President Biden will restore the original boundaries to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments/BLM file

Editor's note: This updates with presidential proclamations to be signed to restore original boundaries for national monuments.

President Biden, in a move that pleased tribes, conservationists, and environmentalists while angering Utah officials, announced plans Thursday to sign proclamations to restore the original boundaries to Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts national monuments.

In the announcement Thursday night, the administration said the move was both to uphold a promise to restore the boundaries and also to uphold "the longstanding principle that America’s national parks, monuments, and other protected areas are to be protected for all time and for all people."

Biden plans to sign the proclamations Friday.

The announcement comes on the eve of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Monday, October 11. The decision was relayed to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

"The president's decision to enlarge the monuments again is a tragic missed opportunity — it fails to provide certainty as well as the funding for law enforcement, research, and other protections which the monuments need and which only Congressional action can offer," the Republican governor said in a written statement.

The president's announcement pointed out that administration "leaders met with members of Congress, state and local government officials, representatives of Tribal Nations, and a wide range of stakeholders" before coming to the decision to restore the monuments' original boundaries.

Haaland back in April was the third Interior secretary in less than five years to visit Bears Ears and Grand Staircase in southern Utah to try to grasp the significance of a landscape with a cultural heritage that reaches back thousands of years and one that also entombs paleontological remains millions of years old in a bid to determine the appropriate size of two national monuments.

She retraced much the same ground, literally and figuratively, as did former Interior secretaries Sally Jewell under President Obama and Ryan Zinke under President Trump in developing recommendations regarding the size of the two monuments.
Jewell's recommendations led Obama to use his authority under The Antiquities Act to set aside 1.35 million acres for Bears Ears in December 2016. Zinke's recommendations led Trump to cut, in a controversial and questionable move, a bit more than 1 million acres from Bears Ears and a bit more than 1 million from Grand Staircase-Escalante, which covered 1.9 million acres when President Clinton established it in 1996.

Jewell's recommendations led Obama to use his authority under The Antiquities Act to set aside 1.35 million acres for Bears Ears in December 2016. Zinke's recommendations led Trump to cut, in a controversial and questionable move, a bit more than 1 million acres from Bears Ears and a bit more than 1 million from Grand Staircase-Escalante, which covered 1.9 million acres when President Clinton established it in 1996.

Metate Arch in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument/BLM

Indigenous groups have been urging the administration to reverse Trump's work. Last month a coalition of Indigenous activists - the Native Organizers Alliance, Illuminative and Utah Dine Bikeyah - took out a full-page ad in the New York Times demanding that “President Biden, Protect Bears Ears Now!”

On Wednesday of this week the Hispanic Access Foundation and the Outdoor Advocacy Project launched an online campaign and petition calling on Biden and Haaland to restore the three monuments' original boundaries and use their power to protect all public lands.

And Thursday morning a coalition of more than 70 progressive, environmental and social justice nonprofits sent a letter to the president urging him to listen to the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and honor his campaign promise, by restoring protections to Bears Ears National Monument. The letters was in soldairity with the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and echoed the call to action they requested in a letter sent to President Biden in late September.

The administration's announcment said restoring the Bears Ears boundaries "will conserve a multitude of sites that are culturally and spiritually important to Tribal Nations— including petroglyphs, pictographs, cultural sites, dwellings, and areas used for traditional rituals, gatherings, and tribal practices — as well as paleontological objects, landscape features, historic objects, and plant and animal species. Restoring the monument’s boundaries and conditions restores its integrity, upholds efforts to honor the federal trust responsibility to Tribal Nations, and conserves these lands and waters for future generations."

Regarding Grand Staircase-Escalante, the administration said resetting the original boundaries established by President Clinton protected the "White and Vermilion Cliffs, Kaiparowits Plateau, Escalante Natural Bridge, Grosvenor Arch, and numerous other enumerated geologic objects. The monument also contains vast paleontological objects including significant fossils of marine and brackish water mollusks, turtles, crocodilians, lizards, dinosaurs, fishes, and mammals, as well as a host of cultural objects associated with both ancient indigenous cultures and early Latter-Day Saint pioneers, including, but not limited to, petroglyphs and pictographs, occupation sites, campsites, granaries, and trails."

Northeast Seamounts and Canyons National Monument not protects unique geological features "that anchor vulnerable ecological communities threatened by varied uses, climate change, and related impacts. Under the restored protections, commercial fishing in the national monument will be prohibited, with fishing for red crab and American lobster to be phased out by September 15, 2023," while recreational fishing will continue to be allowed.

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, said Biden's "decision to restore full federal protection to Bears Ears, Grand Staircase Escalante and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts national monuments shows this administration’s commitment to conserving our public lands and respecting the voices of Indigenous Peoples. It’s time to put Trump’s cynical actions in the rear-view mirror, restore rightful protections, and restart the Bears Ears co-management arrangement with the tribes who have held this place sacred since time immemorial.”

But U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said the president missed an opportunity to seek a bipartisan legislative settlement to the boundary issues.

"By deciding to re-expand the boundaries of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, President Biden has delivered a devastating blow to the ongoing efforts by our state, local, and tribal leaders, along with our congressional delegation, to find a permanent, legislative solution to resolve the longstanding dispute over the boundaries and management of these monuments," Romney said in a Facebook post. "The president squandered the opportunity to build consensus in a divided region—which would have brought certainty to and benefited all stakeholders. We will continue to support efforts to ensure that our monuments’ boundaries and management reflect the unique stakeholder interest and uses in the area, but today’s 'winner take all' mentality moved us further away from that goal."

Bears Ears National Monument was established by the Obama administration in 2016 under the Antiquities Act following years of advocacy by numerous tribes with cultural ties to the land. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition—made up of the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe and Pueblo of Zuni—advocated successfully to protect the cultural, historic, and natural values of the monument. 

Bears Ears is home to multiple culturally significant and archeological sites dating as far back as 11,000 BCE. The land is still in use today by tribal members, who continually visit it to conduct religious ceremonies and other traditional practices.

The back-and-forth over protection for these areas represents just the latest fray over public lands in Utah, and elsewhere in the West, that are viewed either as natural resource-rich and cultural landscapes to be protected or wastelands to be pilfered for what might lie beneath the surface.

"The original Bears Ears and Grand Staircase National Monuments represented an opportunity to restore damaged landscapes, enforce the preservation of antiquities, and educate visitors about the meaning of these lands to science, history, and present-day cultures," wrote Salt Lake City historian Frederick Swanson in his book, Wonders of Sand and Stone, A History of Utah's National Parks and Monuments. "The diminished monuments of today continue the past approach of fragmented and spotty protection of important public resources.

"A different approach would examine the canyon country region on a broad scale, looking for common purposes that might help to heal old divisions," Swanson continued. "This would require all parties to take a hard look at how we have historically treated the land and its longtime inhabitants, and then chart new directions that encompass the entire range of values we seek in our public lands. Such a process, though largely untried, offers perhaps the best hope that Utah's national parks and monuments will remain as living examples of the magnificence of Earth's creation."

When President Obama established the monument, the area was already facing considerable threats from mining and energy development as well as looting and vandalism. President Trump’s decision to shrink the monument by more than 85 percent was the largest rollback of public lands protection in history and a violation of the federal government’s trust and treaty obligations to protect tribal lands and resources, according to Grijalva's office.

Following the decision in 2018, the Trump administration opened land in the Bears Ears region for mineral development and industry speculators have been staking claims throughout the formerly protected area, the congressman's staff added.