Last week President Biden increased the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments to their original massive size (after President Trump reduced them to something more reasonable). For perspective, Natural Bridges National Monument (in the same area), created in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt is 7,600 acres. Bears Ears National Monument, which now engulfs Natural Bridges, is 1.36 million acres, nearly 179,000 times bigger than Natural Bridges. I lived in Utah for several years, and still visit every year and love the Bears Ears area. These massive monuments are going to create access restrictions, especially for off-highway vehicles. This is already starting in Glen Canyon National Recreation area, where permits/fees will now be required for nearly any offroad activity and vehicles are only allowed on "designated" routes.
I agree with the points made here and signed the petition to Utah's Gov. Cox: Fight for Every Inch - https://www.sharetrails.org/fight-for-every-inch/#/6/.
I agree with the points made here and signed the petition to Utah's Gov. Cox: Fight for Every Inch - https://www.sharetrails.org/fight-for-every-inch/#/6/.
- All federally-managed lands outside the existing monument boundaries are more than adequately protected by numerous resource protection statutes and regulations, and in some cases the relentless PR and marketing campaigns to booster support for the monuments have led to a surge in resource degradations from increased visitation levels.
- Archeological resources outside the existing monument boundaries are protected under the Archeological Resources Protection Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. These acts protect the region’s antiquities far more effectively than national monument designation under the Antiquities Act, whose provisions were found unconstitutionally vague, making them unenforceable.
- The Antiquities Act constrains the president to designating national monument size limited to the smallest area compatible with the care and management of the objects to be protected. Both the BENM and the GSENM were originally designated with areas far in excess of the statutorily limited area contemplated by the Act.
- A president’s designation of a federally-managed area as a national monument leads to myriad restrictions on public use as a result of the purely discretionary action of a single government official, with little recourse to the individual citizen or the local communities that suffer the inevitable economic and social losses. Monument designations are bad policy that result in bad government.
- Although the exercise of valid existing rights, including livestock grazing are expressly authorized, recreation, recreational access, and access to inholdings and other valid existing interests are only implied, not expressly authorized.