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President Donald Trump signed new proclamations this week modifying the Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, reducing the scope of these areas to “appropriate sizes that allow for common sense land use in these areas.”
According to the White House, the proclamations made by President Trump this week reduce Bears Ears National Monument from 1.36 million acres to around 121,100 acres, and shrinks the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from 1.87 million acres to around 181,500 acres.
“We’re doing something very dramatic and very important for the people of Utah, the people of our country,” the president said on Monday, upon signing the proclamations in the Oval Office.
The president was joined by Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R).
“We believe that under the Antiquities Act, it’s very clear that these monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area possible to protect the antiquities, and these multimillion-acre monuments that are bigger than the state of Delaware certainly do not fit that designation,” Gov. Cox stated.
The Antiquities Act (1906) was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt. It was the first law of its kind that legally protected natural resources that are historically or scientifically significant on federal land. According to the National Park Service, it gave the president authority to establish national monuments from existing federal lands, among other key permissions for federal authorities to excavate and preserve historical or cultural objects, and so forth.
The White House’s position on the Antiquities Act is that its definitions of “objects of historic or scientific interest” have been “stretched to include landscape areas, biodiversity, ‘viewsheds,’ and ‘remoteness’” unnecessarily.
The reduction of these national monuments will open up acreage for things like grazing, fishing, motorized recreation, timber harvest, and resource development, according to the White House.
“We’re grateful that the president has made a determination that we need to right-size these monuments,” Gov. Cox said. “Again, this does not remove the other protections that already exist in those areas, [it’s] just making the monuments more manageable so that we have the resources necessary to continue to protect these antiquities…”