Final Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Management Plans Endanger Monuments

 by Tim Peterson, Cultural Landscapes Director

On February 6, 2020, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued final decisions approving new land-management plans for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. Far from protecting fossils and cultural sites as the law requires, the plans throw open the gates for increased off-road vehicle use, cattle grazing, and clear-cutting of ancient pinyon and juniper forests. For now, the lands cut from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are open to coal and uranium mining and oil and gas drilling.

Deficient and damaging 

Largely unchanged from earlier drafts, the plans fail to meet even the minimum legal standard for how national monuments must be managed. Time and again, the BLM chose management options that put fossils, cultural resources, wildlife, and wildlands in peril. In several cases, the final plan for Bears Ears imposes lesser protections than if no monument had ever been designated at all.

The plans allow target-shooting nearly everywhere in both monuments and green-light removal of pinyon and juniper forests, replacing them with non-native plants to increase grazing. The Bears Ears plan directs inappropriate increased visitation to cultural areas; planning for how to manage cultural resources will have to wait another two years, and planning for recreation three years, where increased visitation is doing harm now.  

Take Action. Urge your representatives to expand the boundaries of Bears Ears by supporting and co-sponsoring the BEARS Act ›

Hurried and harried

Begun shortly after the president’s unlawful proclamations shrinking Bears Ears by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly half in late 2017, the plans took just over two years to finalize. Throughout the process, experts and the public were disregarded, legal issues were dismissed, and the Trump administration worked hard to spin what the plans are and what they do. 

Acting Utah State BLM Director Anita Bilbao said the plans: “…are the result of extensive and deliberate collaboration between cooperating agency partners, local communities, stakeholders, the Utah Resource Advisory Council, Tribes, and the American public.” 

But Indigenous community leaders and tribal elected officials paint a different picture. 

“The Trump Administration’s final management plan for Bears Ears National Monument is an example of how the federal government continues to ignore Indigenous voices,” said Davis Filfred, Chairman of the Board for Utah Diné Bikéyah.

Shaun Chapoose, Ute Indian Tribe Business Committee member and Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition co-chair, was blunt when describing the plans. “The administration is failing in its treaty and trust responsibilities to Indian tribes,” he said.

Lawsuits, schmawsuits 

Because the new plans flow from the president’s unlawful decisions to revoke and replace the monuments, the plans are also unlawful. Planning should have waited until lawsuits challenging the president’s reductions are resolved, which are currently moving through the courts. We and the other parties to the lawsuits recently filed motions for summary judgment, which ask the court to rule on whether the president acted unlawfully when he revoked and replaced the monuments, as well as to set aside the new plans. We expect a ruling on these motions perhaps as early as later this year.   

Dismissing the role of the courts, Acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Casey Hammond told a reporter: "If we stopped and waited for every piece of litigation to be resolved, we would never be able to do much of anything around here." 

Rest assured that we’ll be fighting to prevent the implementation of the plans and any new ground-disturbing projects that arise from them until the plans are tossed out.   

A sliver of sunlight on the Escalante River 

Blake McCord

In a small bit of good news, after pressure from the Grand Canyon Trust and other groups who’ve spent more than 20 years and millions of dollars on river restoration, the BLM retreated from an earlier proposal to let loose herds of cattle in the Escalante River corridor, instead keeping a narrow swath along the river closed to grazing. Two decades and tens of thousands of hours spent removing thirsty non-native tamarisk and skin-piercing Russian olive trees have allowed nature to recover, and reopening the area to grazing would have devastated the river and the native plants and animals that depend on it. 

It’s not a bluebird day, however. Closing the river to grazing two decades ago was part of a broader, landmark deal that also protected sensitive side canyons and tens of thousands of acres surrounding the river from cattle. While the new plans keep the river closed, they renege on the rest of the deal, reopening to grazing every other acre that was closed while creating new carve-outs for cattle to trample the riverbank in two places.

Take Action. Ask your legislators to cement the original boundaries of 52 national monuments by supporting the ANTIQUITIES Act of 2019 ›

Drill and mine elsewhere, investors plead

Just a few days before the plans were released, a group of 40 investment managers representing $113 billion in assets urged fossil fuel and mining conglomerates not to take advantage of the Trump administration’s gutting of protections to log, mine, and drill at Bears Ears, Grand Staircase, and elsewhere. 

The investors warned that logging, drilling, and mining would put companies and their investors “…at significant risk of public backlash and stranded assets, should these actions be legally challenged or protections be restored by the courts or by future administrations.” 

Waste, fraud, and abuse in Washington

More than merely an outrage in terms of what they do, the plans represent remarkable fiscal irresponsibility. The BLM spent more than $4.6 million on the plans, money that could have gone a long way to manage visitation, protect cultural resources, and add law-enforcement staff on the ground.  The plans are also an abuse of the public trust. When the Interior Department asked for public input, more than 99 percent of 2.8 million respondents opposed shrinking or eliminating the monuments. The five tribes who advocated for the protection of Bears Ears were ignored as well. Hopi Tribal Vice Chairman Clark Tenakhongva said of the plans: “[the] administration’s effort to preempt any adverse ruling by prematurely finalizing the land management planning process for the illegally declared Shash Jaa’ and Indian Creek units unequivocally demonstrates a complete disregard for Native American concerns and blatant disrespect for the cultural landscape protections the Tribes have sought.”

Indeed. For now, all eyes are on the courts.