Trump's Bears Ears and GSENM shrinkage maps are out, and they are ugly
Plus: BLM moves to erase Chaco buffer zone; random real estate room
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
THE NEWS: The Trump administration is moving forward with its bid to revoke a 20-year moratorium on federal oil and gas leasing around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. The Bureau of Land Management is giving the public just two weeks to comment.
THE CONTEXT: The GOP’s assault on public lands, cultural resources, and tribal nations is reaching a fevered pitch this week. The latest attack is on the 10-mile “buffer zone” around the park, where the Biden administration banned new drilling in an effort to protect a small part of the greater Chacoan cultural landscape.
When President Theodore Roosevelt wielded the brand new Antiquities Act in 1907 to create Chaco Canyon National Monument, he drew the boundaries around what is now known as “downtown Chaco,” a handful of structures including the 800-room Pueblo Bonito, constructed between the 9th and 12th centuries by ancestors of today’s Pueblo people.
That was merely the center of the Chacoan world, however, which extended over 100 miles outward into the Four Corners region, which may have been a political empire, a religious or cultural society, a school of architecture, or all of the above. Dozens of Chacoan outliers or “great houses,” along with thousands of smaller sites, shrines, and architectural features with unknown function, did not exist in isolation. They were part of a cultural tapestry woven into the natural landscape. The national monument, in other words, was vastly incomplete, which is especially concerning given that it lies in what would become one of the nation’s most heavily drilled oil and gas fields.
It was with this greater context in mind that in 2023, after years of consideration, public meetings, and analysis, President Joe Biden signed Public Lands Order 7923, which withdrew about 336,000 acres of public land from oil and gas leasing for 20 years. Tribal nations with ties to the cultural landscape, environmental advocates, and archaeologists had sought the withdrawal to provide a buffer zone around the national historical park and to add a layer of protection to the associated sites within 10 miles of the park’s boundaries.
But Project 2025 called for these kinds of withdrawals to be rescinded, and the Trump administration has begun the process of complying. Keep in mind that this does not directly affect the park or the cultural resources therein. Chaco is a national park, and oil and gas leasing and drilling and other development is prohibited; only Congress can change that. Drilling rigs won’t be going up next to Pueblo Bonito, but drilling just outside the park could affect the park’s viewsheds and soundsheds.
The BLM is now inviting public input, for a very limited time, on three alternatives: 1. keeping the ban in place; 2. shrinking the 10-mile buffer zone to just five miles; 3. eliminating the ban altogether. To comment, click on this link and then click on the “Participate Now” button at the top of the page.
The maps illustrate the carnage of the Trump administration’s evisceration of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments better than mere numbers, and show exactly from where the 2.93 million acres of protections were rescinded. They also lay bare just how much Trump removed from the shrunken national monuments that remained after Trump I’s 2017 reduction.
I’ve turned to the maps for another reason these past few days: To try to discern some sort of pattern or logic in where the lines were drawn this time, and why they are so radically different than in 2017. I’ve found that looking at the lines on the maps is more like taking a Rorschach inkblot test: You can come up with some decent sounding explanations, but there’s not much to back them up with.
When the Trump administration rolls back limits on smokestack pollution from coal plants, lowers royalty and reclamation bonding rates for oil and gas facilities, or lower water quality standards, it’s clearly doing so to help their corporate buddies rake in even more profits. When they slash millions of acres from two national monuments, the intent is more ambiguous, perhaps even for the ones making the decisions.
Certainly shrinkage generally is motivated by Trump’s spite towards his more popular predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the ones who originally established Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, respectively. But beyond that Trump himself is in the dark: He actually believes that people are unable to hike, hunt, camp, or fish in these national monuments, which simply is not true. Not only are all of those things allowed, but so are motorized travel on hundreds of miles of designated roads, vegetation management, livestock grazing, and commercial activities.
The main activities these national monuments restricted were new mining claims and new oil and gas, coal, and other energy-related leases (existing active valid leases and claims are not affected by the designation). So, clearly, at least part of the motivation here is to reopen certain lands to the extractive industries. Trump’s proclamations affirm this: They say the land needs to be opened up to miners and drillers to extract “several resources that are vital to energy and resource independence” such as “silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc.” And, of course, we all know by now that Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda includes leasing out as much land as possible — whether it contains oil and gas or not — to the petroleum companies.
The administration is also hoping to trigger a lawsuit that could make its way to the Supreme Court, where it would become a test of the Antiquities Act, itself. Plus it’s looking to open the door to allowing Utah or county governments have more control over federal land. That might be a gift to Sen. Mike Lee to show appreciation for his groveling sycophancy towards Trump, which has become more valuable with the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham.
In other words, the motivations are pretty similar to when Trump shrunk the monuments in 2017. It was clearly done in part to open up known reserves of oil and gas, uranium, coal, and potash. This is made obvious not only by communications between industry and the administration prior to the shrinkage, but also by the fact that Trump I’s shrinkage lines followed known resource reserves, not the boundaries proposed by local and state officials.
For example, the 2017 redraw cut out the Circle Cliffs historic uranium and copper mining district on the far northeast side of GSENM, probably to allow access to those reserves. And while it left part of the vast Kaiparowits coal field in the national monument, it made cutouts for the former Smoky Hollow coal lease, where Andalex had planned on building a gargantuan mine prior to the 1996 designation. At Bears Ears, the 2017 shrinkage cut out the White Canyon uranium mining district, where there’s also tar sand development potential.
This brings up a lot of questions. First off, why did Trump II go to the trouble of redrawing completely new boundaries this time around rather than just re-upping the 2017 lines? After all, they achieved all of the same goals as the bigger, current shrinkage, while also keeping a few more valued landmarks under monument status. The Six Shooter peaks and Bridger Jack Mesa were kept in the Indian Creek Unit of Bears Ears under the 2017 shrinkage, for example, but left out this time. Why?
The most dramatic change, even from Trump’s 2017 boundaries, is to what is now known as the Kaiparowits Horizons Unit of GSENM, where the national monument was eliminated save for a seemingly arbitrarily placed square on Long Flat and a rectangular strip on the East Clark Bench. The latter strip was kept intact because it is where anthropologists found the bones of Sarabosaurus dahli, a new taxon of sea-going dinosaur Turonian mosasaurid. But removed from monument status were hundreds of significant landmarks, from the Cockscomb to Grosvenor Arch to the entire Kaiparowits Plateau.
The 2026 shrinkage does open up the entire Kaiparowits coal field. But it also nixed the whole Grand Staircase Unit, where there are no known mineral reserves.
Perhaps trying to find logic somewhere in the collective brains of the Trump administration is a fool’s errand. I’m certainly not seeing it in these maps. But maybe you can? Check them out and let me know! As is always the case with this sort of detailed image, the best experience is had on the Land Desk website. So if you’re reading this in your email browser, you’d be best off clicking on the headline above, and it will take you straight to the site, where clicking on the images will give you a larger view.
🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑
Well, here’s some relatively affordable housing. Or something like that. I could see turning this thing into a giant art studio, event-space, and housing. And it’s in a lovely part of the world, too! The ad gives a Dolores, Colorado, address. But it’s actually in Arriola, which is about halfway between Cortez and Lewis.
Why, that's the High Country Elevator!
I watched Doug Burgum and Mike Lee behind Trump as this was signed. It really felt like political theater more than a rational balance of energy policy with protecting land for the public. Short sighted, bumper sticker mentality.