BEARS EARS
Trump administration’s new management plan called ‘salt in an open wound’
Nearly two years after dramatically shrinking the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, the Trump administration finalized a management plan Friday that would allow trees to be plowed down using heavy chains, as well as more ranching, in the smaller area that is still preserved.
The new plan for the nearly 202,000-acre expanse of public land, which removes five Native American tribes from the management board of a monument they fought to designate, drew immediate protest from conservation and tribal groups.
But officials from the Interior Department and U.S. Forest Service who jointly manage the monument said that it balanced the region’s economic interests against the need to safeguard it.
“These plans will provide a blueprint to protect the natural and cultural resources that make this monument nationally significant, while enhancing recreational opportunities and ensuring access to traditional uses,” said Ed Roberson, Utah
state director for the Bureau of Land Management, a division of the Interior Department.
Conservationists argued in a statement, the newly released plan for Bears Ears would be “rendered entirely null and void if environmental groups and Native American tribes win the legal battle” over Trump’s decision to carve off 1.1 million acres — 85 percent — of Bears Ears’ original designation.
A coalition of groups sued the administration immediately after Trump traveled to Salt Lake City to make the announcement in December 2017.
A federal judge is considering Justice Department motions to dismiss two lawsuits challenging the decisions to shrink both monuments.
The final management plan and environmental impact statement issued Friday apply to Bears Ears’ Indian Creek and Shash Jaa units, which have a higher level of protection than the 1.1 million acres Trump removed from Bears Ears.
Bureau officials imposed new restrictions on areas inside the existing monument, including prohibiting target shooting at sites such as developed recreation sites, petroglyphs and cliff dwellings. Hunting and fishing will be allowed throughout the area, as well as limited use of offroad vehicles in some areas.
Ethan Lane, executive director of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s Public Lands Council, said in an interview Friday that the administration’s strategy allowed for traditional uses of the landscape without harming moresensitive resources.
One of the most controversial aspects of the new plan posed “chaining” as a prevention measure that clears the forest of fuel that feeds wildfires. But it is often used as a way to open rugged terrain for cattle grazing favored by ranchers in Utah who opposed the Bears Ears designation.
Some ranchers in the state said they would need time to assess the plan’s impact on grazing, while hundreds of thousands of Americans wrote to protest the plan.
National Wildlife Federation president and chief executive Collin O’Mara said the plan is laying open the ancestral lands of the Navajo, Hopi, Ute and Zuni tribes that worked to protect it. “Now the management plan for the meager remnants of the original monument simply pours salt in the open wounds of the tens of thousands of tribal leaders and citizens who fought for decades to conserve these sacred lands.”