While the Malheur occupation continues in Oregon, a potentially bigger public lands debate is unfolding in southeast Utah. Last week, after three years of debate and 1,200 community meetings, Reps. Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz, revealed their Public Lands Initiative. On first glance, the proposal sounds like a strong win for conservation, including the establishment of 41 new wilderness areas in Utah (2.3 million acres) and 14 national conservation areas (1.8 million acres).
But environmentalists say that Bishop and Chaffetz have peppered the bill with so many caveats that it paves the way for energy and mining interests, as well as ranchers, to abuse highly fragile ecosystems, says the Salt Lake City Tribune. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance calls the initiative “a fossil fuel development bill and a giveaway of public resources.” The bill denies Class I airshed protections for the new wilderness areas, which means that mining and drilling can occur right up to the areas’ borders, with the spillover air pollution potentially affecting wildlife.
Bishop, who currently serves as the chair of the Natural Resources Public Lands and Environmental Regulations Subcommittee, has earned a reputation for his belief that public land should be in state hands and generously open to resource extraction. “We should try and transpose as much [public] land to state control as humanly possible,” he told C-SPAN in November 2015. According to U.S. census data, the federal government owns about a third of the nation’s land. In the West, that number is closer to half.
The Public Land Initiative has to still be approved in Congress and signed by President Obama. But the president has another, conflicting public lands proposal from Utah already on his desk. Last December, the Bears Ears Coalition, a group of 25 southwestern Native American tribes, including representatives from the Navajo, Pueblo and Ute, asked the president to convert 1.9 million acres of land known as the Bears Ears into a National Monument. Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, the president can grant monument status without congressional approval. The tribal proposal calls for an unprecedented style of co-management for the monument, with governance shared between five tribes and three federal agencies.
Members of the coalition say that the territory in question is not only spiritually sacred to them and home to more than 100,000 archeological sites, but an invaluable source for traditional foods and medicines. They claim that they had no choice but to make their request to the president directly, since Bishop and Chaffetz have excluded them from discussions. Navajo make up nearly half of the population in San Juan County, where Bears Ears is located. The Public Lands Initiative from Bishop and Chaffetz bans the establishment of any large-scale monument designations in southeastern Utah and makes no mention of the tribal proposal.