Outrage: President Trump could try to revoke or shrink Bears Ears National Monument
President Trump could try to revoke or shrink Bears Ears National Monument. Newly confirmed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is expected to travel to Utah soon to get the process started.
Encouraged by Utah Reps. Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz and other Utah politicians, President Trump may try to rescind or shrink Bears Ears National Monument as soon as possible. According to Sen. Orrin Hatch, Ryan Zinke’s first trip in office will be to Utah to consider “changes” to its status.
Revoking or diminishing Bears Ears’ monument protection would be a truly shocking act. It would leave thousands of sensitive archaeological and cultural sites at risk of vandalism and looting, and it would dash years of hard work by Native American tribes and others to protect this spectacular and sensitive landscape.
This attack on Bears Ears is of a piece with opposition to the Antiquities Act, which President Obama used to confer monument status on Bears Ears in 2016. Passed in 1906, the Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to protect important archaeological, historic and scientific resources on public lands. It has been used on a bipartisan basis by almost every president, a method supported by some 90 percent of voters that forms the backbone of our National Park System.
Sadly, a number of extreme politicians want to make it much harder to declare monuments, and even tear down existing monuments, as in the case of Bears Ears. To some ideologues, the fight against national monuments is a proxy for anti-federal government animus. But whatever the reasoning, the anti-monument movement does not represent the views of most Americans.
Bears Ears monument protection was overdue and popular
Bears Ears National Monument was a textbook case for monument designation. Perhaps nowhere in the world are so many well-preserved cultural resources — from ancient ruins to intricate 1,500-year-old petroglyphs — found within such a striking and relatively undeveloped natural landscape.
But the landscape has been under attack for years, with dozens of cases of looting, vandalism or other damage, including names gouged into rock art and even “disturbance of human remains.” In October 2016, the National Trust For Historic Preservation named the area one of the most “endangered” historical sites in America due to a combination of scant staffing and misuse by visitors.
President Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act to protect Bears Ears was the result of concerted advocacy by a coalition of five tribes, supported by 21 others with direct ties to the region — only after legislative proposals failed to fully consider their concerns (critics called one such bill “a disaster” and “a fraud”). But it was also a broadly popular move, with 71 percent of registered Utah voters supporting monument status.
Move to hurt Bears Ears would be an attack on idea of public lands
That President Trump would act on the urging of extreme allies in Congress to ignore Bears Ears’ wealth of history and detract from its inviolate status is truly sad. More than that, it is bad politics; Rep. Chaffetz, who has had a streak of anti-public lands misadventures , recently took heavy criticism from Utahns at a town hall meeting over the idea of reversing Bears Ears. Partly spurred by local leaders’ anti-Bears Ears sentiment, the Outdoor Retailer show recently opted to leave Utah, taking with it an estimated 50,000 visitors and $45 million in spending each year.
No president has ever tried to reverse a national monument, so it is unclear how such a scenario would play out. One tack Trump could take is to try to drastically shrink the boundaries of Bears Ears. But doing so would be legally dubious, and it would undermine tribal sovereignty; Tribal nations that advocated for monument protection have already appointed official representatives to the newly created Bears Ears Commission, which will help govern the management of the monument. Additionally, multiple courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have repeatedly upheld that the authority to designate national monuments is broad, and includes protecting large landscapes — not just limited areas, as the state of Utah claims.
Beyond the legal intricacies, trying to strip or reduce monument protections in Bears Ears would represent a truly flagrant assault on Our Wild. The radical movement to seize and privatize national public lands has moved from state legislatures to Washington DC, and this would be a huge gain in its favor — a statement that national parks and other public lands don’t really belong to all Americans.
