Utah Republican Congresswoman Celeste Maloy is irritated. Her most recent attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument spurred wide and deep opposition. She pushed back in a video with direct, if misleading, language.<\/p>\n
Maloy has long criticized this southern Utah national monument that was halved by President Trump during his first term, then restored under President Biden. One million awestruck visitors come here every year and spend money in the two Utah counties surrounding the monument, whose towns total less than 14,000 residents. Yet Maloy discounts data showing the economic value of preserved public lands. She neglects the world-class scientific value of these 1.9 million acres, detailed in Biden\u2019s proclamation.<\/p>\n
Rep. Maloy\u2019s attack is wily. She and the rest of the congressional delegation know there\u2019s too much public support to ask President Trump to again chop down the monument\u2019s size. Nearly 3 out of 4 Utah voters are on record as wanting to keep Grand Staircase-Escalante protected as a national monument.<\/p>\n
So Utah politicians are betting the public won\u2019t pay as much attention to management retrenchment as they would to downsizing. They\u2019re using a controversial tactic to force the Bureau of Land Management to abandon the current Resource Management Plan–a blueprint for how the BLM puts the presidential proclamation into effect on the ground.<\/p>\n
But monument supporters are paying attention because management plans matter.<\/p>\n
After President Biden restored the boundaries of Grand Staircase in 2021, the BLM worked with the public for two years to create the 2025 Resource Management Plan, listening to every conceivable collaborative partner. Such plans guide decision-making for years, and this true compromise keeps ranchers\u2019 grazing permits in place while also factoring in a warming planet, persistent drought, the need for biodiversity, and a sustainable future.<\/p>\n
Now, Rep. Maloy has obtained an opinion from the Government Accountability Office to treat the 2025 plan merely as a \u201crule\u201d that Congress can overturn. This unprecedented allowance can\u2019t be challenged in court and permits the Utah delegation to use the Congressional Review Act to kill the conservation-based plan and bar the agency from issuing any \u201csubstantially the same\u201d plan in the future. The Trump-era plan that would take its place leaves much of the monument unprotected from extractive industry and off-road vehicles.<\/p>\n
Maloy says that emphasizing conservation \u201cundercuts rural economic development.\u201d From 2001 to 2022, however, real per capita income grew by 41 percent in the monument\u2019s counties.<\/p>\n
She says that local residents and \u201ctrail users\u201d oppose the Biden plan. This is cherry-picking. Motorized trail users always want greater access, even though the Biden-era plan left more than 800 miles of dirt roads and trails open for motorized vehicles.<\/p>\n
When Maloy talks about \u201cdeep cultural traditions\u201d being disrupted by the current management plan, she isn\u2019t listening to Indigenous people who have made this place their home since time immemorial. The six Native Nations of the Grand-Staircase Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition oppose her move, noting that without the \u201cclear roadmap for protection and conservation\u201d provided by the current management plan, \u201cour ancestral lands and \u2026 cultural sites within the monument would be at greater risk of looting, vandalism, graffiti, and degradation.\u201d<\/p>\n
To support their attacks, Utah\u2019s politicians use their timeworn template to argue exclusively for \u201cthe needs and voices of the people who live and work on this land.\u201d These politicians, however, listen only to county commissioners and legacy ranchers, not to a much broader constituency.<\/p>\n
This is Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, not Grand Staircase County Park. The environmental, scientific, interpretive, and Indigenous values and potential of these public lands have national and international importance.<\/p>\n
This new attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante from Congress–along with a parallel attack on Minnesota\u2019s Boundary Waters\u2014would set a national precedent with no public input that could upend public lands protection for years. Even the deeply conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation said it fears a \u201cWild West\u201d for land-use planning if Congress acts on Maloy\u2019s radical approach.<\/p>\n
The exhausting years-long battle to protect the resources and restorative magic of Grand Staircase-Escalante can wear out supporters. But this place gives us no choice but to speak up once again. Staying silent puts federal agencies in an impossible position and places all of our public lands at risk. Let your members of Congress know that preservation of the monument requires leaving the current resource management plan in place.<\/p>\n
Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He\u2019s been hiking in Grand Staircase and writing about Colorado Plateau conservation for 50 years.<\/em><\/p>\n Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more. <\/a><\/em><\/p>\n To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online<\/a> or check out our guidelines<\/a> for how to submit by email or mail.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Utah politicians are betting the public won\u2019t pay as much attention to management retrenchment as they would to downsizing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columnists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sleepystork.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}