Bob Poulton, rancher, mulepacker, retired corrections officer, Torrey, UT — a Dispatches follow-up
“I can’t believe they’d be so fuckin’ stupid.”
Bob Poulton had warned in the summer of 2017 that President Donald Trump’s threat to national monuments was a threat to the American character.
In early December, the day after Trump ordered largest elimination of land protections in U.S. history, Poulton said by phone from his wooden home in a red sandstone canyon that was sickened.
“We have a stupid president who wants to turn the last wild country in the world into a goddamn coal mine,” he said. “We’re willing to turn over two million acres to the fossil fuel industry. I’m disgusted.”
Trump stripped two million combined acres from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Bears Ears National Monument, leaving the combined acreage of what remained a third of the original size.
It was the expansive remnants of un-industrialized lands inside those national monuments that still connected the American people to the wilderness that forged them as they pushed west and built a great nation. Poulton was so angry that President Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke would tear apart that sacred legacy that, though he drinks tea and not coffee, he cussed.
“I can’t believe they’d be so fuckin’ stupid,” he said.
Considering Trump’s move from a Native American perspective filled him with more rage. President Barack Obama had honored the wishes of Native American tribes from around the southwest when he established Bears Ears National Monument in December 2016. Like the broken treaties of the 1800s, Trump didn’t care.
“We finally give them something and we take it right back,” he said “If I was a Native American I’d be so furious. It’s so disheartening.”
Considering the dire ramifications of pyramiding environmental destruction around the world, Poulton called Trump’s action, “nothing less than a failure to protect the citizenry.”
He said the only solace he could takewas the fact that he was 73-years-old, and had traveled through and deeply loved so much wilderness in his lifetime. Much of it, like the Pinedale Anticline in Wyoming, now an empire of gas wells and vanished wildlife, is ruined now.
“I’m an old man, I’m just sticking to my little valley, I’m done with it,” Poulton said. “I hope you have a good day, I really do.”