Note: the photo is courtesy of Greg Child.
Conservation groups, Indigenous tribes, and the outdoor retail company Patagonia have filed lawsuits over recent drastic cuts in the size of two national monuments in Utah.
On Wednesday, the groups filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington to reopen lawsuits that had been filed against earlier reductions in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
President Trump downsized both monuments in 2017 but President Biden restored them when he took office. In July, Trump slashed the monuments’ sizes again, this time by more than 90 percent.
The conservation groups involved in the litigation include the Natural Resources Defense Council, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Wilderness Society, Grand Canyon Trust, and Center for Biological Diversity.
The Hopi Tribe and Utah Diné Bikéyah, which supports Indigenous communities and values, are also among the plaintiffs. Other Native tribes are expected to file lawsuits of their own against the downsizing.
In the complaints, the groups argue that the 1906 Antiquities Act grants presidents the authority to declare national monuments but not to abolish them “in whole or in part.”
The plaintiffs say that both monuments have significant cultural, archaeological, and scientific resources.
Some fossils found in Grand Staircase are found nowhere else in the world, according to one complaint.
“As the last place mapped in the continental United States, its largely untouched, natural condition makes Grand Staircase an ideal living laboratory for scientific discovery,” the complaint states.
“The stepwise cliffs from which Grand Staircase derives its name make it a uniquely clear window into the age of dinosaurs. . . .
Since the Monument’s designation, scientists have discovered at least 15 new species of dinosaurs in Grand Staircase.”
Bears Ears also has a rich horde of fossils.
“Bears Ears is one of the most ecologically intact least-roaded regions in the contiguous United States,” the complaint states. “As a result, the lands of Bears Ears tell a story stretching back millions of years to today. Paleontologists have found fossils in Bears
Ears—from freshwater sharks and giant amphibians to ferns the size of trees—that reflect the landscape’s evolution over millions of years from a tropical sea to its current desert climate.”
In addition, Bears Ears holds “deep spiritual, historic, and cultural significance for the Native American tribes for whom it is an ancestral homeland,” one lawsuit states.
“The Tribes’ history is written on the landscape today: the Bears Ears area is intensely rich with petroglyphs and rock paintings, cliff dwellings, granaries, graves, ceremonial sites, and the remnants of carefully planned and constructed villages.”
When he downsized the monuments recently, Trump terminated the Bears Ears Commission, which was composed of five indigenous tribal nations that worked with the Bureau of Land Management to develop a management plan for Bears Ears. The nations are the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni.
Since then, the BLM, which manages most of the lands in question, has been removing seals of the five tribal nations from roadside signs about Bears Ears.
In the lawsuits, the plaintiffs say the drastic downsizings open a great deal of public land to extractive uses that can be damaging.
“President Trump’s unlawful actions imperil these and other irreplaceable resources by opening the lands around them to hard rock mining; oil and gas leasing; and other destructive uses that the default federal land laws generally authorize,” one complaint says.
“The harms from hard rock mining activity are substantial and long-lasting. Even
exploratory activity can pollute the soil, produce unsightly waste and debris, scrape lasting scars into the soil, remove native vegetation, disturb wildlife habitat, increase erosion, harm water quality, and damage the cultural and paleontological resources dispersed throughout the 7Monument’s lands. Full-scale mining operations can excavate large pits in the ground and mar or destroy geological formations.”
Utah’s governor and congressional delegation support the downsizing.
“The reduced size and scale allow agencies to better provide management, preservation, and public access to both monuments for generations to come,” said Gov. Spencer Cox in a press release in July.
