by jocelyn | Oct 8, 2021 | Uncategorized
Photo credit: Josh Ewing
President Biden will take action on Friday, October 8 to restore protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
On December 4, 2017, then-President Trump attempted to reduce the boundaries of Bears Ears by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly half, opening some lands removed from the monuments to mining and drilling. Sovereign Tribal Nations and local Utah and national organizations immediately sued to protect the monuments’ value to Indigenous culture, world-renowned paleontological resources, outdoor recreation, biodiversity, and the region’s economic stability. Those lawsuits are pending.
Below are statements from local and national groups representing some of the plaintiffs in the federal court cases:
Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition Statement (Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Zuni Tribe)
Tribes Look Forward To A New Model For Collaborative Management Of Ancestral Lands
Utah Diné Bikéyah – Woody Lee, Executive Director
“Utah Diné Bikéyah celebrates the Bears Ears National Monument restoration. We also acknowledge the challenging times our native communities are having right now which makes this achievement bittersweet but a welcome and hopeful change for the future. We appreciate all the support and hard work of many people, organizations, leaders, and supporters who have helped advance our mission of healing the land and the people.”
Grand Staircase Escalante Partners – Sarah Bauman, Executive Director
“We are grateful for the restoration of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument as a connected and protected landscape. Although we celebrate the restoration, we know that this is only the beginning of our work to ensure that this landscape – the first monument placed into the National Landscape Conservation System – is conserved, and its important science objectives, inclusive of Indigenous knowledge, realized. We look forward to working with Tribal leaders, conservation partners, the Bureau of Land Management, local and state officials, and others to safeguard irreplaceable natural and cultural resources, conduct essential research related to biodiversity and climate change, and protect Grand Staircase in perpetuity.”
Friends of Cedar Mesa – Joe Neuhof, Executive Director
“We are heartened President Biden has once again provided Bears Ears with the protections this internationally significant cultural landscape deserves. Restoration of Bears Ears National Monument demonstrates reverence for the Tribally led effort to protect these lands and acknowledges Bears Ears’ importance to Modern Indigenous Peoples. As evidenced by Edgar Lee Hewett’s recommendation way back in 1904, Bears Ears is exactly the kind of place the Antiquities Act was created to protect. While this day certainly is worthy of celebration, much hard work lies ahead to ensure Bears Ears safeguards do not swing with the political pendulum leaving this sacred landscape as collateral damage. Friends of Cedar Mesa looks forward to working with Tribes and Pueblos, federal land managers, and local communities to find common ground and provide real stewardship for these lands we all love.”
Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance – Scott Groene, Executive Director
“President Biden’s restoration of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments will be hailed by generations for protecting some of the nation’s wildest and most culturally significant public lands. It’s hard to describe the relief and joy our members are feeling right now knowing these places and their irreplaceable objects are on the path to healing after years of deliberate mismanagement and neglect under the prior administration. We’re grateful to President Biden and Interior Secretary Haaland for their leadership in making these places whole.”
Access Fund – Chris Winter, Executive Director
“We are absolutely thrilled that President Biden restored landscape-scale protection for Bears Ears, an irreplaceable and sacred region for Indigenous people. Access Fund is humbled by the hard work of our partners during the ongoing fight to maintain the integrity of Bears Ears for future generations. Bears Ears is a special place for the rock climbing community and we are committed to protecting and conserving its cultural, natural, scientific and recreation values.”
Archaeology Southwest – Bill Doelle, President and CEO
“President Biden’s restoration of contiguous landscape-scale protections for these national monuments and the diverse cultural and scientific values they hold is invigorating. It is a concrete demonstration of the Biden Administration’s stated commitment to listen to Tribes, respect ancestral lands, preserve heritage, and be guided by science. This is something to celebrate!”
Center for Biological Diversity – Randi Spivak, Public Lands Program Director
“It’s fitting that President Biden’s fully restored protections for these spectacular national monuments Trump tried to desecrate. This is truly a reason to celebrate. Biden understands the importance of these landscapes to Native people and the need to act boldly to protect the climate and preserve our natural world.”
Conservation Lands Foundation – Brian Sybert, Executive Director
“Americans love their public lands and millions of them stood up to demand justice and the restoration of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments. We celebrate President Biden’s proclamation to reinstate the original boundaries. We recognize and are grateful for the leadership and vision of Tribal governments and Indigenous non profit organizations to restore justice from the Trump Administration’s illegal actions. At a time when many people may be doubting the power of individual voices, President Biden has made clear with this order that his administration is listening and committed to conserve our country’s great public lands, respect Indigenous ways of knowing, address climate change and build a more equitable society.”
Defenders of Wildlife – Jamie Rappaport Clark, President and CEO
“We applaud today’s action by the Biden administration to restore protections and acreage to Bears Ears and Grand-Staircase Escalante national monuments. These lands are culturally significant to Indigenous peoples to whom these landscapes are sacred and are too scientifically important to leave unprotected. By prioritizing these monuments and conserving these lands, the Biden administration has underscored its commitment to equity, biodiversity and addressing climate change.”
Earthjustice – Heidi McIntosh, Attorney
“We celebrate today as an act of vindication for the Tribes in their fight to preserve these sacred places, and for the many, many people across the country who believe public lands should be protected, and not exploited for short-term, corporate gain.”
Grand Canyon Trust – Tim Peterson, Cultural Landscapes Director
“We applaud President Biden for his decision to honor our shared national heritage by restoring these national monuments. Indigenous peoples have conserved Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante for hundreds of generations, and the revival of these monuments celebrates that legacy.”
Great Old Broads for Wilderness – Shelley Silbert, Executive Director
“We’re thrilled that President Biden and Secretary of Interior Haaland have ensured the protection of these monument lands for future generations. We celebrate the wisdom and action of Tribal organizations, who outlined the need for protection of these sacred places, and the local citizens who rallied to prevent their degradation. The intrinsic value of these spectacular landscapes for their cultural, scientific, and historic worth is immense, and the spiritual significance and unique habitat value is immeasurable.”
National Parks Conservation Association -Theresa Pierno, President and CEO
“Today’s action is a testament to the Tribal nations, local communities and businesses, conservation organizations and countless people across the country who spoke out and fought tirelessly to protect all that Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments and the surrounding national parks hold. We commend President Biden for taking this step to reverse the previous president’s illegal assault on these most treasured places and for providing the protections this land truly deserves. This is an important step in righting the wrongs and showing so many people across the country who care about preserving our national treasures that they have been heard. Today, we celebrate with all of them.”
Natural Resource Defense Council – Manish Bapna, President and CEO
“This is a victory for science, for future generations, and for anyone who looks to these special places for solace, education, healing, and inspiration. President Biden is restoring faith to millions of people across the country who stood up for these national treasures and opposed Trump’s illegal rollbacks. The Antiquities Act exists to protect unique places like these for all time. No President has the power to abolish those protections with the stroke of a pen.
“This begins a new chapter in managing Bears Ears that respects the Tribes’ traditional knowledge in caring for this living landscape. We stand proudly with the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni, who led the long and visionary effort to protect and restore Bears Ears.”
Patagonia – Ryan Gellert, CEO
“We want to thank the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition for their leadership and thank all of our friends in the Indigenous and environmental communities who have worked to protect Bears Ears National Monument. We also want to thank the Biden administration, especially Secretary Haaland, for their work to restore protections for more than a million acres of sacred land. We have a shared responsibility to conserve these important cultural landscapes for future generations.”
Sierra Club – Chris Hill, Director of the Sierra Club’s Our Wild America Campaign
“The Biden administration’s decision to restore protections for three national monuments fulfills a promise to Tribal Nations and reaffirms its commitment to addressing the overlapping biodiversity and climate crises.
“We are thrilled Secretary Haaland has heeded the call of Tribal Nations to restore safeguards for the sacred lands in Bears Ears.”
“It is clear a cohesive, diverse movement can and will prevail over the profit motivations and injustices perpetrated by the fossil fuel and mining industries. Right now is our moment to chart a path together, rooted in justice, to protect the lands, waters and biodiversity on which we all depend.”
Society of Vertebrate Paleontology – David Polly, Past President
“This move restores the conservation status of more than 1,400 scientifically important fossil sites that were removed from GSE-NM in 2017, including sauropod swimming tracks, the location where the dinosaur Machairoceratops was discovered, and the Cretaceous-aged mammal sites that helped spur the establishment of the monument in 1996. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase still have important tales to tell about the ancient history of life on our planet, and this action helps ensure that they will be told.”
The Wilderness Society – Jamie Williams, President
“The President’s actions will fulfill a promise to restore protections illegally ripped away from national monuments while at the same time ensuring these same lands address the need to tackle the climate and extinction crisis. It also shows a true commitment to working with the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, Ute Mountain, and Zuni Tribes to co-manage their tribal homelands in Bears Ears. It also acknowledges the incredible scientific importance of Grand Staircase.
“The President’s commitment to saving more nature will continue to require bold action from him and today gets us a bit closer to reaching those goals. This executive action taken by President Biden recognizes the timely work to be done to truly protect 30% of our land and waters by 2030. He and his team can continue to build on this momentum by protecting other important landscapes, especially those of importance to Tribes and underserved communities such as Avi Kwa Ame in Nevada and Castner Range in Texas.”
Western Watersheds Project – Erik Molvar, Executive Director
“Bears Ears and Grand Staircase National Monuments are spectacular landscapes, and restoring these monuments shows respect for the land, strong stewardship for their desert ecosystems, and honors the Indigenous peoples who now will have an expanded influence on their management. Granting full protections to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante is critically important to protect these fragile desert lands from exploitation by the livestock industry and mineral extraction corporations.”
Wild Earth Guardians – John Horning, Executive Director
“WildEarth Guardians is elated that President Biden is restoring Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments. We thank the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and Ute Indian Tribe for their resolve in leading the fight to protect Bears Ears. Now we can once again get to work preserving the biodiversity and cultural, archeological and paleontological resources of these spectacular landscapes.”
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by jocelyn | Feb 6, 2020 | Uncategorized
Management Plans Ignore Tribes, Courts and the Public
February 6, 2020 (SALT LAKE CITY, Utah)—Today, sovereign tribal nations, local and national groups, all plaintiffs in the federal court cases challenging the legality of the Trump Administration’s reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, released a joint statement. This statement comes in response to the Bureau of Land Management’s Records of Decision finalizing resource management plans for the Monuments.
Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments are both world-renowned hotbeds of paleontological research, world-class destinations for outdoor recreation and natural beauty, and major economic drivers for small businesses in these regions. Bears Ears has been home to Hopi, Diné, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni peoples since time immemorial, and was designated as a national monument in 2016 to protect countless archaeological, cultural, and natural resources, including the wealth of traditional knowledge that Native people hold for this region. It is the first tribally requested national monument.
Below are statements from the plaintiff organizations.
Statements Regarding Bears Ears National Monument:
Shaun Chapoose, Ute Tribal Business Committee Member and Coalition Co-Chair
“The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition is united in opposition to the Administration’s Monument Management Plan. This is just another in a series of unlawful actions reducing and revoking the Bears Ears National Monument. The President’s action and this Management Plan eliminates protections for more than 1 million acres including hundreds of thousands of priceless and significant cultural, natural and sacred objects. The Administration is failing in its treaty and trust responsibilities to Indian tribes.”
Davis Filfred, Board Chairman, Utah Diné Bikéyah
“The Trump Administration’s final management plan for Bears Ears National Monument is an example of how the federal government continues to ignore Indigenous voices, and the sovereignty of the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni, who among many Indigenous governments and peoples, are in a lawsuit challenging the dismantling of Bears Ears National Monument. Our concern, among other things, is that the ROD fails to include proper cultural and environmental protections, and leaves out the voice of Tribes and the elders who hold the most knowledge for these ancestral, public lands.”
Bill Doelle, President and CEO, Archaeology Southwest
“The final management plan has serious inadequacies that the federal agencies have failed to address. The decision to retain these flaws is particularly insulting to the Tribes who led the effort to establish Bears Ears National Monument. Archaeology Southwest continues to stand with the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and our conservation partners in demanding proper management of these lands.”
Rose Marcario, President and CEO, Patagonia
“The Executive Order eliminating protections for Bears Ears National Monument was illegal and no management plan for these lands should proceed until the resolution of the lawsuits. If this administration’s reckless agenda is not stopped, it will lead to the destruction of a national treasure home to sacred artifacts and an area that enjoys support from hunters and hikers as well as local businesses and communities. And even more troubling, it sets a dangerous precedent for the future of all public lands and waters. These wild and wonderful landscapes should not be auctioned off to the highest bidder, and we have every confidence the courts will rule in favor of the plaintiffs and the original boundaries of the National Monument will be restored.”
Brian Sybert, Executive Director, Conservation Lands Foundation
“This reckless management plan is an attempt to circumvent the courts, plain and simple. It threatens one of America’s richest cultural landscapes, along with living indigenous cultures tied to it since time immemorial. The destructive plan not only ignores Tribes, it ignores a majority of Americans—both nationwide and in the West—who do not support the reduction of Bears Ears in the first place.”
Paul Edmondson, President and CEO, National Trust for Historic Preservation
“We believe this management plan fails to provide adequate protection for the irreplaceable prehistoric sites and cultural landscapes that led to President Obama’s designation of the Bears Ears National Monument. This management plan was developed on a rushed timetable that did not adequately consider the views of Native American tribes or the public. There is simply no rationale for rushing to complete this plan when litigation challenging the legality of the monument revocation is still pending.”
Sharon Buccino, Senior Director of Lands, The Natural Resources Defense Council
“These plans are atrocious, and entirely predictable. They are the latest in a series of insults to these magnificent lands by the Trump administration that began when Trump illegally dismantled Bears Ears and Grand Staircase at the behest of corporate interests two years ago. We stand with the five Tribes and the millions of Americas who vigorously oppose this degradation and giveaway of our public lands.”
Theresa Pierno, President and CEO, National Parks Conservation Association
“The administration is illegally gutting protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, and the repercussions will be felt far beyond the monuments’ boundaries. The administration’s reckless management plans set our worst fears in motion, leaving these treasured monuments and surrounding national parks needlessly vulnerable. The new plans put at risk the very things these sites were established to protect, including sacred spaces, adjacent national park landscapes and troves of cultural and scientific resources. Our national monuments and parks are meant to be protected for and enjoyed by all, and we will continue to fight until this landscape is protected as it was intended.”
Phil Hanceford, Conservation Director, The Wilderness Society
“Members of Congress, legal scholars, and more than a dozen groups who have filed lawsuits have made it clear that President Trump’s Executive Order and the use of taxpayer funds that led to these plans was illegal, yet the BLM continues to ignore the law. This is unacceptable. While the BLM may consider this a final decision for the future of public lands in Bears Ears, we will not slow our efforts to protect the cultural, historic, and treasured lands that their plan fails to do.”
Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountains office
“The Trump Administration has finalized their new plans for what’s left of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase National Monuments, but they built their plans on an unlawful foundation. This headlong spree to open up monument lands to extractive industries and development is illegitimate, and could only be done by turning a blind eye to the law and flat out ignoring the Native American Tribes for whom Bears Ears is sacred. But these monument lands were meant to be protected forever. We remain fully committed to defending these remarkable places.”
Tim Peterson, Cultural Landscapes Program Director, The Grand Canyon Trust
“It’s no coincidence that this administration’s terrible plan for Bears Ears comes on the heels of threats to bomb Iran’s cultural sites. While they can’t blow up cliff dwellings or drone strike rock art panels under this plan, the stage is now set to do far-reaching and long-lasting damage to the incomparable Bears Ears cultural landscape. It’s unconscionable.”
Shelley Silbert, Executive Director, Great Old Broads for Wilderness
“The fate of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments must be decided in court before any changes to management occurs. These lands are a treasure trove of natural and cultural history that will suffer serious and irreversible impacts if these management plans are implemented. The process has been conducted illegally and without regard for public input, and the lack of consultation with sovereign tribal nations adds insult to injury. These lands must be protected now and for the future!”
Carly Ferro, Interim Director, Utah Sierra Club
“The Trump administration’s management plan for Bears Ears is nothing more than a wholesale handout to extractive industry, one that is illegitimate since President Trump illegally shrunk Utah’s monuments to begin with. The administration served a plan that continues to ignore the Tribes of the Bears Ears region and is a disaster for climate. We will fight these illegal rollbacks and continue to support our Tribal allies in defending Bears Ears National Monument.”
Ryan Beam, Public Lands Campaigner, The Center for Biological Diversity
“Trump’s plan erodes vital protections for what’s left of Bears Ears. His illegal evisceration of the national monument is still being fought in court, so it’s appalling that the administration is rushing out a plan to trample the safeguards that remain. We won’t rest until all of this spectacular landscape is protected.”
Neal Clark, Wildlands Program Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
“This management plan represents the lowest common denominator for BLM stewardship of public lands, and sets the stage for destructive chaining of native vegetation, unmanageable recreation, and increased off-road vehicle use. This plan is the fruit of the poisonous tree, stemming as it does from President Trump’s illegal rollback of the original 1.35 million-acre monument, and fails to protect the cultural resources that the monument designation was intended to conserve.”
Jamie Rappaport Clark, President & CEO, Defenders of Wildlife
“The Bears Ears and Grand Staircase landscapes are like no other. They deserve reverence and protection, but instead the Trump administration is abandoning the vast majority of these monuments to drilling, mining and other destructive uses. Exposing these lands to such irreparable damage is beyond shameful. We will never stop fighting for the protection of lands within national monuments and for the eagles, elk, owls and all the other wildlife that call it home.”
Erik Molvar, Executive Director, Western Watersheds Project
“Bears Ears deserves the strongest possible protections for its spectacular natural and cultural features. The Trump administration’s plan allows livestock grazing, off-road vehicle use, and road construction that will result in the loss or degradation of these priceless and irreplaceable features, so we plan to keep fighting to protect them in court.
Chris Krupp, Public Lands Guardian, WildEarth Guardians
“This management plan, like the declaration gutting Bears Ears, was devised to wring private profit from a national treasure. Interior lawyers know the 2017 declaration is unlikely to survive a court’s review, which makes it all the worse the Trump administration is fast-tracking the new plan.”
Statements Regarding Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument:
Sarah Bauman, Executive Director, Grand Staircase Escalante Partners
“Grand Staircase is essential to our ability to understand the role biodiversity plays in climate change. As a result of its physical isolation and areas of minimal human impact, as well as its enormous ecological diversity, it provides mankind with rare opportunities for unique comparative climate change studies. Without protections, these opportunities will be lost and with them our ability to build essential knowledge and resources for mitigating climate change.”
- David Polly, President, Society of Vertebrate Paleontology
“For 25 years Grand Staircase has been America’s top spot for paleontology. Dr. Scott from Dino Train, Lythronax the King of Gore, and the coolest new ceratopsians are all brought to us by Grand Staircase. That’s all been thrown out the window by these cuts.”
Brian Sybert, Executive Director, Conservation Lands Foundation
“Grand Staircase was designated more than twenty years ago, and its boundaries were later ratified by Congressional action. This plan is an attempt to further this administration’s reckless push to open treasured, irreplaceable lands to destructive mining and drilling—despite public outcry and before the courts have a chance to weigh in.”
Phil Hanceford, Conservation Director, The Wilderness Society
“Stripping decades worth of protections away from a national monument shows how out of touch the Interior Department is with reality, and the rule of law. The final plans are not worth the wasted taxpayer dollars and legal challenges that are to come.”
Mary O’Brien, Utah Forests Programs Director, Grand Canyon Trust
“There is nothing to be gained from this plan except the destruction of fossils, the expansion of scorched-earth cattle grazing and non-native forage seeding, the loss of dark skies, more roads and unenforced off-road motorization, more extraction from dwindling springs, and more unrecorded wildlife losses – all for what? To show what one president can do to any of our country’s national monuments, at any time, for any self-serving political reason?”
Carly Ferro, Interim Director, Utah Sierra Club
“The bottom line is that the Trump administration acted illegally when it stripped Grand Staircase-Escalante of national monument status. With this plan, Bernhardt’s Interior is clearly trying to let in mining and drilling before a court can overturn the rollbacks. We’ll continue to fight for the protection of Grand Staircase-Escalante—and all of the culture, resources and history this place holds.”
Randi Spivak, Public Lands Program Director, The Center for Biological Diversity
“It’s the height of arrogance for Trump to rush through final decisions on what’s left of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante while we’re fighting his illegal evisceration of these national monuments in court. Trump is eroding vital protections for these spectacular landscapes. We won’t rest until all of these public lands are safeguarded for future generations.”
Chris Krupp, WildEarth Guardians
“The Trump administration’s tactic with Bears Ears and Grand Staircase is pretty clearly ‘act first, answer questions later,’ well aware those acts will cause irreparable damage to the monuments.It’s insulting to the people all across the nation who value these places, but it doesn’t come as a surprise.”
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