Bears Ears: A Clear Choice

July 18 2016

Tim Peterson

by Bill Hedden, Executive Director

On Saturday, July 16, 2016 Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and other Obama administration officials held a public meeting in Bluff, Utah to hear community visions for public lands conservation.

Watch the public listening session:

On behalf of the Grand Canyon Trust, I delievered the following statement at the July 16th meeting in Bluff.

Today, we consider a clear choice: do we prefer the intertribal coalition’s visionary and globally precedent-setting proposal for a Bears Ears National Monument collaboratively managed with the Native peoples? Or do we prefer the upstart Public Lands Initiative (PLI), introduced at the last minute in the Congress after 18 months of closed-door secrecy, and too late for meaningful debate or amendment?

The bill is a disaster without amendment.

The PLI would omit more than half a million acres of the Bears Ears, including tens of thousands of irreplaceable cultural sites and some of the best canyon and mountain country in the United States;
It would demote the sovereign Native American tribes, who are offering to share wisdom about how their ancestral lands are managed, to a small voice in a large crowd;
Across the region, the PLI would leave millions of acres of deserving wilderness unprotected, especially the biologically critical watersheds on the national forests;
The PLI would insult public ownership by letting the State of Utah manage development of America’s fossil fuel resources, while cancelling master leasing plans for the seven PLI counties;
The bill would throw out well-established procedure in transferring vast blocks of public lands to the State of Utah for expedited development of tar sands, oil shale, coal, and uranium without public review or input;
It would turn tens of thousands of acres of public lands and thousands of roads over to state and county ownership, furthering Utah’s radical public land seizure agenda, and;
The PLI would lock in all these bad things by repealing the Antiquities Act in eastern Utah, through the disingenuous mechanism of a partner bill introduced in Congress before the PLI itself.

However much we might all wish it was not true, Utah’s legislators have failed to find balance and the job now rises to President Obama.