President Biden will sit down at a signing ceremony today to restore the size of Bears Ears National Monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are in Utah), and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the New England coast, to their pre-Trump-era boundaries. Bears Ears will once again be back to 1.36 million acres, with Grand Staircase restored to 1.87 million acres.
In 2017, President Trump reduced the size of Bears Ears by 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante by about 50%. Uranium mining lobbyists met with the former President in the weeks before he announced the shrinkage, and, presto, uranium mines were suddenly outside the protection of the reduced-in-size monument. Or maybe that was a coincidence.
Commercial fisherman had also lobbied for the opening of the marine monument, to at least a temporary success.
Expect a lawsuit from Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) who promised to sue the federal government if an attempt was made to restore the sizes of the Utah monuments.
“The Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah conserves one of most significant cultural landscapes in the United States, with thousands of archaeological sites and important areas of spiritual significance to Native American people in the region,” said U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “We look forward to working with Tribal Nations, local communities, the State and others in Utah to protect and manage these lands for future generations.”
“By acting to right a wrong, the President is reaffirming the proud American promise that our parks and monuments are to be protected for all people and for all time,” said Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality Brenda Mallory. “The President’s action will ensure that our children, and our children’s children, will be able to experience the wonder, history, and beauty of these extraordinary public lands and waters as we do today.”
Read more from the Department of the Interior, here.
Photo: Patrick Hendry/Unsplash
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With majorities or tie-breaker majorities in both houses, Biden needs to do this through congress so the next GOP president can’t just undo this with a stroke of a pen.
Was about to ask how to ensure that it doesn’t just get undone again and I guess there’s my answer. Anything left to Congress though is something left undone it seems.
What makes you think they could get antsy Republican votes. He can’t even get 50 Democratic votes. That’s why.
Pretty sure it was protected by an act of Congress before Trump dumped on it.
That’s my understanding. If one president does an order to do whatever, then the next president can just as easily undo it. But if it gets done through congress, then the next government has to go through congress again.
National Park status for both would be great, as that’d seem the hardest to undo, and the hardest to allow extraction in.
Still blows me away how biassed Utah politicians are towards resource extraction, when in fact the state has more people involved in outdoor industry than extraction. Just goes to show who gives the most money to politicians.
Stoked about the subject, but I’m going to take umbrage with the byline “once was public lands, now restored to public land status.” Before Obama declared the national monument, it was still public land. After Trump revoked it, it was still public land. Now that it is restored, it is still public land. The area inside the monument boundary is a mix of BLM, USFS, and state trust lands. The monument designation does not bring it from private to public ownership. It offers extra protections and management that the plain-jane public land does not provide.
Symnatics? I don’t think so.
Many conservos are freaked out by monument status because they believe that it gives the power for a president to condemn private land into a monument at the stroke of a pen. This is not so. It only pulls public land out of many possible uses and abuses that could happen under ordinary management. Many libs were freaked out that revoking the monument status took the land out of public ownership. This is not so. It opened the land back up to the possible uses that the protections prohibited. So, there is stuff to get freaked out about, but it’s not about the ownership.
Thanks for pointing out that it’s always been public land, regardless of its status as a national monument. I was getting ready to do that myself. (It seems that language has been removed from the page, now, though.)
Good point.
You guys are just the best.
I don’t understand Governor Cox’s justification for the lawsuit. It has been federal land longer than Utah has been a state. It isn’t like the federal government took anything away from Utah: it was the fed’s property to begin with.
He has to pretend to hate Federally owned public land. Meanwhile, Utah continues to pimp the hell out of our National Parks to the tune of like $1B in annual tourism. It’s never about the land with these folks.
It’s nice to see someone in charge of the DOI that isn’t an oil baron for a change. Thank you Haaland and Biden!
Having the bigger monument, and not having uranium mining near it, makes me so much more likely to go there to visit. I lived in Utah for a few years, but didn’t get to the monuments before Trump shrunk them, and didn’t want to go to the reduced ones.
It would be really good if the Utah news papers would do a complete accounting over revenue from outdoors industry from public lands vs mining, and also cost to Utah government to administer the State lands vs the costs to Utah to have the Federal lands.
Flat out show these Sage Brush Rebellion folk that federally owned/managed land in your state is financially hugely beneficial, so long as you’re not in the extraction industry.