President Donald Trump on Monday sharply reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah, repealing protections for public lands put in place by his Democratic predecessors are holy among many Native Americans.
Bear ears and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in southern Utah feature ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs and scenic canyons, as well as coal and uranium deposits State officials would like to be made available for development.
Trump, a Republican, issued proclamations under the Antiquities Act to reduce their size by about 90% each. He took similar measures during his first term in office, but he reversed them President Joe Bidena democrat.
The latest move comes as Trump and other Republicans have dramatically overhauled how vast taxpayer-owned lands are managed, concentrated in western states. Trump administration officials and Republicans in Congress have tried this Expand drilling, Mining And Logging on public lands, while Removing protections for endangered species and regression Rules for nature conservation.
“They honestly took the country away from the people,” Trump said at a signing event at the White House on Monday. “We’ll give it back.”
President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, created Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, and President Barack Obama, also a Democrat, created Bears Ears National Monument in 2016 under the Antiquities Act. The 1906 law gives presidents the authority to protect sites deemed historically, archaeologically significant or culturally significant.
Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said tribal leaders have been bracing for cuts since Trump was elected to a second term. She said it was “heartbreaking” and accused federal officials of shirking their legal responsibility to consult with affected tribal nations.
“From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not just a piece of federal public land,” Smith-Idjesa said. “This is a living cultural site that preserves our history, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines, and the footprints of our ancestors.”
“Big day for Utah”
Officials in Utah had long fought the monument designations, arguing that the state should be responsible for controlling its own land. Trump in his first term their size reducedand called its creation a “massive land grab.” Together they spanned more than 3.2 million hectares (13 million hectares), an area almost the size of Connecticut.
Trump reduced it to a total of less than 303,000 acres (123,000 hectares) on Monday.
That’s a larger reduction than in his first term, when he left Grand Staircase Escalante with 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) and Bears Ears with 213,000 acres (86,000 hectares).
“This is a great day for Utah,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said as he stood next to Trump at the White House. “These monument designations should cover as small an area as possible to protect the antiquities.”
Bears Ears was the first national monument created at the request of tribal nations who consider the land sacred. The landscape contains ancestral villages, ceremonial and burial sites, and is included in the origin and migration stories of some tribes. The designation honored five tribes in the region: Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Uintah-Ouray Ute.
Bears Ears is home to hundreds of thousands of objects of cultural and scientific significance and is co-managed through an agreement between tribal nations and federal agencies.
Grand Staircase-Escalante consists of cliffs, canyons, natural arches and archaeological sites including rock art. It has large coal reserves, while the Bears Ears area has uranium deposits.
National monument designation provides comprehensive protection not only for significant geological features or artifacts, but also for the surrounding landscape and prohibits drilling, mining, and new construction nearby. Supporters of Trump’s move to downsize say the protective limits go too far and hinder the extraction of important minerals.
Trump claimed Monday that people weren’t allowed to hunt, fish or “virtually even walk on the monuments.” That’s wrong: Hunting, fishing, camping and other recreational activities are allowed under state and federal regulations, said Steve Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a conservation group.
Biden named or expanded more than a dozen monuments and aimed to protect at least 30% of U.S. land and water by 2030.
Trump’s policy is largely the opposite: He wants to develop the natural resource wealth of federal lands totaling more than 100,000 square miles (260,000 square kilometers) and offshore areas under federal control, such as in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska.
The Democrats are reacting to this by warning against the large-scale disposal of valuable landscapes for commercial purposes.
“Today’s executive action is another chapter in this administration’s war against the West,” Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said Monday. He added that Trump is “turning the Antiquities Act on its head.”
Proposals to sell land failed
Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last year that federal officials would review and consider a rewrite Monument boundaries as part of a push to Expansion of energy production in the USA.
Trump has used repeal proclamations during his current term Bans on commercial fishing within extensive marine monuments in areas of the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New England. These monuments were created by Democratic and Republican administrations. Efforts to boost the fishing industry, which are being challenged in court, represent a dramatic shift in federal policy by prioritizing commercial interests over efforts to increase fish supplies.
Some Republicans have attempted to sell or transfer federal lands to states or other entities. These efforts have largely failed: One push some Republican lawmakers In the House of Representatives, the sale of public lands faced bipartisan opposition, while another proposal from Sen. Mike Lee of Utah proposed the sale more than 3,200 square miles (8,300 square kilometers) of federal land was removed The Republicans’ big tax and spending bill.
The U.S. Supreme Court last year dismissed a lawsuit filed by Utah officials who requested it wrest control over large areas of public lands within the state by the federal government.
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Hannah Schoenbaum reported from Salt Lake City.