On misleading public lands coverage

Plus: Mining (Hype) Monitor

Big Indian Rock in the Lisbon Valley, not far from the Velvet-Wood Mine and other prospective uranium prospects. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

One good thing the Trump administration’s and the GOP’s attack on public lands has brought about is more attention to public lands and the sometimes arcane policies governing them. When I started the Land Desk back in 2021, it was one of the only Substack-like outlets focusing on public lands issues; now there are more than a dozen of them, put out by journalists, quasi-journalists, and advocacy groups — with a fair amount of overlap. Meanwhile, more conventional media outlets have also beefed up their public lands coverage since Trump took office.

I’m all for it — a well informed public makes for a stronger democracy — but it does have a major downside. There has been a noticeable increase in disinformation and misinformation and simply erroneous coverage of the issues and, especially, of the potential effects of the administration’s actions. The motives are surely mixed, ranging from honest misunderstandings to the writer trying to simplify complex issues for the average reader. Maybe they feel that the nuanced reality won’t rally the troops as effectively as hyperbolic alarmism. Maybe they know that outrage is more likely than mere concern to garner clicks, subscriptions, and donations.

While I understand the need to get people fired up about these issues and actions — most of which should indeed be stopped — I also worry that writing one’s congress member or commenting to the federal agencies based on erroneous information will be ineffective or even counterproductive. The truth in most of these cases is bad enough. Let’s just stick with it. Please?

Here are a few examples of what’s got my goat:

• The claim: Revoking Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s management plan will open up nearly 900,000 acres of the monument to oil and gas drilling, coal extraction, and uranium mining.
  The messier reality: MAGA Sen. Mike Lee’s and Rep. Celeste Maloy’s attempts to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s management plan is abhorrent, stupid, and is done out of spite rather than for any pragmatic reasons. If they succeed, the monument’s management will revert back to the far weaker 2020 plan that allowed more grazing, more damaging “vegetation management,” and more off-road vehicle use. Plus the 2020 plan only covered the 1 million acres left in the national monument after Trump removed about 900,000 acres from its boundaries, meaning there would be a sort of management limbo on those 900,000 acres.
  However, rescinding the plan will not eliminate or shrink the national monument or its basic protections, nor will it allow drilling or mining or other development anywhere within the 1.9 million acre national monument. The boundaries will remain the same, which means that the terms set in the 2021 proclamation restoring them also remain in effect¹, and that includes no new oil and gas or coal leases or mining claims within the national monument.
  Furthermore, the claims about grazing have been exaggerated as well. The 2020 plan allowed grazing in all but 125,800 acres of the national monument, but did not allow it right along the Escalante River or in Lower Calf Canyon, and it would have allowed suspended allotments to be reissued (if a rancher wanted them). The 2024 plan put 314,700 acres off-limits to grazing — including bigger buffers around the Escalante River — and would have permanently retired suspended allotments.

  Feds seek public input on Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan

• The claim: Moving the U.S. Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake City, “the beating heart of the anti-public-lands movement in America,” will lead to a mass selloff of public lands and is part of an “execution” of the agency.
  The messy reality: Look, I know that Utah politicians are kooky and that they don’t like the idea of federal land management. I wrote a whole damned book about it. But that doesn’t mean that once you cross the border into Utah you become a raving sagebrush rebel. There are pros and cons to moving a federal agency to the West, but it’s not like Phil Lyman, Mike Lee, Celeste Maloy, Ken Ivory, and the ghost of Cal Black are going to have more influence over the agency’s HQ in SLC than they would in D.C. Nor is the relocation, alone, going to lead to public land sales. Utah happens to be home to strong public lands advocacy and environmental groups, including SUWA, Grow the Flow, Utah Rivers Council, HEAL Utah, Uranium Watch, Torrey House Press, and others. Salt Lake City is more progressive politically than many cities in blue states. Over the last three decades it has elected liberal mayors and other city leaders, including climate, human rights, and air quality activists.
  Instead of fear-mongering over Utah, maybe we should be focused on the severe budget cuts plaguing the Forest Service, the loss of thousands of staffers and their deep well of institutional knowledge, its growing inability to manage lands under its purview regardless of where it’s headquartered, along with policies aimed at increasing logging and grazing on the nation’s forests. That’s the real danger.

• The mislead: Almost every story or blog post or call to action regarding the administration’s move to rescind the oil and gas leasing moratorium in the area around Chaco Culture National Historical Park is accompanied by a photo of Pueblo Bonito, Casa Rinconada, or another site inside the park itself.
  The messy reality: This is misleading because it gives the impression that those structures will now be open to drilling. That’s not the case. The park and the pueblos in it retain their protections no matter what happens with the moratorium. The leasing ban is for a ten mile radius outside the park boundaries, which is, indeed, a very significant cultural landscape, replete with Chacoan “roads,” outlier pueblos and great houses, shrines, and other sites — and absolutely should be protected from energy development. This is an innocent mistake: The sites in “downtown Chaco” are not only photogenic, but most outlets probably can’t find stock images of the sites that could be wrecked by drilling if the moratorium is lifted. Still, they could ask me …

So yes, write to your congress member, protest, write letters to the editor, and send your two cents to your public lands agencies. But please, base your protests and suggestions and recommendations on facts, not on outrage-inciting hyperbole or speculation.

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The Shootaring uranium mill near Ticaboo, Utah. Anfield says it plans to restart the facility. Built in 1980, the facility ran for only six months or so before shutting down. It has remained idle ever since. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

If nuclear reactors could run on hype, alone, then we’d have plenty of power for all of those hyperscale data centers in the pipeline. The optimistic, gold-rushesque press releases about new uranium mining claims, acquisitions, and exploration just keep coming, giving the impression that there is a nuclear renaissance underway in the West. Maybe there is, sort of, but it hasn’t made it to the uranium mining space yet.

The one substantial move forward was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granting a construction license to Bill Gates-backed Terra Power, allowing it to begin building its Natrium advanced reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming. It’s a big deal, but the company doesn’t expect to bring the plant online until 2030, at least, and will still need an operating license to do so.

It will take more than one reactor to bring the western Colorado and eastern Utah uranium mining industry back to anywhere near its Cold War-era glory days, though that’s not stopping mining firms from courting investors.

Some of the latest hype includes:

• American Atomics’ website banner is an image of Monument Valley, where Diné miners worked Cold War-era uranium mines with virtually no safety measures or protective equipment, despite industry and government knowledge of the occupational hazards. Many of those workers eventually fell sick and died from exposure to radon and other substances in the mine. Now the company hopes to “reshape how nations fuel their power grids and defend their energy sovereignty” by building a “fully American-controlled nuclear fuel cycle, from exploration and extraction to enrichment and supply.” They hope to seed the effort with the 217-claim Big Indian project in the Lisbon Valley in cooperation with a company run by Mark Steen, the son of Charles Steen. American Atomics also has a block of mining claims in the Uravan uranium belt in western Colorado.

• After abandoning its proposal to use high-pressure slurry ablation, or HPSA, to extract uranium from the October waste rock pile near Gateway, Colorado, Disa applied to do the same on the smaller Mary Ann pile in Montrose County. On April 22, the NRC replied to Disa with a request for more information. Disa filed an amendment to its application on May 14.

• Anfield Energy submitted a permit to restart its long-idle JD-8 mine located on a mesa south of the Paradox Valley in western Colorado. This is part of an effort to restart its entire Monogram Mesa Complex, which consists of five inactive facilities. The company claims it plans on being permitted and starting production in mid-2026. If it hits its target, however, it doesn’t appear to have a place to mill the ore. While it says it plans to restart the Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, Utah, the state hasn’t issued a permit for it to do so. However, Anfield did apparently drill monitoring wells at the Shootaring Mill and at its Slick Rock project near the western Colorado hamlet of the same name.

• Anfield, as you may remember, is the company behind the Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley. The same one the Trump administration dramatically fast-tracked permitting for to help solve the so-called “energy emergency.” Well, Anfield did do some work at the mine, but they still don’t have state air quality, ventilation shaft, or groundwater remediation permits, meaning actual production is a long ways off. That must be some emergency, eh?

  

  The Velvet Wood-Mine as it appeared in May 2026. Without critical state permits, they won’t be solving the energy emergency anytime too soon. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

1. It’s worth remembering that restored GSENM was managed by the Trump-era plan for the three years between when Biden restored the monument in 2021, and when the new management plan went into effect in 2024.