The Trump administration's proposed management plan for Bears Ears National Monument was decried Friday as being destructive to the landscape and cultural aspects of the monument/BLM file
Chaining, the practice of using heavy chains stretched between tractors or bulldozers to rip out vegetation, would be allowed in parts of Bears Ears National Monument under the Trump administration's proposed management plan. The plan, which also would allow new roads and utility lines to cross the landscape in southeastern Utah, drew immediate condemnation Friday from environmental and tribal groups, who are hoping their legal moves to reverse President Trump's redrawing of the monument's boundaries will prevent the plan from taking effect.
The Proposed Monument Management Plans and Final Environmental Impact Statement Shash Jáa and Indian Creek Units of Bears Ears released Friday addresses the small portion of the original monument designated by President Obama that remained after President Trump in December 2017 issued proclamations that, if upheld in court, would significantly shrink both Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Carleton Bowekaty, lieutenant governor of the Zuni Pueblo and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said since the federal protections were eliminated from the larger region by Trump's proclamations, a great amount of damage has been registered on cultural areas of the original monument.
“It’s like seeing that your grandmother’s house has been robbed,” Bowekaty said Friday. “These lands are sacred to us and they are being destroyed — sometimes inadvertently — by people who don’t understand our culture and way of life. That’s why we want all of this area protected, so we can help educate others and share our traditions with all people.”
Conservation groups remained optimistic that, in the end, their contention that President Trump lacked the authority to shrink the two monuments would prevail.
“If we win the legal fight to restore Bears Ears National Monument, this plan will just be 800 pages of wasted effort,” said Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountains office. “Even in the parts of Bears Ears that President Trump left intact, he’s planning on putting destructive activities before the American public’s interests. Bears Ears is not the kind of place for chaining thousands of acres of forest or stringing up utility lines. These are wild, sweeping monument lands.”
Some Democrats in Congress also condemned the plan, saying it was written with "input from the newly appointed and reconstituted Monument Advisory Council, which is composed entirely of outspoken critics of the original monument and was formulated without government-to-government consultation with sovereign tribal nations."
“This management plan is a cynical attempt to support President Trump’s illegal move, and publishing it before the judge has ruled smacks of disrespect for the judicial branch,” U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva said. “Trump officials released this just as lawmakers are leaving Washington for the recess, hoping to avoid questions for which they have no answers.
"If they believed their changes to the monument and the management plan were legal or defensible, they wouldn’t be rushing them through before the courts have weighed in on the legality of the president’s decisions – and they would send us the explanatory documents we asked for months ago," the Democrat from Arizona said. "This plan relies on the advice of a rigged panel of monument opponents. It will waste a mountain of taxpayer dollars. Fortunately, I’m confident that when the courts rule, these illegal actions will be overturned and Bears Ears National Monument will be restored.”
When President Trump declared new boundaries for Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, a move that shed 2 million acres combined from the two, the president claimed he was acting to preserve "states rights." At the same time, his action could also allow those 2 million acres of federal lands to be opened to energy development and other uses monument status had banned.
At the time, Trump maintained that Presidents Clinton and Barack Obama, who established Bears Ears in December 2016, "severely abused the purpose, spirit, and intent of a century-old law known as the Antiquities Act." His proclamations cut the 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by a bit more than 1 million acres and broke it into three monuments to be known as Grand Staircase, Escalante Canyons, and Kaiparowits. Bears Ears National Monument would be shrunk to a bit more than 201,000 acres from its original size of 1.3 million acres if his actions withstand legal scrutiny.
Conservation and environmental groups immediately challenged Trump's authority to shrink the two monuments, filing a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., that December. The lawsuit remains pending while the U.S. District Court mulls the administration's request that it be dismissed.
The legal action didn't stop the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, which share management of Bears Ears, from devising new management plans for the area. The draft management plan released Friday outlines an aggressive appropoach to managing the landscape. Though the document states that the plan would "provide for the proper care and management of Monument objects and values including the 'object[s] of antiquity' and 'objects of historic or scientific interest'" within the monument, it would allow "fewer land and resource use restrictions and allowing for more discretion for multiple uses."
The proposal would:
* Open certain areas of the Indian Creek Unit to new rights-of-way (e.g., roads);
* Adopt transportation and utility rights-of-way outlined in a 1991 resource management document;
* Adopt the San Juan County (Utah) off-road vehicle route system as much as practicable (San Juan County officials in the past have bridled at federal management of public lands and at times encouraged ORV use in areas where the BLM had banned it) ;
* Permit target shooting, which has been blamed in many instances for sparking wildfires on public lands, outside of designated campgrounds;
* Manage lands with wilderness characteristics for multiple use, and;
* Permit landscape improvements (e.g., fencing, guzzlers, storage tanks, corrals, vegetation treatments) to support livestock grazing.
The proposal does outline safeguards for paleontological and archaeological resources, management of "natural quiet," and nesting raptors.
“The illegal decimation of Bears Ears National Monument opens up ancestral lands of the Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni to development that will likely degrade critical wildlife habitat, fragment migration corridors, and potentially expose southern Utah communities to unacceptable pollution and health risks,” said Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. “Now the management plan for the meager remnants of the original monument simply pours salt in the open wounds of the tens of thousands of tribal leaders and citizens who fought for decades to conserve these sacred lands.”
At the National Parks Conservation Association, President and CEO Theresa Pierno called the management plan "an insult to the public, who overwhelmingly spoke out in favor of protecting Bears Ears— and all our national monuments. Today’s plan opens the monument to damaging uses that carelessly put troves of scientific resources, sacred spaces, and adjacent national park landscapes in jeopardy. Our parks don’t exist in isolation, and the administration’s plan ignores the long-recognized threats to parks from harmful activities outside their borders, putting at risk their air and water quality, dark night skies and expansive viewsheds, as well as the multi-million-dollar economy they support. The only management plan acceptable is one that encompasses Bears Ears’ entire landscape and protects the values and resources for which the monument was originally and legally created.”
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We have more than enough give-it-away for free livestock grazing. Let the ranchers take their animals home where they belong. Let the wilderness be wilderness not farms.
Either these folks didn't read the report or they are trying to blow smoke up your you know what.
While the protestors above would lead you to believe the administration is changing the rules for the worse, all the proposed alternatives (except A-status quo), include the preferred alternative, REDUCE, the amount of land open to grazing and REDUCE the amount of cultural resources at risk versus the status quo.
I believe that, before we get tangled up in doublespeak, we need to step back and remember what happened here. Protections were removed, by the current federal administration and at the insistence of the Utah delegation, from an already designated national monument. If either the current federal administration or the Utah delegation had a sincere or trustworthy intention to protect the area, they would have left the national monument designation in place. Now, with the 2020 election looming closer, they try to camoflage their misdeeds with sugarcoated words about how they will protect the leftovers, all in the hope that the public has a short memory and can be easily fooled. It seems like the same old treacherously deceitful business as usual to me.
Until just recently, I devoted my summers to working in a remote nonprofit bookstore in one of America's premiere national parks located not really all that far from Bears Ears National Monument. Although I was already very familiar with the park and the foibles of the Department of the Interior (DOI) and National Park Service (NPS), working full summers in such close proximity was still an "eye opening" experience. The park where I worked is situated in an area rich in racial, ethnic, political, and religious diversity, including diverse histories and remnant homelands; however, that diversity, although practically on the park's doorsteps, seemed almost invisible within the leadership of both the nonprofit and the agency. Welcoming greater diversity in both the visitors and the workforces at the national parks is a stated goal of the NPS and both the nonprofit and the agency have access to a diverse national recruitment pool, as well as a diverse pool of locally available labor at the park where I was employed. Yet, there still seemed to be relatively few minorities above the level of seasonal workers. Inadequate attention to diversity seeped down from the top and into every aspect of park operations, fostering a permissive environment, a fertile breeding ground, for a wider range of problems.
As just one example, there are certainly regional tensions, often severe, in the area in which this park is located. My coworkers and I were frequently confronted with "eccentric" visitors. Setting the right "welcoming" tone for all of these visitors was critical and it was not helpful that the bookstores operated by the "official nonprofit partner" of the NPS in this park carried "official" guidebooks to the park in English, German, French, Chinese, and Japanese, but not in Spanish. It was also revealing when, more than once, I was obliquely warned against spending too much time helping "those" people and "those" people always seemed to mean minority visitors. But, by far my most vivid memory is when a woman, dressed in an elaborate cowgirl outfit, entered the bookstore, glared at our selection of works on Native Americans, voiced belligerent animosity toward Bears Ears National Monument, and loudly endorsed an apparently regional publication that she insisted the bookstore should be selling. By her account, this publication argued that Native Americans were too impaired to progress past the Stone Age on their own, remain inherently impaired today, and thus the government should give them no say in how any land, reservation or otherwise, is managed. Being the only staff on duty at the time and a minority with indigenous ancestry myself, I was left with the challenge of defusing the situation without further public disruption and without being coerced into appearing to agree with her rhetoric, which I did.
The point is that neither the nonprofit nor the DOI adequately acknowledged regional diversity issues or the resulting ethnic, racial, religious, or political tensions. Nor did either the nonprofit or the DOI take adequate care to ensure diversity within their own ranks. Intolerance and prejudice are the home turf of bullies, who thrive and breed in permissive environments and get worse the longer they are allowed to act out their urges unrestrained. My experience taught me how a myopic complacency, if not a downright hostility toward diversity, within the nonprofit and the current federal administration, served to foster not just a hostile work environment, but a permissive environment in which all other forms of discrimination, including corrupt and twisted land use and protection policies can take root and eventually be normalized. To agree with anything in this contrived plan for the small portion that remains of the originally designated monument is to be tricked into tacitly and complicitly accepting the original crime.
I've had a number of personal experiences in Southeastern Utah that echo what rumple says above. The folks down there who complain that their families have lived in Blanding or Monticello for nearly two hundred years would have us believe they were here before those who call themselves "Native" Americans.
In fact, I once was in a grocery store in Blanding and heard another customer talking about a Navajo candidate for county commission. He referred to him twice as a "Navajo Ni**er."
When I told him that the comment was disgusting, the store clerk grinned and said, "Hell, you just don't know those people."
Of course, down thataway they think pretty much the same thing about park rangers and BLM or USFS employees, too. One BLM range manager I met told me he was trying to get transferred out of the territory because his daughter was getting ready to start school and he knew she wouldn't be welcomed by other kids.
Southeastern Utah is a completely different part of the world.
I've been there (and the northeastern part of Arizona) and it's an eye opening experience. I did notice almost unspeakable poverty. We just stopped at several fast food places (I think one was the A&W in Blanding), where employment there may have been some of the better jobs, and where there seem to be a lot of unemployed and older people just hanging out because the food was cheap and there was air conditioning.
However, I never met anyone who stared at us nor made us feel like we were unwelcome outsiders. The Navajo were universally welcoming to visitors. We stayed in a motel in Moab where one clerk was Navajo and encouraged us to visit the reservation. I don't get why anyone would anything bad to say about the Navajo.
" I don't get why anyone would anything bad to say about the Navajo."
Visiting and actually living there are two different things. ( Disclaimer : I never lived in Blanding or San Juan County, but did live in other parts of Southern Utah ) There is perception there that Navajo and other tribes receive handouts they don't deserve. They are often viewed as lazy people who are content to live on "our" tax dollars.
They are seen as a threat because they sometimes outnumber Anglos. Recently, however, that particular threat has started moving to the forefront because younger native people are better educated than they were just a few years ago and with better education, they are learning that they really can have some power in a democratic society. They realize now that they can VOTE.
The recent war over Navajo candidates for county commission is a direct reflection of how frightened Anglos have become in San Juan County. Anglo citizens fought hard and tried every trick they could think of to prevent Native candidates from appearing on the ballot. It wound up in several court cases and there was devastation down there when courts ruled that Willie Greyeyes was an eligible candidate.
Anglos were terrified because in that corner of the state, Navajos and Utes hold a majority. Even worse than being Lamanites (what the Mormon Church used to call Indians) they are mostly Democrats. Courts also ruled that boundaries of commission voting districts had been gerrymandered to favor Anglo candidates. The court decisions required that boundaries be redrawn. (In most Utah counties, there are only 3 county commissioners).
Willie Greyeys won the election by beating an Anglo Republican by a handy margin in District 2. Republican Kelly Laws recieved 45.55% (814 votes) while Greyeyes tallied 54.45% (973)
District 3 lies mostly within the Ute and Navajo reservations and had only one candidate, Kenneth Maryboy, a Democrat who received all 1049 votes cast.
The only Republican Anglo who won was Bruce Adams in District 1 with 1540 votes running unopposed.
Anglo citizens of San Juan County are worried because their Republican stronghold is being threatened by democracy and now 2 out of 3 commissioners are not only Lamanites, but Democrats, too.
And when you say, "I never met anyone who stared at us nor made us feel like we were unwelcome outsiders," the answer is probably because you and other travelers bring MONEY. (And Moab up in Grand County is a hotbed of liberalism because of all those young hippies and other outsiders who moved in when they discovered the beauty of the place.)
Chaining? Good God almighty! That still goes on? What a relic of the recent past. Chains, rocks & dirt, hot sun, boy did I made my dollar today. Mindless stuff. But we got all our live to spare for a moron cause. Nothing more then an excuse to fire up the dozers and sweat some. for all those who don't know, "chaining" is nothing more then laying the land to waste and pretending to spend dollars on something usefull other then pulling up cedars, junipers, sage etc. I hear Mars is a chained out ball, maybe you wouldn't have to work so hard there.
Sam - perhaps you should actually read the report rather than be sucked in by the hyperbolic TDS. Chaining is not a relic of the past, it is current practice in the areas. Further is is only used for fire mitigation and under the preferred alternative "Mechanical treatments would be allowed only in those areas where the agencies have determined that it would be consistent with the proper care and management of Monument objects and values."