The Public Processes That Lead to Proclamations

The above map is of the Canyon of the Ancients National Monument, which, like almost all others, doesn’t have the back and forth across Admins of Bears Ears and GSE.

New folks may have never seen this TSW piece from 2020, where I suggested a unification approach to Bears Ears.

Mark Squillace, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School, tells the story of when he accompanied Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit to affected communities to discuss Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The way his story goes, talking person to person with Babbit may have actually changed minds, or at least reduced the atmosphere of antipathy. (Of course, that’s Mark’s side of the story, but we don’t have another one, so I’ll go with it.)

Here’s my unifying approach based on that:
1. Send the Secretary out there (presence is a great symbol) as part of a public comment period
2. Determine to listen respectfully to the other sides, including elected officials from the other party (!). As the President-elect said, they are not your enemy.
3. Do a deal with the goal of stability.. “can everyone live with this?”

Actually, it sounds a lot like plain old collaboration. It’s also what states have to do regularly, which is why I like former western governors and DNR directors for Interior Secretaries.
It’s interesting to think about why it is that when the stakes are higher than at the State level, it seems like collaboration takes a back seat and “winner takes all” takes over. But internationally, we’d reject that approach in supporting peace processes. Perhaps national politics are some kind of anomaly. Not in a good way.

There was this quote from Babbitt about another Monument, Canyon of the Ancients, which I thought was interesting but sadly the link to the Durango Herald is now broken.

The pushback from the energy production industry is a major obstacle, but Babbitt said he has long held the belief that the two, preservation and industry, can co-exist.

“How many of you know, that there is gas production at the Canyon of the Ancients?” Babbitt asked the crowd of about 30 members and non-members. “The opponent says you’re taking things off the slate of use and production, that the land is just being set aside for weak environmentalists. But (oil and gas) can be managed with minimal impact. It is possible to make them work together.

The comments on the TSW piece are also interesting, not much has changed.  One link in the post was to this story in the Deseret News with details about the campaign and funding, as well as tribes for and against.

But Clarke said most of the tribal leaders who visited Bears Ears for the Jewell meeting had probably never been there before and likely will not be back again.

“The more distant you are as a Navajo and tribal member the more likely you are to support the monument because you view it as an abstraction or concept or theory of tribal sovereignty,” he said. “The closer you get to the monument, the more likely you are to view it as land that can and should be used properly.”

The Conservation Lands Foundation boasts on its website that the marathon listening meeting in Bluff attended by more than 1,500 people for Jewell was an “incredible success,” with huge showings from their Friends Grassroots Network that includes multiple Colorado-based organizations.

Supporters of monument designations sported blue T-shirts to draw attention to themselves at the event designed for Jewell to hear the issues surrounding the monument debate.

“Secretary Jewell, you came to Utah seeking local input. Unfortunately, what you saw and what you heard was theater staged by radical environmentalist outsiders intent on smothering local voices. This wasn’t local grass roots. This was Astroturf,” blogged Matthew Anderson, the Sutherland Institute’s policy analyst for the Coalition for Self Government in the West.

Chaffetz said he has no doubt tribal leaders are being influenced by environmental groups seeking monument designation.

“I sat with the president of the Navajo Nation last August and he had no idea what Bears Ears was or where it was,” he said.

Clarke wonders at what he says is a contradiction inherent in the monument designation.

“Everybody who came out here says it’s beautiful, it’s wonderful and pristine and we want to keep it that way. I say ‘thank you,’ because we have been taking care of it the last 100 years,” he said.

Patrick brought up the differences between Monumentization and Wilderness, (and forest plans and RMP’s and Roadless)  in his comment on the previous post:

The 2000 management plan for Grand Staircase Escalante closed thousands of miles of primitive dirt roads, most claimed as RS-2477 roads by the state of Utah. Massive sections of the monument are completely inaccessible by vehicle, not because there are no roads but because the public isn’t allowed to use them. Most of these roads were boundary roads for Wilderness Study Areas that predated the WSA and are technically outside of them, but were closed when the BLM decided to manage most of Grand Staircase as de facto wilderness.

And this is the real problem that keep triggering backlash – the fact that certain groups have been attempting to use national monuments as backdoor de facto wilderness designations. Real wilderness designations are settled by Congress and involve political compromises that usually cherry stem roads to preserve existing access. Monument proclamations bypass the political process and allow wilderness groups to force their will on the public, with massive wilderness-like areas shutting down all access to entire regions of the state. Grand Staircase is the prime example of this because it closed so much. The current travel management plan left maybe 5% of existing roads open. That monument set the precedent that monument designations remove public access to public lands. Before that, new National Monuments and National Parks often increased public access, involving building new roads and infrastructure to allow the public to more easily visit spectacular places. If you contrast somewhere like Zion or Colorado National Monument, which both have some impressively engineered roads built to allow public access to very forbidding terrain, with Grand Staircase which only closed existing roads, the difference is striking.

It seems like there are public processes of some kind (meetings) but not necessarily what we have come to expect in terms of formal comment periods.  Still, some, even large Monuments, receive little pushback.

My current thinking is that folks like Hewlitt (who apparently funded TWS and others involved in the campaign, according to the reporting) want land “conserved” From their current strategy document.

To date, we are approximately 65% of the way toward the foundation’s long-term goal of protecting half of the North American West. In the past five years, our grantees achieved new protections on approximately 10 million acres, which was our goal.

It seems perhaps if we put that together with Babbitt’s observation on Canyon of the Ancients. from their 2024 Manager’s Report:

Canyons of the Ancients National Monument (CANM) is a multiple use national monument. Over 81% of the monument is leased for oil and gas development to a dozen different operators and corporations. One of the largest CO2 fields in the world is found under the McElmo Dome within the boundaries of the monument. Almost 500 billion cubic feet of CO2 is extracted from within the monument and sent via high-pressure pipeline to the Permian Basin in west Texas where it is used to enhance petroleum production. This CO2 production business is the largest source of tax revenue for both Montezuma and Dolores Counties.

Approximately 160,000 of the monument’s 177,000 acres are also available for livestock grazing, including 23 grazing allotments allowing for 6,400 animal use months of grazing use. Additionally, the monument is open to small and big game hunting following Colorado state hunting and fishing laws. The monument also contains 190 miles of motorized vehicle routes open for public use including off-highway vehicles.

The proclamation designating the area states that the monument has the densest concentration of cultural sites found in our country with an estimated 30,000 sites. Twenty-six modern day tribal nations are affiliated with the cultural sites and landscape of Canyons of the Ancients.

We might have a win-win, Hewlitt gets to claim more acres as “protected” (they’re Monuments) and leave the details to those closer to the ground.

Apparently, it’s not in the Monumentizing per se, but what’s in the proclamation exactly, and the question is “what kind of collaborative or public engagement processes led to those?” Because as Patrick points out, and Don experienced, most Monuments don’t switch back and forth over time, so there is something distinctive about Bears Ears (and GSE).  What is it?

Here are more  photos from the CofA  Manager’s Report. Canyon of the Ancients is one of my faves.