Trump Shrinks Bears Ears National Monument By 85 Percent, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That 1.35 Million Acres Of Sacred Tribal Land Were Closed To Uranium Mining

The Filing

SALT LAKE CITY. In a ceremony at the Utah State Capitol, President Donald J. Trump on Monday signed two proclamations shrinking Bears Ears National Monument by roughly 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by nearly half, the largest rollback of federal land protection in the history of the United States.

The action stripped protected status from more than two million acres of public land, returning terrain previously closed to extraction to a status under which it could once again be claimed, leased, and mined. Bears Ears, designated by President Barack Obama in December 2016 at the request of a coalition of five tribes including the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe, and Zuni, contains tens of thousands of archaeological sites, cliff dwellings, and petroglyphs. Under the new boundaries, roughly 1.15 million of its 1.35 million acres reverted to ordinary federal land, where the cliff dwellings would continue to exist but the government would no longer be implying anything by it.

"Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington," Trump told the assembled crowd. "And guess what? They're wrong." The President framed the proclamations as a historic reversal of federal overreach and a restoration of control to the people of Utah, a group administration officials clarified did not include the five tribes who had spent years assembling the original proposal and who opposed its dismantling.

The redrawn Grand Staircase-Escalante boundaries excluded the Kaiparowits Plateau, one of the largest coal deposits in the country, while the Bears Ears reduction left a known uranium deposit and an existing uranium mine outside the protected zone. Energy Fuels Resources, a uranium company that had retained lobbyists to press for a smaller monument, expressed satisfaction that lands near its operations would no longer be encumbered by a designation formally acknowledging they were irreplaceable.

A source within the administration characterized the proclamations as a routine correction. "The land was just sitting there, protected," the source said. "Now it can finally be used for something." Asked what the something was, the source indicated that the market would decide, and noted that the market had, in several documented instances, already decided it was uranium.

At press time, the proclamations had been challenged in five separate lawsuits, and the cliff dwellings, unaware they had been deregulated, remained where they had stood for roughly eight centuries.

Who Benefits

§President Trump, who delivered a signature deregulatory victory to Utah Republicans and recast the largest reduction of protected land in American history as a populist restoration of local control.
§Energy Fuels Resources, the uranium company that lobbied for a smaller Bears Ears and saw a uranium deposit and an active mine left outside the new protected boundary.
§The coal industry, handed renewed access to the Kaiparowits Plateau deposit newly excluded from Grand Staircase-Escalante.
§Utah's Republican congressional delegation, including Senator Orrin Hatch, who had pushed for the reduction for years and was thanked by name from the podium.
§Oil, gas, and hard-rock mining interests, granted the ability to lease and stake claims across more than two million acres returned to multiple-use status.
§Future extraction companies, given terrain whose chief prior obstacle, a federal designation calling it culturally and scientifically irreplaceable, had been removed.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment