Among the action items on President-elect Biden’s early agenda is the restoration of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. The monuments encompass vast swaths of the spectacular red rock terrain that comprises much of south-central and southeastern Utah’s canyon and mesa landscape.
These monuments need restoration because in December 2017 the Trump administration, in an historically unprecedented move, drastically slashed their size—Bears Ears by about 85% and Grand Staircase Escalante by nearly half. President Biden can and will quickly reverse those actions. The ambitious Biden-Harris Plan For Tribal Nations emphasizes that “As President, Biden will take immediate steps to reverse the Trump administration’s assault on America’s natural treasures, including by reversing Trump’s attacks on…Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.”
The significance of restoring—and in the case of Bears Ears, one hopes also expanding—these monuments can hardly be understated. Restoring the protected status of these lands is not just about preserving scenic beauty and the economic benefits landscape tourism provides—as important as that is—but is a crucial action for the advancement of social justice.
The Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition—a coalition of the Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute, Diné and Ute tribes—note that these lands are staggeringly rich in archeological sites—over 100,000—and remain essential for ongoing cultural practices. Bears Ears lands, explain the coalition, are “a unique cultural place where we visit and practice our traditional religions for the purpose of attaining or resuming health for ourselves, our communities and our natural world.” If the lands are protected, they allow for traditional practices like the gathering of plants (such as pinon nuts), medicinal herbs, wood for ceremonial and heating purposes, and hunting.
These practices do not harm the land, unlike the industrial mineral extraction being pushed by the Trump administration. If industry begins fossil fuel extraction from these lands, it will exacerbate the climate crisis that already endangers these varied ecosystems. Ignoring climate science, the Trump administration finalized its permitting plans for oil, gas and mineral leases on these lands last February.
Extreme weather is the most immediate climate problem facing monument lands. By 2050 the droughts already plaguing Utah are expected to become 225% more severe. Wildfires will follow. Utah is on pace to see 23 more high wildfire risk days per year; 45% of the state’s population lives with elevated risk of wildfires. The temperature in these naturally hot and arid lands has already increased 1.88 degrees Fahrenheit. Thousands more Utahns (and visitors to the state) are vulnerable to extreme heat. Violent dust storms and invasive species will also follow the hotter temperatures.
Restoring the ability of indigenous peoples to use these lands rather than ceding them to resource extraction industries not only helps with the climate crisis but highlights the democratic purposes of public lands. Federal public lands are one of the most remarkable and laudable innovations of American democracy. From National Parks to national forests, seashores and wilderness areas, public lands have been among the most consistently open and accessible institutions in the United States. Unlike primary and university education systems, government, or private industry, our federal public lands have never legalized the exclusion of religious, ethnic or racial minorities.
This history is far from perfect of course. Some native peoples were expelled from the lands that became National Parks; for a brief time, the Great Smokie Mountains and Shenandoah National Parks segregated campground and picnic facilities. A few early conservationists were outright racists; more modern conservationists all too often overlooked the fact that poor and nonwhite citizens bore a disproportionate burden of pollution and other environmental ills. Yet these unforgivable sins should not obscure the remarkably open and inclusive history of our communally owned federal lands.
The fight to restore Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments is thus a battle to help reclaim the democratic purpose of public lands. Most immediately that reclamation would restore some of the long-abused rights of indigenous people. More broadly it would revivify the democratic values of our public lands, places made for average citizens.
Public lands also allow for enacting values other than the instrumental ethos of market exploitation. The philosopher Michael J. Sandel makes the useful distinction between a society with a market—an “effective tool for organizing productive activity”—and a market society, “a way of life where market relations and market incentives and market values come to dominate all aspects of life.” Public lands are a key mechanism with which we can create institutions and spaces not dominated by market concerns, but by a variety of aesthetic, health, religious, spiritual, biocentric and communal values. Just as public spaces allow for a diverse set of people to enjoy shared goods, they allow for the realization of diverse value systems. Giving public lands to private interests robs the public of not just places, but the values—cultures—that can be enacted there.
Public lands, then, mean much more than any one value or interest group, as important as any of those values or groups may be. They are a means by which we can achieve our best, most democratic aspirations.
The Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition argues that the Trump administration largely cut them out of its process that determined the revised monument boundaries. The tribes filed a lawsuit to combat the new monument boundaries; it was quickly combined with several others. The plaintiffs charge that while a president can create monuments, only congress can shrink them or significantly alter their boundaries or protections. The US Court for the District of Columbia has yet to rule on the consolidated action.
The Biden administration need not and should not wait on the courts to resolve the monument issue. They should immediately reinstate the old boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and restore and enlarge Bears Ears. In doing so they will be undoing one of the grossly abusive actions of the Trump administration and help achieve one measure of justice for indigenous peoples. A restored Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante will be a tangible countermeasure to the authoritarianism that has so clearly and so clearly marked the Trump administration.