Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante Restored!

 by Tim Peterson, Cultural Landscapes Director

Today, October 8, 2021, President Biden signed proclamations renewing and restoring Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments to their original glory! The proclamations restore the boundaries of both monuments and include protections for an additional 11,200 acres around Indian Creek in Bears Ears. See a map of the restored monuments ›

READ THE PROCLAMATIONS:
Bears Ears National Monument Proclamation ›
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Proclamation ›

With these landmark proclamations, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are made whole and complete again — returned to their rightful place as venerated national monuments, fully protected under the Antiquities Act of 1906. 

TAKE ACTION. Send a "thank you" to President Biden now ›

National monument protections restored

It’s a truly momentous day for both monuments, for the countless people who love them, and for the lands themselves — so rich in culture, fossils, plants and animals, and stunning scenery that make them so deserving of the elevated protections that national monument status affords. 

I am proud to stand with President Biden in restoring these monuments and fulfilling his commitment to the American people...The historical connection between Indigenous peoples and Bears Ears is undeniable; our Native American ancestors sustained themselves on the landscape since time immemorial and evidence of their rich lives is everywhere one looks. This living landscape must be protected so that all Americans have the profound opportunity to learn and cherish our history.”

–Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland

Native nations to help guide management at Bears Ears

President Biden’s proclamation for Bears Ears also reinstates the strongest model of federal-intertribal collaborative land management to date in American law, a model that was weakened in President Trump’s 2017 attempt to shrink the monument. 

At Bears Ears, Native nations can now celebrate their history in these cultural landscapes by actively collaborating government-to-government with the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service on land management for places their ancestors have stewarded for hundreds of generations. At Grand Staircase-Escalante, you can almost hear ancient pinyon and juniper forests heave a sigh of relief as the threat of clear-cutting abates.

Rebuilding and healing begin

These curative actions by President Biden are the first step in undoing President Trump’s unlawful December 2017 proclamations that slashed Bears Ears by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly half. Those actions represented the single largest removal of protections for national public lands in American history, stripping more than 2 million acres of their preservation status. The restoration of these monuments is a powerful metaphor for what America needs most now: to rebuild and to heal.

President Biden’s proclamations mean we can begin rebuilding what so many have spent so long working to protect. We look forward to new management plans for both monuments, and we’ll share details about what’s next in the coming months. Now, there is much work to be done activating Bears Ears as the nation’s first national monument to honor Indigenous cultures and traditional knowledge and restoring the primacy of science and discovery at Grand Staircase-Escalante.

What restoring national monuments means on the ground

TIM PETERSON

Bears Ears is a place of history, a place of wonder, a place of great beauty, and a place where everyone has a story to tell. The story written here during President Trump’s term was one of industry access and influence — for the uranium-mining company that lobbied the administration to reduce the boundaries, and for the politicians who disrespected the Native nations that sought to see the area set aside for preservation. Bears Ears holds a future of healing, and we all have a part in that work. 

Grand Staircase-Escalante is a place where science is honored and where discovery is paramount. That discovery can be personal for the family that takes in its stunning vistas for the first time, or scientific, from jaw-dropping native bee diversity to the discovery of more than two dozen species of dinosaurs previously unknown to science. 

National support for national monuments

Making these monuments whole again is a key step toward finally fulfilling their original promise, and one that the American public supports broadly. Year after year, polling has revealed that a supermajority of Western voters opposed the downsizing of national monuments. Now, conservation, recreation, scientific, and grassroots groups and associations all across the nation meet the monument restorations with joy and celebration. Millions of citizens do too — President Trump’s downsizing of national monuments drew rebuke from more than 2.8 million public commenters in 2017. 

Some Utah politicians at the local and state level and within the congressional delegation will likely oppose the restoration of the monuments, but politicians and extractive interests objected to the preservation of public lands from Arches and Capitol Reef to Canyonlands when they were protected in the 20th century. Today, few would argue that protections should be removed from these crown jewels of our national park system. 

By restoring these national monuments, President Biden has also reinvigorated the opportunities they offer: to respect and elevate the Indigenous histories that have conserved these places for hundreds of generations, and to honor the past and its unbreakable bond to the present and the future. After years of struggle, it’s time to set about rebuilding that legacy.