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(These Mormon politicians won't be satisfied until all of Utah is turned
into a big fracking toilet bowl.)
NY Times, Mar. 13 2016
Remote Utah Enclave Becomes New Battleground Over Reach of U.S. Control
By JACK HEALY
SAN JUAN COUNTY, Utah — The juniper mesas and sunset-red canyons in this
corner of southern Utah are so remote that even the governor says he has
probably only seen them from the window of a plane. They are a paradise
for hikers and campers, a revered retreat where generations of American
Indian tribes have hunted, gathered ceremonial herbs and carved their
stories onto the sandstone walls.
Today, the land known as Bears Ears — named for twin buttes that jut out
over the horizon — has become something else altogether: a battleground
in the fight over how much power Washington exerts over federally
controlled Western landscapes.
At a moment when much of President Obama’s environmental agenda has been
blocked by Congress and stalled in the courts, the president still has
the power under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create national monuments
on federal lands with the stroke of a pen. A coalition of tribes, with
support from conservation groups, is pushing for a new monument here in
the red-rock deserts, arguing it would protect 1.9 million acres of
culturally significant land from new mining and drilling and become a
final major act of conservation for the administration.
But this is Utah, where lawmakers are so angry with federal land
policies that in 2012 they passed a law demanding that Washington hand
over 31 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the
Forest Service to the state. The federal government — the landlord of 65
percent of Utah’s land — has not complied, so Utah is now considering a
quixotic $14 million lawsuit to force a transfer.
Conservative lawmakers across the state have lined up to oppose any new
monument. Ranchers, county commissioners, business groups and even some
local tribal members object to it as a land grab that would add
crippling restrictions on animal grazing, oil and gas drilling and
road-building in a rural county that never saw its share of Utah’s
economic growth. Unemployment here is 8.4 percent, more than double the
state average.
“We’ve chosen to live here knowing we’re never going to get rich,” said
Bruce Adams, a San Juan county commissioner and fifth-generation rancher
whose cattle largely graze on federal allotments. “We chose to live here
because we love the land, we love the country.”
To create a new monument out of Bears Ears “would be almost
un-American,” Mr. Adams said. Val Dalton, a rancher who grazes cattle
almost exclusively on federal land, said new federal protections “would
put us out of business.”
But for the coalition of tribes and nature advocates seeking
preservation, a new national monument here would preserve a stretch of
mountains, mesas and canyons six times the size of Los Angeles. It could
also create a new model for how public lands are managed: The tribal
coalition of Navajos, Zunis, Hopis, Utes and Ute Mountain Utes wants to
jointly manage the land with the government.
“You can’t talk about who we are as a people without talking about the
land,” said Eric Descheenie, a chairman of the intertribal coalition
leading the effort. “The same kind of love that we have for relatives is
no different than the love we have for the land. Our traditional people
know and understand these lands as living, breathing beings.”
A monument at Bear Ears was always going to be a fight, but the armed
occupation of a federal wildlife sanctuary in rural Oregon this year has
added a raw edge to the debate. Ranchers and conservative land activists
here opposed the takeover of the Malheur sanctuary, but sympathized with
the grievances over grazing lands and federal rules that lay at the
heart of the siege.
When Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, visited the White House this
winter, he hand-delivered a note urging Mr. Obama not to proclaim a new
monument in Bears Ears. He cited the “heated and antagonistic” dispute
over public lands, and said any presidential proclamation could poison
the debate for decades.
Indeed, Utahns are still mistrustful over the fact that nearly 20 years
ago, President Bill Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monument here, Mr. Herbert said in a telephone interview.
“This is just going to add kerosene onto the fire,” he said. “It’s not a
smart thing to do.”
Last month, at the urging of Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of
California, Mr. Obama designated three national monuments in Southern
California, covering 1.8 million acres. By contrast, Utah’s Republican
representatives in Salt Lake City and in Washington overwhelmingly
oppose Mr. Obama acting on his own: Instead, they are pushing a broader
bill that would conserve some stretches of land while allowing energy
development in other parcels.
“Not all Western lands are Yellowstone,” said Representative Rob Bishop,
who, with his fellow Utah Republican congressman, Jason Chaffetz, has
been cobbling together a huge public-lands bill that would draw a new
map for wilderness, roads, energy development and recreation across 18
million federal acres in eastern Utah.
“There needs to be some kind of trade-off,” Mr. Bishop said. “This
administration is trying to stop all kinds of economic and mining
development.”
His proposal would conserve about four times as much land as it
envisions for energy development. It would also preserve about 1.2
million acres of the Bears Ears as a “national conservation area.”
Environmental groups have largely denounced the plan, saying it would
lead to more roads and traffic in the back country and open eastern Utah
to tar-sands extraction and new oil drilling. Tribal groups pushing for
a monument say they would have a far weaker voice in how the area was
managed.
Opinions are as split as opposite sides of a canyon in the tiny towns
like Aneth, White Mesa and Montezuma Creek, where nodding pump jacks
draw up oil, packs of wild horses dart across the roads, and occasional
cars of tourists pull over to snap photos.
Harrison Johnson said his Diné ancestors (more commonly called Navajos)
hunted and lived in the Bears Ears region long before Utah was Utah.
People still go there to hunt elk or deer, gather wood for fence posts
and herbs for ceremonies. And he said he wanted no more federal
oversight of the land. “The protection’s already there for us,” Mr.
Johnson said. “We don’t just go in there and tear up things. We know how
to take care of the land.”
But Malcolm Lehi, a Ute Mountain Ute tribal council member, said it was
time for tribes to have a more equal footing in caring for the West’s
pristine places. On a recent hike past the rock-art carvings and old
dwellings, it was so still that he could hear a bird’s wings beating as
it whooshed past him.
“It stopped me in my tracks,” Mr. Lehi said. “The past has never left
us. It is present to this day, and I heard the past come back alive.”
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