They are sprawling lands of seemingly endless vistas and soaring plateaus. The red canyons are sprinkled with ancient rock art and historic Indigenous settlements. Normally nonconfrontational paleontologists were so wowed by their fossils that they sued to try to protect the land.
Two Democratic presidents moved to preserve this rugged terrain by creating a pair of national monuments in southern Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase- Escalante.
President Trump radically reduced the borders of the two monuments, then their status was reversed again when President Biden took office and essentially restored protection of the original lands.
Another reversal seems all but certain if Trump retakes the White House. Experts say that this year’s election also brings attention to a broader question: What will happen to millions of acres of land concentrated in the West and owned by the U.S. government?
Trump has already shown his desire to throw open more of the land for oil drilling, mining and logging. And a Supreme Court heavily influenced by Trump-appointed justices has hinted it would like to review the power of presidents to create national monuments.
Trump appointees Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch signaled this year that they want to review President Obama’s expansion of Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument on the Oregon-California state line. And in 2021, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. announced his skepticism about another of Obama’s monument designations — of an underwater preserve larger than Yellowstone National Park off the New England coast. `
“Which of the following is not like the others: (a) a monument, (b) an antiquity (defined as a “relic or monument of ancient times”) or (c) 5,000 square miles of land beneath the ocean?” Roberts wrote in a statement, even as the court declined to take up the case.
And a controversial plan drawn up by conservatives as a blueprint for the next Republican administration would have Trump go even further if elected: It calls on him to repeal the Antiquities Act of 1906, the law that allowed presidents of both parties to make monuments of nearly 160 archaeological sites, historic landmarks and other outstanding scientific or historic locations.
Project 2025 says the monument law has been overused and that public lands need to remain open to a wide range of uses — including oil drilling, coal mining and recreation. That fits with Trump’s pledge, if he wins a second term, to “drill, baby, drill.”
Though Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, the author of the chapter on the Interior Department, lawyer William Perry Pendley, already served in the first Trump administration, as the top official in the Bureau of Land Management.
In Project 2025, Pendley accuses the Biden administration of “implementing a vast regulatory regime,” beyond that envisioned by Congress, and effectively banning almost all “productive economic uses” of federal lands managed by the Interior Department.
Environmental and tribal organizations have expressed the opposite view, noting that it was Trump who made the largest reduction in monument-protected lands in history and who would be likely to grant even more corporate access to public lands in a second term.
“Project 2025 is an example of what it would look like to sell off America’s natural resources and public lands to corporations with little-to-no regard for the environment, the climate, taxpayers, or wildlife,” wrote the Center for Western Priorities, a nonprofit that has resisted the push to transfer federal lands to state and private ownership.
Other issues — such as the economy, immigration, abortion and fair elections — have topped the agenda during the presidential campaign, while the environment, climate change and public land priorities have mostly taken a back seat.
That may be in part because most of the land owned by the U.S. government lies in Western states, most of which (with the exceptions of Arizona and Nevada) will not be closely decided in the presidential race.
The federal government owns less than 5% of the land east of the Mississippi River, but nearly half of the acreage in 11 Western states in the Lower 48, controlled mostly by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service.
Conservatives in many of those states have been campaigning for decades to try to wrest control of some of that property from the federal government, saying that decisions about its use should be made closer to home.
Environmentalists have countered that federal officials are in the best position to protect land that is treasured by all Americans, not just those in a particular state or community.
Last week’s vice presidential debate offered a rare moment in campaign 2024 in which the candidates’ sharply different views about public lands leaped onto the national stage.
Asked about the crisis in affordable housing, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance declared that “a lot of federal lands … aren’t being used for anything,” and “could be places where we build a lot of housing.”
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz disagreed. He said open space has been kept that way “for a reason” and that the country needed a better solution than saying, “Let’s take this federal land and let’s sell it.”
Republicans in Utah celebrated in 2017 when Trump rolled back the boundaries of sprawling Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, which lie roughly 100 miles apart in the southern part of the state. The then-president slashed Bears Ears by about 85%, down to 201,876 acres. He cut the second monument from 1.9 million acres to a little over 1 million acres.
Trump accused Democratic Presidents Obama and Clinton of setting aside far too much land to protect the archaeology and other resources that were the object of the monument designations.
“Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington,” Trump said. “And guess what? They’re wrong.”
Some Utah residents welcomed the Republican’s new designations and the jobs they said looser protections would be likely to create. But about 3,000 demonstrators, including tribal members, protested on the day of Trump’s action. They said the monument status helped protect cultural resources, including petroglyphs and centuries-old cave dwellings.
The shifting between Democratic and Republican administrations has meant a whipsawing between philosophies — with the Trump-era management plan for the Utah monuments remaining in place while Biden administration management plans are embroiled in a painstaking approval process.
The nonprofit that helps oversee conservation and programs at Grand Staircase-Escalante says it has been challenging to keep up with the flood of new visitors that came with the Trump administration’s less restrictive policies. The Trump management plan allows, for example, a doubling of the size of groups that can visit the monument, to 25.
“This doesn’t sound like a lot, but a group of 25 people leaves much greater amounts of human waste and other trash compared to a group of 12,” Jackie Grant, executive director of Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners, said in an email. “Human excrement can take over a year to decompose in the desert environment of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Now imagine the impact of 500,000 to a million people pooping in a fairly limited desert area over the course of a year.”
The group size limit is expected to be reduced in the Biden administration management plan, which is nearing completion.
The Trump plan also opened more remote roads to use by all-terrain vehicles. The opening of the V-Road in the Escalante Canyons section of the monument has left the area — under consideration for higher protection as a wilderness area — marred by vandalism, trash and more human waste.
That damage came with little of the “economic expansion by way of natural resource extraction” that state officials had promised, Grant said.
Pendley, the former Trump BLM official, has been fighting for more state and local control of public lands since he served in the administration of Republican Ronald Reagan. He wrote “Sagebrush Rebel,” a book about Reagan’s fight against what he saw as excessive federal control of Western lands.
Pendley’s Project 2025 plan calls for a downsizing of Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, saying the area should be governed by a historic agreement that predated the monument. It would allow greater harvesting of timber on BLM land, creating well-paying jobs and reducing fuel for future wildfires, Pendley argues.
The Wyoming-reared lawyer says that many laws enacted after the Antiquities Act — to protect endangered species and wild and scenic rivers, for example — create adequate protections for the outdoors.
Advocates for Cascade-Siskiyou and other monuments say presidents have used their monument-making power wisely. They point to the Grand Canyon in Arizona and Denali in Alaska as among the many monuments that went on to become beloved national parks.
Dave Willis, a horse packer who lives on monument land in Oregon, has been fighting for creation and preservation of the Cascade-Siskiyou monument for decades. The intent of Trump allies to open the property to timber harvest is just part of a “scorched-earth policy with regard to all public lands,” he said.
“Americans really care about their public lands,” Willis said. “And when someone threatens them, they are not going to take it lying down. Trying to degrade public lands will put you on the wrong side of history.”
