Last year, this week we hiked in the hoarfrost covered Toadstools in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. The 2 million acre national monument was created by President Clinton, One of the current administration’s first acts was to cut the size of this in half and open the unprotected area to mineral extraction. No president had ever previously reversed a prior president’s actions under the Antiquities Act and the legal challenges to whether he had the authority to do so is still in the courts.
Even greater devastation was imposed on nearby Bears Ears National Monument established by President Obama. Bears Ears creation was pushed by many native tribes to protect sacred sites and cultural icons as well as the natural resources. The new administration blew up the protection by reducing the monument by 85% and opening the newly unprotected areas to mineral extraction. President-elect Biden campaigned stating he would reverse this destruction.
The assault on Bears Ears was a direct attack on the Navajo, Zuni, Hopi, Ute, and Uintah and Ouray Ute peoples who worked to protect the Bears Ears land previously stripped from them by Mormon and other colonial settlers and the federal government. Biden has selected Congresswoman Deb Haaland, a citizen of New Mexico and the Laguna Pueblo tribe, to be Secretary of the Interior. The neglect of natural resources is further shown by the administration’s failure to appoint directors of the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management (which oversees Grand Staircase-Escalante) in the entire four years.
It is possible that Congress will enact legislation to grant National Park status to both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante. The National Park designation has been cynically used the last four years to dubiously create new parks. The 63rd National Park was established in the newly passed Defense Authorization Act elevating the New River Gorge in West Virginia from a National Recreational Area. A very small area was designated as a National Park (to undoubtedly try to increase tourism—and funded a larger parking lot!) and a larger area designated as a National Preserve (to allow guns and hunting). Two Republican representatives had proposed legislation to create Bears Ears National Park, but it would have only protected the much smaller area designated by the administration and fix into legislation the opening of most of the area to mining, oil and gas extraction.
Last summer Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act which guaranteed funding of $1.9 billion annually to the Interior Department for deferred maintenance. The Act also provided funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, but — of course — the administration in November implemented bureaucratic hurdles to delay acquisition. That order can be reversed by order of the new president who promised in the campaign to protect 30 percent of American land and water by 2030 as one effort to slow climate change. Hope springs.
