Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante in southern Utah have been at the center of political fights over public lands in recent years. And the stakes continue to be high going into the November election.
Conservation and controversy have been intertwined since the U.S. first began to set aside land for protection more than a century ago, said historian Adam Sowards, professor emeritus at the University of Idaho and author of “Making America’s Public Lands.”
“That said, the United States’ political situation in 2024 is pretty divided,” he said. “Utah is ground zero in some of the public land fights that show all of this ping-ponging back and forth.”
Former President Barack Obama established Bears Ears in 2016 at 1.35 million acres. When he took office the following year, former President Donald Trump reduced it by 85% to roughly 228,000 acres. Then in 2021, President Joe Biden returned it to its original size.
Presidents can redraw the boundaries because of the Antiquities Act of 1906. It allows them to act quickly to preserve historic, scientific and cultural sites through executive action, rather than having to wait for legislation. Presidents from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush have used the act to create more than 100 national monuments over the decades. It’s the origin of many in Utah, including Timpanogos Cave and Cedar Breaks. Grand Staircase-Escalante was established by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It was also shrunk by Trump and restored by Biden.
Using that power isn’t groundbreaking in and of itself, Sowards said, but “the extent of that redrawing with Bears Ears [in 2017], that was pretty extreme. … That's not the kind of thing that we've seen in this long history.”
With the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris essentially tied, Bears Ears could soon find itself back in the middle of this political tug-of-war. Depending on which way the election goes, the results could potentially undo years of work between federal agencies and a coalition of Indigenous tribes that led to the release of the monument’s final proposed management plan in early October.
“What I would potentially see with a Trump administration would be, again, a reduction in size of Bears Ears,” said Erika Allen Wolters, assistant professor of political science at Oregon State University and co-editor of “The Environmental Politics & Policy of Western Public Lands.”
“I feel like the guesswork gets taken out of it because it's already been mapped out.”
Based on the previous Trump administration, she said that map would likely include opening parts of Bears Ears to extractive industries, such as mining and drilling for oil and gas.
That worries some Utahns like Mark Maryboy, a member of the Navajo Nation and a former tribal and county elected official in southeast Utah. Even though the monument has protection now, he said people in his community worry that it will disappear.
“That’s a constant concern, and it's already happened in the past,” he said. “Politically, anything can happen. You can't say it's a done deal.”
If this land loses protection, he said it would hurt the tribe’s ability to preserve its culture and way of life. According to the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, the monument’s vast landscape of red rock and forest contains more than 100,000 archeological sites that represent the ancestral homelands of multiple tribes.
"Bears Ears is more than just a landscape — it's a living testament to our ancestors, where their presence is felt, spiritual energy and ceremonies continue,” Curtis Yanito, Navajo Nation Council delegate and co-chair of the Bears Ears Commission, said in a statement following the release of the monument’s management plan.
“As stewards of this sacred place, it is our duty to protect it, not just for today, but for future generations," he wrote.
Utahns generally appear to favor keeping Bears Ears intact, too.
A 2023 poll from Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics found that 42% of respondents supported the monument at its current size, compared with 26% who were opposed. A 2016 survey commissioned by The Pew Charitable Trusts shortly before Obama established the monument found similar support from Utahns, with 55% in favor of protections and 41% opposed.
Not everyone would be upset by a future president reducing Bears Ears’ size, though.
In response to the Biden administration expanding the monument, the state of Utah and Kane and Garfield counties sued the federal government in 2022. A statement from Gov. Spencer Cox and Utah’s congressional delegation described the restoration of both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante as “abusive federal overreach.”
Cox and other Republican leaders continue to argue that expansive monuments go against what the Antiquities Act intended. The state’s legal battle over Bears Ears is ongoing, with Utah pleading its case before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in early October. That’s on top of a separate lawsuit Utah filed this year against the federal government in hopes of gaining state control of 18.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land.
Bears Ears has also drawn ire from some recreational groups, such as the Blue Ribbon Coalition, which advocates for off-highway vehicle access, and the Sportsmen’s Alliance hunting organization. The proposed Bears Ears management plan would prohibit recreational shooting and require off-highway vehicles to stay on designated routes.
Bears Ears is far from the only piece of Utah public land feeling the effects of presidential politics.
Shifts between Bureau of Land Management decisions from the Trump and Biden administrations have fueled a years-long debate over a proposed highway through the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area near St. George. The continued uncertainty has upset everyone from rock climbers to county officials.
Each side only wants the pendulum to stop when it has swung their way, Sowards said, but the neverending back-and-forth ends up hurting everyone, from ranchers to oil companies to conservationists.
“Most people in the world — businesses, community members — want stability,” he said. “And this is not a recipe for stability to know that a management plan and a land’s designation could change every four years, forever.”
That’s one argument against continuing to use the Antiquities Act in this way, Wolters said. If national monuments remain in flux from one election to the next, the “political whiplash” not only leaves the landscape in limbo but also creates frustration for the people whose job it is to oversee that land.
With Bears Ears’ recent emphasis on incorporating Indigenous knowledge, she said erasing a management plan that Native leaders devoted a lot of time and energy to could also dissuade tribes from engaging in similar collaborations in the future.
“Indigenous nations … might be looking at this going, ‘What's the point of investing in this when this could flip?’ And I think that’s a really unfortunate precedent that could potentially be set.”
If land is developed during a lapse in protections, she said it could also be hard to piece it back together again later — even if a future administration chooses to protect it.
One potential solution to bring more stability to public lands would be legislative action, Sowards said.
Some of Utah’s prized national parks, including Arches and Capitol Reef, were first established as national monuments by executive order before Congress passed laws to make their protections more concrete. If Congress acted to set more land boundaries and protections, less would ride on the whims of presidential power. Instead, he said there’s often legislative gridlock.
Until that changes, places like Bears Ears are likely to see more political swings.
“Working to restore a species or to protect priceless artifacts that are on the landscape that are sacred — these take a tremendous amount of time and effort and energy,” Sowards said.
“To let it just sort of blow in the political wind is a real disservice to people who are committed to these things.”
