Much has been made of the Bears Ears National Monument’s new draft resource management plan because it had extensive input from a group of tribes who have direct ancestral ties to Bears Ears National Monument. While the tribes were at the table drawing plans for the controversial national monument, the plan still contains damaging actions that both the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service have permitted on these lands in the past and plan to continue going forward.
It may be that many land protection groups that normally would have been more forceful in their criticism of the General Management Plan may have pulled their punches because the tribes are okay with the planning outcome. On critical issues like livestock grazing in the desert, no serious desert protection person should be happy with the proposed direction.
Traditionally “national monuments” have been highly protected pieces of federal land centered on conservation and preservation created under the Antiquities Act. For example, Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, designated in 1916 but given national park protections in 1935, is highly protected by the National Park Service. No grazing or commercial uses other than visitation are allowed.
This is true of other national monuments in the Southwest, though most were designated to protect archaeological sites and are relatively small in area. Most are managed by the National Park Service which doesn’t allow livestock grazing, off roading, logging or other exploitations on their lands (with some narrow exceptions).
Starting in the 1990s, President Clinton started to designate national monuments to be managed by the “multiple use” agencies, the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Now, the concept of highly protected national monuments has been diluted in these multiple use national monuments. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments are two such monuments where oil and gas, off roading, livestock grazing, and some firewood collecting are allowed. Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in northern New Mexico is another BLM national monument where grazing continues, apparently unchanged by the monument designation.
The Bears Ears National Monument has been controversial since President Obama designated it in 2016. Donald Trump slashed its acreage by 85%, prompting unresolved lawsuits. President Biden reassembled the monument soon after he took office. He did the same for similar cuts Trump made to Grand Staircase.
The Bears Ears and the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments have been battlegrounds in the culture wars in Utah. The old west politicians dominated by ranching, mining, oil drilling, uranium and off-roading interests have long viewed public lands as places to be exploited for the gain of the local economy. Coal mines planned for Grand Staircase Escalante were scrubbed by the Clinton monument designation. These old economic interests dominate state government in Utah and the state of Utah had joined these economic interests in fighting federal protections for these Utah national monuments. The state continues to advocate for revocation of these national monuments so the areas can be opened for oil, uranium, coal and livestock grazing.
Meanwhile, the local economies in southern Utah have been booming with tourism based on these national monuments and national parks. San Juan County, once friendly to exploiters, is now dominated by tourism interests and tribal representatives. Generally, the state government has ignored this shift in local sentiment.
The BLM and US Forest Service plan to allow livestock grazing on most of the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument. Cows in the desert means ruin to delicate riparian areas, dewatering of springs, trampling of rare wetlands, extirpation of native plants, and the spread of weeds like cheatgrass which push out native grasses and cause fire to reach places where it likely never burned before.
In deserts like the Colorado Plateau, the riparian areas are critical habitat for numerous endangered species. Hundreds of species of birds cluster in these ribbons of green and animals come from far and wide to drink clear stream waters. Cattle congregate near water and unless the agencies take decisive action, cattle will ruin these riparian areas, trampling the streambanks, widening and making shallow the streams and ultimately drying the stream as the tree cover dies and sun evaporates the stream.
If the tribes at the management planning table fought to remove cattle from the Bears Ears, we may never know. We do know that under the preferred alternative that the US Forest Service plans to allow 10,406 cows to graze on 281,543 acres of the national monument. The Bureau of Land Management will allow 62,000 cows to graze 1.075 million acres of the national monument. That’s a lot of cows in a place that receives 8 inches of rain and snow per year.
Do tribal members run cattle in the area and have a direct economic interest in maintaining grazing? Any ranchers using the monument enjoy basically free federal grazing at the expense of the American taxpayer and at the high cost of damaged ecology, trampled archaeological sites and diminished wildlife.
Local ranchers who have long had a great deal of political power throughout the West would lean hard on the agencies and politicians to fight any effort to reduce or eliminate grazing in this beautiful region.
Even so, now is the time to eliminate livestock grazing in the Bears Ears regardless of who owns the cattle. The science is overwhelming on the side of livestock free deserts for the sake of healthy watersheds, native plants and animals and the enjoyment of all visited Americans, including the tribal members who sit at the management table.
Let’s hope that conservationists will continue to express these facts strongly, regardless of who sits at the management tables for all public lands in the Southwest.
