During a visit to Utah next week, President Trump will announce that he is lopping a combined 2 million acres from the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, reducing them to 37 percent of their current size, said the Washington Post. The Center for American Progress, a think tank, said it would be “the largest elimination of protected areas in U.S. history.”
Bears Ears, now 1.35 million acres, would be cut into two smaller sites totaling 201,397 acres, said the Post. From its current 1.9 million acres, Grand Staircase-Escalante would be refashioned into three monuments covering 997,490 acres. Democratic presidents created the two Utah monuments. Trump would slash them in the name of agricultural and industrial production. In April, the president said the 1906 Antiquities Act “does not give the federal government unlimited power to lock up millions of acres of land and water, and it’s time we ended this abusive practice.”
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke reviewed two dozen national monuments under Trump’s orders and recommended downsizing a handful of them — Bears Ears in particular, which was created at the end of the Obama administration. Utah lawmakers and local officeholders say the national monument is too big and will prevent local development.
“A coalition of conservation groups and tribes, who view Bears Ears as an important ancestral Pueblo site, are prepared to fight the changes in court,” said the Post. Although President Woodrow Wilson severely cut the size of Mount Olympus National Monument, a 1938 attorney general’s opinion said that only Congress can reduce the size of a monument.