The Bears Ears Controversy

In my last post, "The Coming Green Wave," I mentioned the controversy over Bears Ears National Monument. It's a wilderness area in southeastern Utah that was declared a national monument by President Barack Obama in December 2016. In December 2017, President Donald Trump reduced it drastically in size.

Here's a map. You can click to enlarge it:

Pursuant to President Trump's order, only the Indian Creek Unit and the Shash Jáa Unit will remain protected.

Some Bears Ears photos:

Get the picture? Bears Ears is a national treasure: lovely, vast, unspoiled, once the home of ancient North American Pueblo peoples. Many Native American tribes today still consider sites within Bears Ears sacred:

The Hopi, Navajo, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni tribal governments are working together to defend the Bears Ears National Monument. They support two bills now in Congress: H.R.4518, the Bears Ears National Monument Expansion Act, and S. 2354, the Antiquities Act of 2018. These bills would restore and expand the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument to the full boundary originally proposed by the five tribes in 2015.

A national monument is "a protected area that is similar to a national park, but can be created from any land owned or controlled by the federal government by proclamation of the President of the United States." The main difference between a national monument and a national park is that the latter must be created by an act of Congress; the U.S. president, acting alone, can declare a national monument. This is what President Obama did with respect to Bears Ears.

My understanding is that if it were to remain a fully protected area, none of the original Bears Ears National Monument could undergo oil or uranium extraction; real estate development; agricultural use other than cattle grazing, which is permitted; destructive forms of recreational use; etc. After being shrunk, some 85 percent of the original site would no longer be protected.

Mr. Trump's Bears Ears order also cut another national monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante, to about half its original size.

Grand Staircase-Escalante

Grand Staircase-Escalante was declared a national monument by President Bill Clinton in 1996.

I am about to donate to the Bears Ear Defense Fund, set up by the Grand Canyon Trust. I invite you to donate to this fund or any other worthy organization that works to defend Bears Ears.

The Coming Green Wave

Timothy Egan

"A Green Wave is coming this November," writes New York Times op-ed columnist Timothy Egan, who calls it "the pent-up force of the most overlooked constituency in America. These independents, Teddy Roosevelt Republicans and Democrats on the sideline have been largely silent as the Trump administration has tried to destroy a century of bipartisan love of the land."

Mr. Egan rightly feels Mr. Trump deserves much blame for supporting our country's continuing to burn coal, thereby exacerbating climate change. He says the record firestorms in the American West and in Canada this year may finally convince voters to vote "green," in view of the fact that climate scientists are at last confirming that global warming causes strange weather patterns that can lead to forest fires, hurricanes, and (as is happening here in Maryland) repeated heavy rainstorms that produce scary, killing, financially costly flash floods.

The coming Green Wave of anti-Trump/anti-GOP voting, Mr. Egan says, will arise because:

... if just one unorganized voting segment, the 60 million bird-watchers of America, sent a unified political message this fall, you’d have a political block with more than 10 times the membership of the National Rifle Association.

Bird-watchers in Colorado

And also because:

While President Trump tries to prop up the dying and dirty coal industry with taxpayer subsidies, the outdoor recreation industry has been roaring along. It is a $374-billion-a-year economy, by the government’s own calculation, and more than twice that size by private estimates.

Huge numbers of outdoorsy potential voters are already in revolt:

The revolt started after Trump shrunk several national monuments in the West last year — the largest rollback of public land protection in our history. The outdoor retailer Patagonia responded with a blank screen on its web page with the statement, “The President Stole Your Land.” It was the first shot in a battle that has been raging all summer.

Bears Ears National Monument in Utah
was shrunk by presidential order this year.

The ultimate size of the revolt could be phenomenal. After all, "144 million Americans ... participated in an outdoor activity last year," writes Mr. Egan, and there were "344 million overall visitors to national parks."

If just a tenth of these patrons of national parks and a tenth of all these outdoors-loving people show up at the polls and vote "green" this year, it could dramatically change our politics going into the 2020 presidential election year.

Thomas L. Friedman

And then, writes Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman in "What if Mother Nature Is on the Ballot in 2020?," Katy bar the door!

What if all the extreme weather this year — linked to climate change — gets even worse and more costly? What if the big 2020 issue is not left-right — but hot-cold or wet-dry? What if the big 2020 issue is not “Who lost Russia?” or “Who lost North Korea?” but “Who lost planet Earth?” ...

Mother Nature is done letting us pretend that we don’t know and can’t connect the dots — and that could create some very interesting politics. ...

Sure, Trump will sneer that “green” is girlyman, uneconomic, unpatriotic and vaguely French. But Democrats can easily counter that green is globally strategic, locally profitable and working class — green is the new red, white and blue. That message can play today in Rust Belt battleground states like Michigan and Ohio.

If the "green" message — surprisingly to many, perhaps, it's a highly pragmatic one — plays out the way it ought to in Michigan, Ohio, and other key states, it could turn Mr. Trump into a one-term president!