President Donald Trump on Monday cut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah by about 90% each, stripping protections from public lands that are sacred to many Native Americans and opening the door wider for coal and uranium development. The proclamations, issued under the Antiquities Act, reduced the two monuments from more than 3.2 million acres combined to less than 303,000 acres.
Who Pays for the Power Grab
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 the reduction since Trump was elected to a second term. She called the move “heartbreaking” and said federal officials had sidestepped their legal responsibility to consult with tribal nations that would be affected. Her words cut through the polished language of land management. “From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not simply a piece of federal public land,” she said. “This is a living cultural site that holds our histories, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines and our ancestors’ footprints.”
That’s the human cost buried under the paperwork. The monuments contain ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs, scenic canyons, archaeological sites and rock paintings, and the protections Trump tore back also banned drilling, mining and new construction nearby. The land isn’t empty. It’s full of history, memory and material that can’t be replaced once the machinery gets moving.
What the State Calls “Access”
Trump said at a White House signing event, “They took the land from the people quite honestly. We’re giving it back.” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox praised the move, saying, “This is a big day for Utah,” and adding, “These monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area as possible to protect the antiquities.” The language sounds tidy enough, but the facts on the ground point somewhere else: state officials want coal and uranium deposits made available for development, and Trump’s order clears a much larger path for extraction.
Trump also claimed Monday that people cannot hunt, fish or “virtually not even walk” on the monuments. Steve Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said that was false and that hunting, fishing, camping and other recreation are permitted under state and federal regulations. So the usual script rolls on: exaggerate the restrictions, then use the exaggeration to justify handing land over to industry.
The monuments were not created in a vacuum. President Bill Clinton established Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, and President Barack Obama created Bears Ears National Monument in 2016 under the Antiquities Act, the 1906 law that gives presidents the power to protect sites considered historic, archaeologically significant or culturally important. Bears Ears was the first national monument created at the request of tribal nations that consider the land sacred, and its designation honored five tribes in the region: Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Uintah-Ouray Ute. It is jointly managed by an agreement between tribal nations and federal agencies.
Extraction, Boundaries, and the Old Machine
The fight over these monuments is really a fight over who gets to decide what happens to land owned by the public and controlled from above. Trump and other Republicans have reshaped the management of vast taxpayer-owned lands concentrated in Western states, pushing to expand drilling, mining and logging while removing protections for imperiled species and rolling back rules for conservation. Trump wants to tap into the natural resource wealth of federal lands that total more than 100,000 square miles, or 260,000 square kilometers, and offshore areas under federal control, such as in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska.
Grand Staircase-Escalante contains cliffs, canyons, natural arches and archaeological sites, including rock paintings, and it holds large coal reserves. The Bears Ears area has uranium. Those deposits sit beneath places that many Native Americans treat as living cultural sites, not just real estate waiting for a permit stamp.
Trump’s move went further than his first term, when he left Grand Staircase-Escalante at 1 million acres and Bears Ears at 213,000 acres. This time, the reductions were deeper. Much deeper.
Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said, “Today’s executive action is another chapter in this administration’s war on the West.” He added that Trump was “turning the Antiquities Act on its head.” Trump Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last year that federal officials would review and consider redrawing monument boundaries as part of a push to expand U.S. energy production. In other words, the machinery had already been humming before Monday’s signing event.
Republicans have also tried to sell or transfer federal lands to states or other entities, but those efforts have largely fallen flat. A push by some GOP lawmakers in the House to sell public lands ran into bipartisan opposition, while another proposal by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah to sell more than 3,200 square miles, or 8,300 square kilometers, of federal lands was removed from Republicans’ big tax and spending bill. The U.S. Supreme Court last year turned back a lawsuit from Utah officials who sought to wrest control of vast areas of public land within the state from the federal government.
The state keeps reaching. The people below keep paying.