Energy developers and uranium miners want to drill and mine on land that used to be part of Bears Ears National Monument, even as President Joe Biden is reviewing the monument for expansion.
Utah-based conservation groups say since January, oil and gas companies have nominated over 40,000 acres of land inside the original monument boundaries for drilling.
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance analyzed publicly-available data from the Bureau of Land Management to come up with that number.
“This is more [oil and gas nominations] than throughout the Trump years,” said Steve Bloch, an attorney with the group...