The Trump administration’s unprecedented, cruel and entirely unnecessary slashing of the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments — the second such evisceration of these monuments in nine years — marks the largest rollback of federal public lands protection in U.S. history. It also overturns the restoration of both monuments’ footprints by President Biden, to immense popular support and celebration, shortly after he took office in 2021.
At the signing ceremony that sealed the fate of both Utah monuments last week, Trump was surrounded by politicians who cheered the move, including long-time public lands opponent Sen. Mike Lee. The Utah Republican grinned and cackled like it was Christmas morning.
Meanwhile Trump lied about imaginary restrictions on access and being unable to walk in the monuments, as though they are are fenced off by walls and barbed wire. Nothing could be further from the truth. The two monuments are, in fact, open to all. But they’ll be fenced off from everyone soon enough, once they’re being drilled, mined, logged and desecrated by Trump’s allies.
According to outlets like the Conservation Lands Foundation and Friends of the Inyo, Trump’s destruction of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears ignores the wishes of over 90% of Americans who want the monuments preserved at the sizes they were established. Trump’s proclamation also ignores the monuments’ role as outdoor destinations popular with hikers, backpackers and hunters throughout the West, and the contributions they make as regional economic engines.
And Trump’s move spits in the faces of the thousands of tribes, community groups and individual Americans who volunteered for hours over the course of decades to protect these public lands for posterity, nature, conservation and the great American preservation tradition.
Not that Trump and his friends care. There’s bigger money to be made for their benefactors in destroying the ecosystems, habitats and species that Grand Staircase-Escalante, Bears Ears and other national monuments were wisely and carefully set aside to protect from gross exploitation in the first place.
In fact, Grand Staircase-Escalante recently survived a Lee-led attempt in the Senate to gut it via the seldom-used Congressional Review Act, which was used earlier this year to decimate protections for Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Wilderness to make way for a Chilean-owned copper mine. It’s astonishing how, a full three decades after Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated in response to multiple citizens groups that had long wanted the area protected, the modern Republican Party that was once an eager bipartisan supporter of broad environmental and wilderness bills now loathes the idea of conservation or public lands protection at all.
On an even more tragic note, the first-of-its-kind Bears Ears Intertribal Commission — made up of a coalition of the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Ute India Tribe — that served as a co-management partner for the national monument was dissolved with the stroke of a Sharpie as part of Trump’s executive proclamation. Trump’s duplicity stabs the five Utah tribes in the back, and further defiles and whitewashes the Native American legacy behind Bears Ears’ designation.
Iconic American locales like Joshua Tree, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon and Olympic National Parks were all first protected as national monuments in the 1930s, and eventually became national parks by way of congressional action in subsequent years. Pinnacles National Park in Monterey County is even older, having first been set aside as a national monument by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. Imagine a post-1945 president meddling with the size and footprint of those monuments decades after the fact, just as Trump has done now in decimating Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears.
Throughout their time as national monuments, there has never been a public outcry or groundswell of support for reducing or eradicating the boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante or Bears Ears — only calls for their preservation. But the same Republicans, shilling for the same deep-pocketed resource extractors, have worked for the last decade to ensure their destruction.
They are of the same mindset as those who drove John Muir to his grave when his beloved Hetch Hetchy at Yosemite National Park was desecrated by the construction of O’Shaughnessy Dam in 1914, and are the ideological descendants of the railroad, timber and cattle barons of the Old West that nearly eradicated the American buffalo by shooting them for sport from luxury locomotives speeding across the Great Plains. They are also the reason cooler heads began to set aside federal public lands for preservation, starting with the revolutionary idea of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, and eventually, the formation of the National Park Service in 1916.
So why are Trump and his GOP allies doing this? From their actions, it’s clear they loathe preservation. They reject the legacy of American conservation, and see national monuments and other protected American public lands as impediments to their resource extraction benefactors being able to mine, drill and log at will. Since Trump was inaugurated for his second term, he and his anti-conservation allies have been moving at light speed to undo every major American environmental accomplishment of the last 70 years. And now they’re hoping to reach back even further into U.S. history.
With the 90% slashings in size of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, Trump and his Project 2025 benefactors at the Heritage Foundation hope to prompt a court challenge in which they can ultimately litigate the 1906 Antiquities Act before the Supreme Court. Signed into law 120 years ago by President Roosevelt to enable presidents to designate National Monuments on federal public land when Congress is moving too slowly — or deliberately dragging its feet — to pass national park legislation for areas facing imminent threats, the act has long been a target for right-wing extremists like the Heritage Foundation and anti-public land zealots like Lee.
While the implementation of federal agency management falls under the purview of the executive branch, there’s no reason you can’t put pressure on Congress to push back against the Trump administration’s move. Congress should offer congressional ratification of these now-reduced monuments at their original size, or develop new preservation proposals like National Park or wilderness designations.
Call and write senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff and your U.S. representative today, and put the pressure on. Let them know this callous move by the administration is unacceptable.
Tommy Hough is an environmental consultant, former San Diego County planning commissioner, founding president of San Diego County Democrats for Environmental Action, and the former morning host at 91X and FM 94/9.
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