On Monday, July 13, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders with outsized impacts to federally-owned public lands in Utah. He shrank the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by about 90% each.
The move is yet another action in a year-long back-and-forth over the national monuments, both of which were established under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which was enacted “to provide general legal protection of cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific interest on federal lands.”
Grand Staircase-Escalante was established by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and later expanded to encompass 1.9 million acres. Bears Ears National Monument was established by President Barack Obama in 2016 and, at the time of his order, encompassed over 1.3 million acres. Bears Ears was designated at the behest of an inter-tribal coalition with cultural interests in the area.
Both monument designations faced fierce opposition from Utah legislators, who argued that the large-scale designations disrupted multiple uses of the land and ran counter to the original text of the Antiquities Act, which requires designations to “be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
Meanwhile, advocates for the designation say that they incorporated public comment, balanced different types of recreational use and grazing, along with protecting the unique archeological and natural beauty of those areas.
The debate was never fully resolved. In his first term, President Trump drastically shrunk both monuments in 2017, only for President Joe Biden to restore them in 2021, adding additional acreage to Bears Ears. Now, Trump is again moving to slash the monuments, this time by even more acreage than he did in his first term.
When signing the executive order, President Trump falsely claimed that hunting and fishing were not allowed on the previous monument designations; they both were in the majority of both designations, as were things like off-highway recreation on existing routes, grazing, and other uses.
“It’s important to note that this is not a sale or loss of public land acres. These monuments were already public before their monument designation and will remain public after this change,” notes MeatEater Director of Conservation, Mark Kenyon. “But there are real impacts, namely the protections being removed from these lands, with likely increases in resource extraction and other development as the result, and a precedent being set that could lead to more monuments being shrunk or altered in the future. Given the fact that there are many quality hunting and fishing opportunities within existing national monuments today, this is an issue that deserves the attention of the hunting and angling public.”
Earlier this year, MeatEater reported on an attempt by Utah’s congressional delegation to go after Grand Staircase-Escalante’s management plan, but that effort appears to have been subsumed by this week’s executive orders, which will reduce Grand Staircase-Escalante by 1.87 million acres, leaving only 181,500 acres within the designation. Additionally, Bears Ears will be shrunk by 1.36 million acres to approximately 121,100 acres.
The reductions are significantly greater in scale than those that Trump doled out during his first term, though a White House fact sheet notes that “the specific landmarks, structures, and objects of historic and scientific interest that the Antiquities Act and monuments safeguard will continue to be protected.”
Some conservation groups have panned the move and promised litigation; while the Antiquities Act gives presidents the power to establish national monuments, they argue that it does not give them the ability to shrink them. A lawsuit along those lines was filed back in 2017, but the monuments were restored before the courts issued a final decision on the lawsuit.
“This action will only bring uncertainty and chaos to places that should instead be protected for their rich biodiversity, unique geology, and remarkable cultural values,” said Scott Braden, Executive Director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance in a press release. “The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is committed to defending the monuments—whether that’s in a court of law or the halls of Congress.”
Trump’s executive order will revert the former designations to their previous management statuses. Some conservationists worry that doing so will open the door for rampant off-road use, as well as resource extraction, to the detriment of the area’s long-term preservation, and consequently, hunting and fishing opportunities.
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