The damaging effects of Trump's disrespect for the public land

Ever since the beginning of his first term Trump has been trying very hard Withdraw funding for the national park system and diminish national land. There is no question that America has the greatest National Park, Forest and Monument system on the planet. It is an incredible Legacy one that required a great deal of vision to save and protect many millions of acres of precious land and resources. I've been to many of these sacred areas throughout Utah and Arizona, and I can tell you first hand they are worth protecting at all costs.

Now Trump is continuing his ignorant rampage, and wants to sell the rights to that land to the highest bidder. Letting Big Oil, timber, mining and other industrial interests decimate the precious wilderness areas that America has remaining. The lack of vision inherent within that effort boggles the mind. This Legacy that started with Roosevelt and continued with Clinton and Obama is under great threat by people with a street trash mentality.

The ignorance continues. Just give it away to industry. National land? Who cares?

President Donald Trump on Monday sharply reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah, undoing protections established by his Democratic predecessors on public lands that are sacred among many Native Americans.

Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in southern Utah have ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs and scenic canyons, as well as coal and uranium deposits that state officials want made available for development.

Trump, a Republican, issued proclamations under the Antiquities Act to reduce their size by about 90% each. He took similar actions during his first term, but those were reversed by President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

The latest move comes as Trump and other Republicans have drastically reshaped the management of vast taxpayer-owned lands concentrated in Western states. Trump administration officials and congressional Republicans have sought to expand drilling, mining and logging on public lands, while removing protections for imperiled species and rolling back rules for conservation.

“From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not simply a piece of federal public land,” Smith-Idjesa said. “This is a living cultural site that holds our histories, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines and our ancestors’ footprints.”

Trump reduced them Monday to less than 303,000 acres (123,000 hectares) combined.

That’s a greater reduction than his first term, when he left Grand Staircase Escalante at 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) and Bears Ears at 213,000 acres (86,000 hectares).

The national monument designation provides sweeping protections not just for significant geological features or artifacts but also for the surrounding landscape, banning drilling, mining and new construction nearby. Proponents of Trump’s move to downsize say the protective boundaries stretch too far and hinder mining for critical minerals.

Trump asserted Monday that people can not hunt, fish or “virtually not even walk” on the monuments. That’s false: Hunting, fishing, camping and other recreation are permitted under state and federal regulations, said Steve Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a conservation group.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-bears-ears-grand-staircase-escalante-69f14749f13a7ac6fb6ee07ce4cd84bf