American Indian tribes, environmental activists, and eco-minded politicians are blasting the Department of Interior’s newly released management plan for the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. Among other things, the plan allows extensive logging, widespread use of off-road vehicles, and chaining—the mechanical clearing of land by attaching a chain to two vehicles that drag it along the ground to rip out brush and other plants, a method that is cheap but especially damaging to sensitive areas.
In a statement, Carleton Bowekaty, co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said: “It’s like seeing that your grandmother’s house has been robbed. These lands are sacred to us and they are being destroyed—sometimes inadvertently—by people who don’t understand our culture and way of life.”
According to Rep. Raúl Grijalva, the Democratic chairman of the House Natural Resources committee, the 173-page management document is a “cynical attempt” to bolster the Trump regime’s slashing of the monument from the original 2,112 square miles designated for it by President Barack Obama to just 315 square miles. That downsizing is being litigated against by several environmental organizations and the Hopi tribe, who, along with four other tribes, had a major hand over two decades in making the monument a reality. A ruling in the case now being reviewed by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia could be announced at any time.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys and others with public land expertise argue that the 1906 Antiquities Act and a subsequent law in the 1970s give presidents the power to set aside land for national monuments but do not authorize them to eliminate established monuments nor reduce their extent without a vote of Congress. Jennifer Yachmin at Greenwire reports:
"Trump officials released this just as lawmakers are leaving Washington for the recess, hoping to avoid questions for which they have no answers," said Grijalva (D-Ariz.). "If they believed their changes to the monument and the management plan were legal or defensible, they wouldn't be rushing them through before the courts have weighed in on the legality of the president's decisions — and they would send us the explanatory documents we asked for months ago." [...]
"This is further confirmation of what we've known since Trump's unlawful proclamation shrinking Bears Ears back in December 2017 — that BLM is abdicating its responsibility to protect the full extent of Bears Ears," said Natural Resources Defense Council's Bobby McEnaney. "Even within the boundaries of what remains of the monument, it's not going to adequately protect these irreplaceable objects. BLM should go back to the drawing board and draft a plan that protects the whole monument."
The Obama version of Bears Ears encompasses a vast region of stunning geography and geology, of sandstone hills, desert mesas, and mountain meadowlands where there are tens of thousands of cultural artifacts, including cliff dwellings and pottery, some of which may date back as far as the time of the Clovis people, the original inhabitants of the North American continent who arrived at least 13,000 years ago. As President Obama noted in his eloquent proclamation designating the monument in December 2016:
Communities have depended on the resources of the region for hundreds of generations. Understanding the important role of the green highlands in providing habitat for subsistence plants and animals, as well as capturing and filtering water from passing storms, the Navajo refer to such places as "Nahodishgish," or places to be left alone. Local communities seeking to protect the mountains for their watershed values have long recognized the importance of the Bears Ears' headwaters. Wildfires, both natural and human-set, have shaped and maintained forests and grasslands of this area for millennia. Ranchers have relied on the forests and grasslands of the region for ages, and hunters come from across the globe for a chance at a bull elk or other big game. Today, ecological restoration through the careful use of wildfire and management of grazing and timber is working to restore and maintain the health of these vital watersheds and grasslands.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans provided public comments objecting to various aspects of the draft of the management plan that nevertheless made it into the final version. There are now 30 days, until August 25, to raise objections to the final plan.
At the root of the effort to wreck the monument is Trump’s antipathy to Obama and anything he did, his wretched stance on anything having to do with environmental protection, his willingness to kowtow to energy interests, and his what-do-we-need-them-for attitude about public lands in general.
As Bloomberg reported Friday, the release of the management plan for the remnant of Bears Ears National Monument comes on the heels of the appointment of William Perry Pendley as the deputy director for policy and programs at the Bureau of Land Management. Pendley, a lawyer, has previously opposed various national monument designations, sought to retract the designation of Bears Ears, and favors selling off vast chunks of BLM lands to private interests.
If they could, these guys would strip mine the whole country, build McMansions in Yosemite, and turn Yellowstone into a hunting ground of captive animals.
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