. Some of the largest fires in recorded history, including last year’s Martin Fire, ripped through hundreds of thousands of acres of cheatgrass, fueled by overgrazing and huge PJ removal projects. Chaining is good for one thing, temporarily growing more food for cows. Oh, and giving tax dollars to good ol boy contractors.
Dear Sam,
‘I see nothing wrong with this’.
Nature does.
Naturalists do.
You cannot ‘manage’ ecocsystems.
You can, however leave nature alone.
It does just fine by itself. Just stay the hell out of it.
And work to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.
Are you PAID by someone like a logging, drilling, mining, grazing entity to write these comments?
Whats the status of the lawsuits? It seems like nothing has happened since they were filed. Wouldn’t a judge be able to stop this sort of thing pending the outcome of the suits?
The relocation of the BLM doesn’t weaken the agency, it will strengthen it. Getting the land managers away from Washington and the ridiculousness of beltway politics and into the center of the lands they manage makes sense on so many levels. Although these lands are publicly owned, they need to be managed by and in conjunction with the people who live there and raise their children there. The people who live next to these lands should have more say on how they are managed than politicians and other elites from big coastal cities who will never set foot in the mountain west.
@Jason
It’s weird that the “people who live next to these lands” often respond to their newfound dominion by raping and pillaging them.
It’s the only way they can make dollars at public expense, egg head beltway scientists and land conservationists with their degrees in ecology and environmental science be damned.
this administration cares about nothing but money wild places and wild animals have no place for them because to this administration thy offer no value
Then there’s this from the scientists at Utah’s Department of Natural Resources. https://youtu.be/skIYOsBRLds