The optimists say that the law and court precedents will make mincemeat of Pr*sident Trump’s decision—announced in Salt Lake City today—to massively shrink two national monuments in Utah that were designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and President Barack Obama in 2016.
The pessimists say the law is ambiguous, none of the precedents have specifically tested whether a sitting president can reduce the size of monuments designated by a previous president, and courts are often unpredictable and could rule in Trump’s favor.
The pessimists hope the optimists are right. Because if they are, then at least one of the Trump regime’s flashiest efforts to put public lands under less protection will have been stopped in its tracks. Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument will be shielded from further exploitation.
If the optimists aren’t right, and the courts rule in favor of Trump’s decision, 2 million acres of those two monuments will be shorn away.
But that wouldn’t be the end of the story. You can bet that an attempt would also be made under such circumstances to butcher several more monuments on the original list of 27 that were scrutinized by Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke over the summer.
In his smarmy but mercifully brief speech today at the state capitol, Trump said he would be “reversing federal overreach” by “restoring this land to its citizens,” as if these public lands belong solely to Utahns. If Trump’s proclamations shrinking the two monuments and breaking the remnants into bits were to pass court review, Bears Ears would go from 1.35 million acres to 228,700 acres, not all of them contiguous. And the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument established by Bill Clinton two decades ago would be cut nearly in half from 1.88 million acres to 997,490 acres.
In a speech dotted with several detours into upside-down land, Trump declared his decision means that “Public lands will once again be for public use.”
The basic parameters of the shrink job had trickled out long before Trump’s formal announcement, making his less than three-hour pop-up in Salt Lake anticlimactic, but nevertheless an important opportunity for him to collect some praise and wave the checkered winner’s flag to show Republicans how supposedly invaluable he is to them.
And, of course, to give Barack Obama another poke in the eye. This matters to Trump, who, it should never be forgotten, unofficially began his campaign for the presidency—out of malice or delusion—based on his racist effort to convince millions of Americans that Obama was not born in the United States.
But Trump’s trip also matters to Utah’s Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, who, in April, labeled Obama’s designation of Bears Ears a “betrayal” and a “federal land grab.” He also praised Trump for understanding “better than anyone the lasting damage wrought by past presidents under the Antiquities Act.” That act, passed in 1906, gave presidents authority to set aside national monuments. Hatch was on hand Monday for a lickspittle introduction of Trump.
And because the indigenous leadership of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition was indispensable in bringing the monument into being, and obtained co-management rights there from Obama, Trump’s announcement amounted to a kick in the gut to American Indians, whom he condescends to at every opportunity. He did so Monday by trying to pretend that downsizing Bears Ears would actually benefit the tribes.
Thus … a three-fer.
On Saturday, supporters of the monuments—5,000 of them, the Utah Highway Patrol said—showed up at the state capitol in advance of Trump’s trip to protest his decision. A smaller number of people gathered in Monticello, Utah, to praise the downsizing. Benjamin Wood reported on a few of the Salt Lake speakers:
“We need places like Bears Ears, where the land remains largely untouched, where the plants remain pure, the minerals remain pure,” said Ethel Branch, attorney general of the Navajo Nation, “because that affects the potency of our prayers and the potency of our ceremonies.” [...]
Rep. Patrice Arent, D-Millcreek, criticized the changes, saying Trump’s visit to Utah on Monday will “wreak destruction on a land he knows basically nothing about.” [...]
“Most local residents don’t want to see their scenic and sacred treasures dug up and plundered for profit,” she said.
Some of the litigants have already queued up. “We’ve got the documents ready to file,” says one. That’s University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson, an expert on resources in the West and of Indian law who began his legal career at the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund in 1971. He is an adviser to the five-tribe coalition of Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Mountain Ute, and Zuni who are bringing the lawsuit against Trump.
Working together with non-Indian environmental activists, the tribes lobbied for and were key to the creation of Bears Ears. It looks as if they will also be key to rescuing it from the clutches of those who think the fundamental problem with public land is that it’s not private.
Davis Filfred, a Navajo Nation council delegate, said he feared Bears Ears would, like his tribe’s land, become tainted by coal mining and other energy development. Here’s Andrea Smardon:
“There is no reclamation, they scarred the whole Mother Earth,” Filfred said. “The way I see it, they’re going to bulldoze Bears Ears, and there will be nothing there. We’ll tell the next generation, ‘You see that ash pit over there, that’s where Bears Ears was. Now it’s a uranium mine.’
“Money cannot replace what we have in terms of wilderness area. It’s habitat to many species, plants and medicinal and ceremonial herbs. You can’t wipe all those away.”
Conservationists are also expected to file suit soon over the shrinking of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.