On governance by spite and the future of Bears Ears
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
On a mid-November evening I stood on a gravelly plain, shivering in the wind as clouds dangled their wispy fingers of snow onto Cedar Mesa to the north of me. The long sunset finally fizzled into darkness and I watched for the one-day-past-full moon to rise over the Valley of the Gods. But the dark horizon never yielded the anticipated orb. Instead, I was treated to evanescent shards of orangish light escaping through cracks in the clouds.
I was in southeastern Utah on a nearly flat expanse of scrub-covered limestone some 1,200 feet above the winding and silty San Juan River. I was also just barely inside the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument. At least for now. But the national monument protections on my little dispersed campsite, along with a good portion of the landscape I looked out upon, will likely go away shortly after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year.
Last week the New York Times reported that Trump will again shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments back to the diminished boundaries he established in 2017. The 1.36-million-acre Bears Ears — which President Joe Biden restored in 2021 — will become a 200,000 acre national monument divided into two discrete units. Left out will be Valley of the Gods, Cedar Mesa, the Goosenecks of the San Juan, the White Canyon and Dark Canyon regions, and portions of Butler and Cottonwood Washes.
The act is likely illegal, since the Antiquities Act only gives presidents the power to establish national monuments, not shrink or eliminate them. And it will revive lawsuits still pending since Trump’s previous shrinkage. But while the legal challenges wend their ways through the courts, Trump’s shrinkage will take hold (barring a court injunction). The draft management plan that federal officials and tribal representatives have worked on for years will be rendered obsolete before it’s even approved, and about 1.2 million acres of public land will be re-opened to new mining claims and oil and gas and coal leasing.
There are the conservation consequences to think of, which I’ll get to, but more importantly is the symbolic significance. Bears Ears was originally proposed and conceived of and pushed by five sovereign tribal nations — with the backing of another two dozen tribes — who were looking to protect lands that had been stolen from them and put into the “public domain.” Representatives from those tribes had a hand in crafting the new management plan, which uniquely incorporates Indigenous knowledge into decision-making.
By overturning the national monument, Trump is thumbing his noses at those same tribal nations, essentially telling them that their efforts and ties to this land are meaningless. As I stood out there dissolving into the darkness, a question arose: Why? Why the hell would a Manhattan real estate developer and reality show personality, who probably had never set foot on the West’s public lands, make such a cruel and thoughtless gesture? What was he hoping to achieve?
I’ve posited potential motives for the initial shrinkage. Trump wanted to curry favor with the powerful Sen. Orrin Hatch, of Utah, so he could gut Obamacare and get tax cuts for the wealthy through Congress. He wanted to help out his friends in the uranium mining and oil and gas industries. He wanted to repay Utah voters for abandoning their principles and voting for him.
But the oil and gas industry isn’t exactly champing at the bit to drill in the Bears Ears area. There are many other more accessible and profitable places to chase hydrocarbons. And in 2017 the domestic uranium mining industry was virtually nonexistent, and its 200 or so employees hardly made for a significant voting bloc. Mark Chalmers and Curtis Moore, the CEO and VP of Energy Fuels, probably the most viable uranium mining and milling company out there, didn’t even donate to any of Trump’s presidential campaigns.
It really seems that Trump diminished Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments for no other reason than to dismantle the environmental legacies of his rivals and predecessors, former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. And given his cabinet picks so far, Trump is planning on more of the same in his second term. He “governs” out of greed and self-interest, first, followed closely by spite — aimed at liberals, his political rivals, and Republicans who don’t show enough fealty to him.
The expected shrinkage won’t have an immediate impact on the landscape where the protections are lifted, which will simply revert back to federal land managed under the multiple-use mandate. Come Jan. 20, there will not be a battalion of drilling rigs marching upon the weird formations of Valley of the Gods or mines opening up in White Canyon’s cliffs.
Yet there will be longer term consequences. All of the debate and back and forth over the national monument has attracted more visitors to the general area, and that has brought more impacts. Taking away national monument status from most of those lands will not reduce visitation, but it will take away resources for and opportunities to manage their impacts. The Trump-era management plan, which was hardly a plan at all and replaced the tribal commission with a bunch of monument opponents, will remain in place, rendering what’s left of the national monument almost meaningless.
After Trump’s first shrinkage, speculators and would-be mining firms staked a handful of claims in lands that had been taken out of Bears Ears national monument. That was when the uranium industry was moribund. Now, higher prices, a renewed interest in nuclear power, and a ban on enriched reactor fuel from Russia has given the industry new life. While uranium production remains minimal, exploration has kicked up significantly, including in lands just outside the Bears Ears boundary. This time around we’re likely to see not only mining claims being staked soon after the shrinkage in places like White Canyon and Cottonwood Creek, but also exploratory drilling. Even if companies don’t have any short-term interest in mining in the area, the drilling can help them establish the claims’ validity, thereby increasing the likelihood that the right to mine those parcels would be locked in if a future administration or the courts were to restore Bears Ears.
Plus, the shrinkage will make the land removed from the national monument more vulnerable to Utah’s attempt to seize control of all “unappropriated” public lands within the state’s boundaries.
Just as night became complete, the moon emerged from behind the clouds and cast a pale light over everything. At the same time, I saw my friends’ truck’s headlights bouncing up the road, so I trudged through the cold to guide them to the campsite. We laughed and talked and played music. One was still reeling from the shock of the presidential election’s outcome, the other, who works with rural communities across the West, had seen Trump’s victory as almost inevitable.
Eventually, I snuggled up in my sleeping bag in my little tent and emerged more than ten hours later, just as the moon was getting ready to set and the sun prepared to rise over the corner of the Carrizo Mountains along the New Mexico-Arizona border. The landscape around me slowly revealed itself as if awakening from slumber. Later, under the almost harsh blue sky, my friends and I made our way almost aimlessly across the scrub-covered plain, trying to avoid the Russian thistle that had proliferated after more than a century of cattle grazing and following the erratic cow paths when we encountered them.
At one point we heard the report of what sounded like a semi-automatic firearm being shot in the distance. It wasn’t a hunter, I’m sure of that. More likely a recreational shooter looking to waste some ammo before the proposed shooting ban goes into effect — though now it’s not likely to. Maybe they were targeting cans, or petroglyphs, or a desert-varnish-covered boulder, or grazing cattle. I involuntarily flinched at each bang.
I walked with gratitude for the beauty all around and the freedom to wander through it. I walked with sadness, too, and anger at those who would try to reduce this place, this living landscape, to a pawn in their petty and vindictive game, and who would try to open it back up to corporations looking to wring every last particle of profit from it. But I also found hope in the knowledge that powerful tribal nations, land protectors, and nonprofits will continue their fight to protect this land and challenge the spiteful attempts to diminish this place.
We came to the edge of the San Juan River gorge and dropped into it, following a path forged by gold prospectors back during the “Bluff Excitement” of the early 1890s, when folks thought they could get rich by scouring the San Juan River’s banks for flakes of gold. The gold rush fizzled before it got started, but the trail endures. After reaching its terminus, we stopped our banter and sat quietly and listened to the silty waters gurgle by slowly and watched a red tail hawk frolic reassuringly in the updrafts far above. The future is uncertain, but this much I know: Beauty will persist regardless of who occupies the White House.
📖 Reading Room 🧐
There’s a new book out and yours truly even wrote a chapter for it.
Here’s the publisher’s description:
The American West is often portrayed as a place of rugged, unending landscapes presenting us with boundless opportunities. But the land is more fragile and resources more finite than popular perceptions acknowledge. This collection of essays, A Watershed Moment, reveals tensions between a culture of economic growth and personal freedom and the ecological, economic, and social constraints set by community values and the land itself. As Westerners and their communities come up against these limits, the volume editors highlight issues of sustainability endemic to the region and to the nation as a whole.
The volume presents practical approaches to land use, land management, and community planning that are motivated by philosophical views on justice, quality of life, and sustainability in the American West. The contributors are policymakers, government employees, land and water managers, urban planners, biologists, tribal members, writers, and academics from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. The result is a compelling vision of place-based, policy-oriented sustainability across the West.
You can find it in all the usual places (like your local independent bookstore) or order it directly from University of Utah Press.
I love this. New term: Governance by spite. And thank you for the repeated use of “Trump shrinkage.”
What a beautiful and even hopeful evocation of our shared landscape. We'll get through this together.