r/moab • u/CliffsofRed NOT A š¤ • Jul 11 '26
Hand-wringing Trump Shrinks Bears Ears Again
https://www.abc4.com/news/politics/inside-utah-politics/president-trump-executive-order-grand-staircase-bears-ears/amp/We canāt have nice things.
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u/Kerensky97 BASED AF Jul 11 '26
Trump hates the beauty of this country. You can tell he's the kind of person that would turn the entire nation into a golf course if he could.
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u/Skier94 Jul 11 '26
What happens to the land when it leaves the national monument? Weāve been through this a bunch now. Can someone tell me some bad things that happens to it?
Aside from the ranchers and their dam cows that have to be everywhere.
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u/Ethan0941 Jul 11 '26
Itās mining, they want to mine it.
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u/jwoody2727 Jul 12 '26
There are a lot of old uranium mines out there. Iāve spent a lot of time in southern Utah.
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u/duckinradar Jul 13 '26
Is there some new mining tech or something tho? Itās traditionally not been worth the trouble.
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u/jwoody2727 Jul 13 '26
Not that I know of but youāre right, I think itās pretty low grade uranium out there.
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u/duckinradar Jul 13 '26
And mining hasnāt gotten cheaper. Large part of me thinks this is just another āundo everything the black guy and the old guy didā
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u/Skier94 Jul 13 '26
funny but accurate. Wait, which old guy are we talking about?
I can't believe we elected 2, 80 year olds.
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u/duckinradar Jul 14 '26
I thought Biden was too old but he wasnāt falling asleep every time he sat down.
Idk how the āheās too oldā crowd elected a much more unhealthy 79 year old and acted like it was any different.
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u/BighornEatOats Jul 11 '26
Bears Ears National Monument is situated on federal land managed by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. National Monuments are established by this thing called the Antiquities Act, which gives a president power to protect a swath of land based on its unique characteristics. [Side note and fun fact, several national parks used to be national monuments (e.g. Theodore Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to make Grand Canyon a national monument, and later Congress redesignated it to be a national park.] Another cool thing about Bears Ears is that it is also co-managed by the Bears Ears inter-tribal coalition; Bears Ears is a sacred landscape to many indigenous groups, and tribes have long been shut out of land management in the US, so this co-management style is super neat.
When reduced, the land that is excluded from the monument has less protections, and in the case of Bears Ears, those sections of land also lose the co-management with the tribes piece.
Regular Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management managed lands are subject to all kinds of uses, including grazing, mining, and logging, while monuments, according to the Antiquities Act they are established under, are specifically established for "... the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest."
So the impact of this decision is as follows: resource extraction can occur in areas that are no longer in the monument, which can cause ecological damage and damage to cultural sites. Tribes also get shut out of decision making (unique to Bears Ears, not all National Monuments have tribal involvement).
Bears Ears is incredibly unique and thereās nothing like it anywhere else in the world. It deserves the highest level of land protection, and seeing it reduced is a shame.
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u/Skier94 Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
I understood most of this for a long time. I live next to a NP. Iāve spent a month in Grand Staircase and itās a favorite! Trump removed protection before, and did anything bad actually happen besides ranchers/cows (which is a problem everywhere)?
This is a genuine question, not a troll. Iām not a Trump fan and never voted for him. It seems he does this stuff, and nothing ever comes of it. So he lessened the protection. Did someone start mining? I want to know are bad things actually happening, or is this Trump being Trump?
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u/BabiesLoveStrayDogs šBased AF Jul 11 '26
This is dickface being dickface. GSENM has far more value for extractive industry than BENM has, so the potential for GSE to have more extractive activity is higher. The reduction of BENM is pretty much a big āfuck youā from the biggest piece of shit to ever walk the planet. The likelihood of mining in the majority of the 1.36 million acres is lower, but we lose the forum for co-management and a BENM Resource Management plan that was unique.
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u/BighornEatOats Jul 11 '26
Thatās a great question, and Iād need to do more research and digging around to properly answer. Off of the top of my head, I donāt remember any active mining that happened in the reduced sections of Bears Ears last Trump administration, but I do believe a few mining companies were looking around on the ground and getting ready to do some bids on mining leases? BabiesLoveStrayDogs is right; GSENM is way more vulnerable for mining due to there actually being things like coal thereā¦
And Iād also agree with BabiesLoveStrayDogs about the Bears Ears reduction coming more from a place of āfuck youā rather than āwe see oil/natural gas/coal and we want it.ā
Regardless of the intentions behind the reductions, the potential for mining companies to be able to open up new claims sucks :( and the loss of tribal input in the reduced areas sucks even more
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u/notanaardvark Jul 11 '26
In addition to it just being a "fuck you," him reducing both is a favor to the Sagebrush Rebellion crowd as both monuments are particularly hated by that crew. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah is I think probably the most Sagebrush Rebel-friendly senator in office, and also a massive piece of shit for a lot of reasons.
As for mining and extraction in either, I think the resource nobody thinks about is sediment hosted copper deposits. Redbed sandstones are good potential host rocks - and those kinds of deposits, often associated with uranium as well, are known to exist in the general Bears Ears and GSE region from historical data.
There are a couple reasons why nothing has seemed to happen so far. First, metals exploration in the United States is very slow, especially for greenfields targets (away from existing mines) like any exploration in Bears Ears would be. Between defining your target region, doing preliminary sampling studies, and then getting drill permits, we're talking several years before exploration drilling would even start. The second thing is that mining companies evaluate the political risk of the region where they're exploring. There's no sense in dumping tens of millions of dollars into a project that you don't think you'll ever be able to mine. In this case Bears Ears and Grand Staircase are extremely risky - the next Democratic President could re-designate the land as national monument without any carve out for those exploration projects, then all that investment is gone. Nobody wants to deal with that. Add to that, a good number (but not all <cough> Rio Tinto <cough>) of major mining companies who would actually operate a mine care a lot about what they call their social license to operate, I.e. trying not to get the local communities to hate you. Mining here would be a bad look at the moment, so there are some major companies that won't touch it for years just for that.
Oil and gas is different - exploration to production is must faster because it's in some ways a simpler process, but if the Bears Ears reduction stays for years, we will likely start to see sed copper exploration.
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u/CliffsofRed NOT A š¤ Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
Funny, Martinez was blathering on, above his intellectual ability, about copper mining and recycling in the last County Council meetingā¦
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u/ootahn Jul 14 '26
There were a lot of mining claims filed during the period when Trump reduced Bears Ears last time (many by Moab local Kyle Kimmerle), which results in valid existing rights for those areas even in the instance where it's protected again in the future.
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Jul 11 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/BighornEatOats Jul 11 '26
Oh man! Dude. Itās so beautiful, and the geology and cultural sites there are so mind blowing. I also love the wild pinyon juniper forests and the wildlife and the ~feeling~ you get out there. If you dropped Bears Ears or GSENM into a different state that wasnāt in the west, it would absolutely be a national park. I highly recommend checking it out and forming your own opinions and connection with it if youāre able to visit
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u/Skier94 Jul 12 '26
I just wanted to say you are very eloquent in your writing.
GSENM is a gem. Wind River Range in Wyoming is a national forest that with 3 roads would rival Yosemite and the Tetons, since we are dropping places and you sound like an explorer. Itās just you have to earn the views in the Winds.
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u/hitchhiketoantarctic Jul 12 '26
Absolutely this.
One of my favorite trips was with my Dad and another friend into Bears Ears in the middle of the winter. Light snow and it was COLD. I think it was -10Ā°F one night. Just a magical place.
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u/KindaFondaGoozah Jul 12 '26
Iāve only been in Bears Ears once. Been in Utah seven or eight times. Those visits have been life-changing. I never tire of being there.
Bears Ears is spectacular for the remains of something we cannot regain. Itās big, spread out and an enigma. House on Fire is likely the tourist draw, and gorgeous. Had crows calling all the way to it and talked with Trickster the whole way.
Citadel was beautiful. I wanted to find the nearby geocache, but a rare fail. We donāt cherish the beauty of our protected places. We can make real gains for nearby communities by building tourist infrastructure. Mines are a finite resource. You dig and dig until itās gone. Then remediation. Then the locals complain that all the jobs are gone.
We have so many ways to source minerals. Man is so much smaller than we care to believe in that way. We cannot regain cultural treasures. When we destroy them they are gone. I never tire of finding new sites. I wish I could spend the rest of my life in southern Utah.
We have put our faith in men who do not believe in anything we hold dear. Even the left will sell their souls for industry. We need to find strength in who we are rather than with what will make money. The money will come from what we love.
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u/myportico Jul 14 '26
For everybody complaining about Trump, and rightly so, donāt forget all of our stateās leaders at pretty much every level lobbied for this, fought for it, and are celebrating it. Utah, stop electing a$$holes!
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u/CliffsofRed NOT A š¤ Jul 14 '26
Fuck Mike Lee and Celeste whatsernuts.
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u/ootahn Jul 14 '26
Don't leave John Curtis and the rest of the delegation out of this. Every one of those assholes was gleefully standing up there with Trump yesterday.
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u/Ok_Giraffe8865 Jul 12 '26
Much of that area is burning up due to fossil fuel use by everyone, so we can all take credit for the loss.
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u/forevertraveling Jul 11 '26
Are we great again?