The Utah congressional delegation stood behind the Resolute Desk, an offensive line protecting their quarterback. They nodded along as President Trump issued executive orders last month that virtually abolished Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, reducing their protected acres by 90% and opening up more than 3 million acres of public land to mining claims, oil and gas leasing, and destructive development.
But the opposing team consists of most everyone else. A stunning 91% of Western voters say national monuments should retain existing boundaries.
That Oval Office ceremony was a heartbreaking parade of lies and misrepresentations. Rep. Celeste Malloy (R-Utah) praised the president, saying he was “listening to the people of Utah.” And yet, even in this stronghold of conservative capitalism, 75% of Utah voters want the delegation to prioritize conservation on public lands over energy production.
Trump’s regime sees public lands as real estate — assets on a balance sheet — not national treasures. Retribution further motivates the president: The two monuments were created by two Democratic presidents (Clinton and Obama) and restored by a third (Biden). “They” did it. “They” must be reversed.
Trump said “they took the land away from the people,” as he mused about “giving more than we did the first time back to the people of Utah,” referencing his evisceration of the two monuments in 2017, at the behest of then-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).
But in establishing national monuments, no land is actually “taken away.” No land can be “given back.” All the Bureau of Land Management land in both designated monuments was and remains federal land, owned by all Americans. This has never been state land.
Trump spoke only of “certain monuments,” without naming them. He surely did not read these two proclamations or the much longer and more detailed science and culture-based proclamations he was nullifying.
Deputy Interior Secretary Kate MacGregor joined the Oval Office event to describe how presidents use the Antiquities Act to legally establish national monuments. She jumped abruptly from the first 1,200-acre monument created in 1906 by Teddy Roosevelt to President Clinton’s Grand Staircase-Escalante proclamation in 1996. She neglected Roosevelt’s 17 other monuments — along with dozens of others established by nearly every president.
The law that Roosevelt signed 120 years ago decrees that reservations be “confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
So that first monument, Devils Tower in Wyoming, need be no bigger than 1,200 acres. But Roosevelt also understood that preservation of big landscapes requires coherence and continuity. That’s why he also used his Supreme Court-verified power to declare large reserves: a 800,000-acre Grand Canyon National Monument, the first act of conservation in this iconic Western landscape, and a 600,000-acre Mount Olympus National Monument, core of what became Washington’s Olympic National Park.
Ignoring this inconvenient history, McGregor used the timeworn lie that monuments “locked those acres up.”
Trump expounded on this lie: “For nobody to use. You can’t do anything. You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing. You can’t do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it.”
The deputy secretary nodded and said, “That’s exactly right, sir.”
But it’s exactly wrong. The proclamations creating these monuments clearly stated that grazing, hunting and fishing would continue. No existing rights were withdrawn. Hundreds of thousands of visitors come every year to walk in both monuments.
The smiling line of federal officials and Utah politicians knew this. But no one corrected the president’s outrageous ignorance.
As the president itemized his misconceptions, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) smirked. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox leaned in to agree with the president that this is “even better than the first time” Trump gutted the monuments — this time not only shattering legal protections but also disrespecting five Native nations by eliminating the Bears Ears Commission that mandated historic co-stewardship with Indigenous peoples on their sacred lands.
Biden’s Bears Ears proclamation spoke of protecting “lands and resources profoundly sacred to Tribal Nations.” His Grand Staircase proclamation described “one of the world’s great paleontological laboratories.”
After dismissing all of these resources, the new Trump proclamations speak only of minerals: “chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, lead, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, silver, thorium, titanium, uranium, vanadium, zinc, and zirconium.” And coal in Grand Staircase’s remote Kaiparowits Plateau.
Monument status prohibited additional mining leases on these Bureau of Land Management public lands. The Utah delegates (and donors to those politicians) are obsessed with boundary reduction because they want maximum access for corporate profit.
But they remain ensnared by a 19th century dream. Even though the claims have already begun, mining in these far-flung canyons has mostly proven impractical or uneconomical. Even so, losing protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase will lead to more roads that disrupt biodiversity, locked gates on corporate access roads that truly “lock up” the land, less staff to prevent cultural vandalism and less support for scientific discovery.
At the signing, Sen. John Curtis said local Utahns “manage these lands better than people 2,000 miles away.” But Utahns are not in charge of America’s public lands. These cynical politicians manipulating the president have created nothing more than a legal and management morass, ecological disruption, and spiritual and cultural chaos — the opposite of the Bears Ears tribes’ mantra: “Visit With Respect.”
Like so many retrograde policies of the Trump regime, these radical politicians have now imposed one more directive from their Project 2025 agenda on a country that doesn’t want it. Our best weapon to fight back remains the ballot box. On Nov. 3, Americans should make clear how they feel about their public lands being handed to the wealthy elite to destroy irreplaceable wildlands and Indigenous sacred places.
Stephen Trimble, a writer in Utah, has been exploring, photographing and advocating for southern Utah red rock country for 50 years. His most recent book is a new edition of “The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin.”
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