BLM Wants Grand Staircase-Escalante Open for Business
Under a new plan released Wednesday by the Bureau of Land Management, most of the land President Trump excised from Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument would become available to oil, gas, and coal companies. Under the same plan, Bears Ears National Monument would be managed in a way that “provides more flexibility” for uses like mining, timber harvest, grazing, and off-road vehicles. This, despite promises from Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke that the quest for energy dominance had nothing to do with their decisions to drastically shrink both monuments last year.
And the plans come even though the fate of these monuments is far from settled. After President Trump reduced the size of Bears Ears by 1.15 million acres and Grand Staircase by 900,000 acres, conservation and tribal groups promptly filed five lawsuits arguing that the Antiquities Act, which Trump invoked, allows a president to create, not shrink, national monuments.
With litigation pending, monument proponents say any change to management plans is premature. “It’s an entire waste of time,” Steve Bloch, legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, told The Salt Lake Tribune. “It’s clear that they are trying to race ahead and do as much damage as they can in the shortest time possible.”
The documents identify four management alternatives for both monuments, and in both instances the agencies identified the least-restrictive option as their preferred way forward. While both management plans are a major departure from the protections afforded monuments, the changes proposed for Grand Staircase-Escalante are notably stark. Under BLM’s preferred plan, nearly 700,000 acres of the original monument would be open for extraction. (BLM included a report detailing the potential for coal, oil, and natural gas development.) No areas in the monument would be managed as wilderness.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, in defending his department’s call to shrink the monuments, has said over and over that “not one square inch” of land is being removed from the federal estate, but BLM’s plan would sell off 1,610 acres of Grand Staircase.
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