Donald Trump has approved a sharp reduction in the size of two national monuments in Utah held sacred by many Native Americans, in the latest move to open US public land to corporate developers and the oil and gas industry. The two monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, will see a reduction of "close to a million and a half acres each," Trump said during an executive order signing event on Monday, undoing protections established by former presidents. "They took the land from the people quite honestly," Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. "We're giving it back."
The Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in southern Utah have ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs and scenic canyons, as well as coal and uranium deposits that state officials want made available for development. The executive order marked the second time Trump has made such an approval. In 2017, during his first term, the president also shrank the designations for the national monuments, an effort that was later reversed by the Biden administration.
"We believe that under the Antiquities Act, it's very clear that these monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area possible to protect the antiquities, and these multimillion-acre monuments that are bigger than the state of Delaware certainly do not fit that designation," said Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah who joined Trump at the signing event on Monday. The Antiquities Act gives presidents the power to grant legal protections to sites considered historic, archaeologically significant or culturally important. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was established by Bill Clinton in 1996. Barack Obama created Bears Ears National Monument in 2016 under the 1906 law.
The downsizing, while expected, has prompted criticism from environmental advocates and tribal representatives who have fought for years to protect the monuments. Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, said it would take "legal action to maintain protections for these treasured landscapes." "President Trump's attack on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments is just as illegal today as it was in 2017," said Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney for Earthjustice's Rocky Mountain office, in a statement. "The Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to designate national monuments, not to destroy them." "Today's proclamations are a slap to the face of public lands visitors across the country, as well as the local communities and tribes that have worked for years to protect these special places," McIntosh added.
Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said tribal leaders had braced for a reduction since Trump was elected to a second term. She said Monday it was "heartbreaking" and accused federal officials of sidestepping their legal responsibility to consult with tribal nations that would be affected. "From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not simply a piece of federal public land," Smith-Idjesa said. "This is a living cultural site that holds our histories, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines and our ancestors' footprints."
The latest move comes as Trump and other Republicans have drastically reshaped the management of vast taxpayer-owned lands concentrated in western states. Trump administration officials and congressional Republicans have sought to expand drilling, mining and logging on public lands, while removing protections for imperiled species and rolling back rules for conservation. Utah officials have long fought against the monument designation and have argued that the state should be in charge of controlling its own lands. Trump in his first term reduced their size, calling their creation a "massive land grab." Combined they span more than 3.2m acres (13m hectares), an area nearly the size of Connecticut.
Bears Ears was the first national monument protected at the request of tribal nations that consider the land sacred. The landscape contains ancestral villages, ceremonial and burial sites and features in some tribes' creation and migration stories. Its designation honored five tribes in the region - Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Uintah-Ouray Ute. Home to hundreds of thousands of objects of cultural and scientific significance, Bears Ears is jointly managed by an agreement between tribal nations and federal agencies. Grand Staircase-Escalante consists of cliffs, canyons, natural arches and archaeological sites, including rock paintings. It holds large coal reserves, while the Bears Ears area has uranium.
The national monument designation provides sweeping protections not just for significant geological features or artifacts but also for the surrounding landscape, banning drilling, mining and new construction nearby. Proponents of Trump's plan to downsize say the protective boundaries stretch too far and hinder mining for critical minerals. Biden designated or expanded more than a dozen monuments and had a goal to conserve at least 30% of US lands and waters by 2030. Trump's policies are largely the opposite: he wants to tap into the natural resource wealth of federal lands that total more than 100,000 sq miles (260,000 sq km) and offshore areas under federal control, such as in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska. That's drawn a sharp backlash from Democrats and conservationists, who warn of the wholesale disposal of treasured landscapes for commercial gain. Doug Burgum, Trump's interior secretary, had said last year that federal officials would review and consider redrawing the boundaries of national monuments as part of a push to expand US energy production.