US

Land Grab Or Common Sense? What Trump’s Shrinking Of National Monuments Means

U.S. Geological Surey, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

President Donald Trump issued two proclamations Monday trimming down the land of two national monuments by more than 90%.

Trump shrank the two natural Utah monuments, Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, from approximately 3.23 million acres to just 302,600 acres invoking the 1906 Antiquities Act. This law, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, made the “preservation of archeological and historical sites on public lands” the federal government’s responsibility, according to the National Park Service (NPS) website.

Trump’s Monday proclamation is the third time Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments have been resized under the Antiquities Act since they became national monuments. In 2017, one year after President Barack Obama designated Bears Ears a national monument, Trump decreased its land size by over 1 million acres and truncated Grand Staircase-Escalante by over 800,000 acres. In 2021, President Joe Biden resized the monuments using the Antiquities Act so that Bears Ears encompassed 1.36 million acres and Grand Staircase 1.87 million acres.

“We’ve done something that was, I think, very desperately needed. I think it was very unfair to the people of Utah, and now fairness has been brought back,” Trump told reporters while issuing the proclamations.

The Antiquities Act has been used by presidents to set land aside as national memorials almost 300 times, according to NPS. In 2016, Obama made Bears Ears a national monument using the law, and 20 years earlier, President Bill Clinton made the Grand Staircase-Escalante a national monument.

Roosevelt also used the law he signed to designate the Grand Canyon as a national monument in 1908.

Some American Indian tribes consider Bears Ears National Monument to be sacred land.

For “hundreds of generations,” tribes “lived in the surrounding deep sandstone canyons, desert mesas, and meadow mountaintops,” and the original monument land contains “[a]bundant rock art, ancient cliff dwellings, ceremonial sites, and countless other artifacts,” according to Obama’s Presidential Proclamation which established the national monument in 2016.

The Grand Staircase National Monument was established to protect the land which has “a unique combination of archeological, paleontological, geologic and bioloic resources, in a relatively unspoiled natural state,” according to Clinton’s 1996 Proclamation. It has been considered “an outdoor laboratory,” with hundreds of scientific studies and projects conducted within the monument, according to Biden’s 2021 proclamation to re-expand the national monument after Trump’s original proclamation decreased its size.

Since it has been under the protection of a national monument, the Grand Staircase-Escalante has “a remarkable ecosystem at the landscape-level and sets the stage for future discovery about human, paleontological, and geologic history on the Colorado Plateau,” Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance notes on its website.

Trump used the Antiquities Act to decrease the size of these national monuments on the basis that the Act allows a national monument to be established so long as it protects objects “of historic or scientific interest,” and that the protected area should be “the smallest area compatible with their proper care and management,” according a White House fact sheet published Monday. His proclamation makes it so that “the surrounding lands not relevant to such protected landmarks, structures, and objects will now be available for multiple-use, sustained-yield management,” instead of protected as national monuments.

His proclamations are a way of combatting “overreach and abuse of the Antiquities Act,” according to the fact sheet.

Decreasing the land size of the monuments “allows for the restoration of public access and traditional multiple-use activities on these Federal lands and waters,” according to the Fact Sheet. Those activities include “grazing, timber harvest, fishing, hunting, resource development, infrastructure upgrades, and motorized recreation,” although fishing, hunting, and other recreational activities were already allowed at these monuments.

The Bureau of Land Management directed DCNF to the White House’s fact sheet when comment was requested. The White House directed DCNF to the press conference and its fact sheet.

Trump’s decision to resize the monuments received the support of the governor of the state they are both located in.

“We’re grateful that the President has made a determination that we need to rightsize these monuments. This does not remove the other protections that already exist in those areas, just making the monuments more manageable so that we have the resources necessary to protect these antiquities,” Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said while Trump signed the proclamations.

Meanwhile, environmental groups blasted the move.

The Conservation Lands Foundation opposes the size reduction of these national monuments, claiming that by reducing the land protected as monuments, it “puts Tribal cultural resources, habitats, animals, clean water, outdoor recreation access, and local economies and communities at immediate risk,” according to its website.

Trump’s proclamation “goes directly against the historic federal and intertribal collaborative management authority for Bears Ears, and landmark Tribal co-stewardship framework for Grand Staircase-Escalante, defying the sovereignty of Native Nations and the federal government’s duty of Tribal consultation,” according to the Sierra Club, a prominent environmental organization.