Bear's Ears And Escalante NM Restorations Low-Hanging Fruit For Biden Administration
On Dec. 4, 2017, President Donald Trump announced an unprecedented move in a presidency that would prove to be full of them. Standing before Utah’s state capitol in Salt Lake City, he signed a proclamation drastically shrinking two sprawling national monuments in southern Utah that his Democratic predecessors had established. “I’ve come to Utah to take a very historic action to reverse federal overreach,” he said, as he slashed Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument nearly in half.
Sometime soon after his inauguration, however, President Joe Biden is expected to act to reverse those reversals. “As President,” his campaign promised, “Biden will take immediate steps to reverse the Trump Administration’s assaults on America’s natural treasures,” including Bears Ears and Grand-Staircase Escalante.
For conservation groups, that would be genuinely good news. So far, they have seen few lasting consequences of Trump’s actions, which were intended to increase access and encourage exploitation of natural resources within the monuments. “The optimistic part,” says Mike Popejoy, Utah public lands director at Grand Canyon Trust, “is that with the reversion to the original boundaries, no on-the-ground damage on any large scale has been done.”
But restoring the boundaries will be the easy part. In the months and years that follow, the Biden team will have to create its own plan to manage a spectacular red-rock desert landscape that is sacred to many southwestern Native American tribes. This means not only rolling back unwelcome changes from the Trump era, but also establishing and enforcing protections that most everyone agrees were insufficient even before Trump slashed the monuments. With the recent, historic nomination of U.S. Representative Deb Haaland (D-New Mexico) as the nation’s first Native American Interior Secretary, expectations are sky high. “We understand that something’s going to happen on the first day,” says Woody Lee, executive director of Utah Diné Bikéyah, a tribal advocacy group that pushed for the creation of the Bears Ears monument. “We’re pretty much ready to go.”
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2021/01/biden-expected-to-reverse-trump-order-to-shrink-utah-national-monuments/