Bears Ears cut by 1.1 million acres

President Trump signed Proclamation 9681 in Salt Lake City on December 4, 2017, a little less than a year after President Obama designated Bears Ears National Monument. The new proclamation excludes about 1,150,860 acres from the monument. What remains is about 201,876 acres in two separate units: Indian Creek, in the north near Canyonlands National Park, and Shash Jáa, the Navajo name for the Bears Ears, around the buttes themselves and on part of Comb Ridge.

At the same event the president signed a second proclamation cutting Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, designated in 1996, from about 1.9 million acres to about 1 million acres in three units.

What falls outside

The lands removed include most of Cedar Mesa and Grand Gulch, Valley of the Gods, White Canyon and Dark Canyon, and stretches of the San Juan River corridor. Cedar Mesa alone holds a great concentration of Ancestral Pueblo archaeology, from Basketmaker granaries to thirteenth century cliff dwellings.

Excluded land does not become private. It remains public land under the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service, managed under existing plans, and archaeological sites on it remain protected by federal law, including the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. What changes is the monument’s added layer. Sixty days after the proclamation, the excluded lands reopen to new mining claims and to mineral and geothermal leasing, subject to other laws and existing plans. The proclamation notes that some excluded areas keep other protections, such as wilderness study areas and areas of critical environmental concern along the San Juan River and in Valley of the Gods.

The proclamation also changes the Bears Ears Commission created in 2016, which gave one elected officer from each of five tribes a role in planning. It becomes the Shash Jáa Commission, applies only to that unit, and adds the San Juan County commissioner for District 3.

The reasons given

The proclamation rests its case on the wording of the Antiquities Act, which limits a monument to the smallest area compatible with the care of the objects it protects. It states that some objects listed in 2016 are not unique to the area, that some lack significant scientific or historic interest, that many were not under threat of damage, and that existing federal laws already protect them. On that reading, the 2016 reservation was larger than the Act allows.

In his remarks the president described the change as returning decisions over the land to the people of Utah. Gov. Gary Herbert, Sen. Orrin Hatch, Rep. Rob Bishop and a majority of the San Juan County Commission have pressed for the reduction since the original designation. Their stated objections were the monument’s size, the absence of consent from the state and county, and the effect of restrictions on grazing, motorized access, firewood and energy development in a county with few other sources of income.

The reduction follows a review President Trump ordered in April 2017 of large monuments designated since 1996. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke visited Bears Ears in May and recommended that its boundaries be revised.

The other side, and the courts

The five tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, which proposed the monument in 2015, reject both the reduction and its reasoning. The Hopi Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, joined by the Navajo Nation and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, filed suit today in federal district court in Washington, D.C. The complaint argues that the Antiquities Act gives a president power to designate monuments but not to abolish or dismantle them, a power it says belongs to Congress alone. Conservation, archaeology and outdoor recreation groups have said they will file their own suits this week.

The tribes regard the region as ancestral land still used for ceremony, gathering and hunting, and point to decades of looting and grave robbing as the reason protections were sought in the first place. The Hopi Tribe’s cultural preservation office has long represented Hopi interests in sites across the Four Corners.

For visitors nothing changes on the ground this week. The BLM’s Monticello Field Office continues to manage the area, and the Cedar Mesa permit system for day hiking and backpacking stays in place.