AP
Washington
President Donald Trump on Monday sharply reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah, undoing protections established by his Democratic predecessors on public lands that are sacred among many Native Americans.
Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in southern Utah have ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs and scenic canyons, as well as coal and uranium deposits that state officials want made available for development.
Trump, a Republican, issued proclamations under the Antiquities Act to reduce their size by about 90 per cent each. He took similar actions during his first term, but those were reversed by President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
The latest move comes as Trump and other Republicans have drastically reshaped the management of vast taxpayer-owned lands concentrated in Western states. Trump administration officials and congressional Republicans have sought to expand drilling, mining and logging on public lands, while removing protections for imperiled species and rolling back rules for conservation.
“They took the land from the people quite honestly,” Trump said at a signing event at the White House Monday. “We’re giving it back.”
The 1906 law gives presidents the power to protect sites considered historic, archaeologically significant or culturally important.
Then president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, established 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. Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said tribal leaders had braced for a reduction since Trump was elected to a second term. She said it was “heartbreaking” and accused federal officials of sidestepping their legal responsibility to consult with tribal nations that would be impacted.
“From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not simply a piece of federal public land,” Smith-Idjesa said. “This is a living cultural site that holds our histories, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines and our ancestors’ footprints.”
Utah officials had long fought against the monument designations and argued that the state should be in charge of controlling its own lands. Trump in his first term reduced their size, calling their creation a “massive land grab”. Combined they spanned more than 3.2 million acres (13 million hectares), an area nearly the size of Connecticut.
Trump reduced them Monday to less than 3,03,000 acres (1,23,000 hectares) combined.
That’s a greater reduction than his first term, when he left Grand Staircase Escalante at 1 million acres (4,05,000 hectares) and Bears Ears at 2,13,000 acres (86,000 hectares).
“This is a big day for Utah,” Utah Gov Spencer Cox as he stood next to Trump at the White House. “These monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area as possible to protect the antiquities.”
Bears Ears was the first national monument created at the request of tribal nations that consider the land sacred. The landscape contains ancestral villages, ceremonial and burial sites and features in some tribes’ creation and migration stories. Its designation honored five tribes in the region – Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Uintah-Ouray Ute.
Home to hundreds of thousands of objects of cultural and scientific significance, Bears Ears is jointly managed by an agreement between tribal nations and federal agencies.
Grand Staircase-Escalante consists of cliffs, canyons, natural arches and archaeological sites, including rock paintings. It holds large coal reserves, while the Bears Ears area has uranium.
The national monument designation provides sweeping protections not just for significant geological features or artifacts but also for the surrounding landscape, banning drilling, mining and new construction nearby. Proponents of Trump’s move to downsize say the protective boundaries stretch too far and hinder mining for critical minerals.
Trump asserted Monday that people can not hunt, fish or “virtually not even walk” on the monuments. That’s false: Hunting, fishing, camping and other recreation are permitted under state and federal regulations, said Steve Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a conservation group.
Biden designated or expanded more than a dozen monuments and had a goal to conserve at least 30 per cent of US lands and waters by 2030.
Trump’s policies are largely the opposite: He wants to tap into the natural resource wealth of federal lands that total more than 100,000 square miles (2,60,000 square kilometres) and offshore areas under federal control, such as in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska.
That’s drawn backlash from Democrats who warn of the wholesale disposal of treasured landscapes for commercial gain.
“Today’s executive action is another chapter in this administration’s war on the West,” Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said Monday. He added that Trump was “turning the Antiquities Act on its head”.
