Last week, President Joe Biden ordered a 60-day review of the boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, which President Donald Trump reduced by 2 million acres in 2017. The announcement rekindled tensions in Utah, where national monument designations have been used to add protections to federal public lands for more than 100 years, often over the objections of state leaders.
In order to better understand the history and use of the Antiquities Act, we caught up with David Gessner, author of the new book “Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness,” by email to help put the current debate into a historical context...