Be Angry

From Teddy Roosevelt to Edward Abbey, why Americans need national monuments.

By Doug Schnitzspahn

It was impossible not to be angry last week when President Trump shrunk the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments in Utah on July 13 by 90%, a whopping 3 million acres. Anger in this case was simply the morally correct way to feel. And what made me even angrier was the glee on the faces of Utah Sen. Mike Lee, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, and the rest of the Utah Congressional delegation. They practically squealed with childish excitement, their grins taking over their bald heads. How could anyone at this point in human history be so unabashedly happy to gut protections that keep intact some of the last undisturbed spaces we have left on this planet? It was a win for cynicism, for unregulated industry, and for an outdated way of looking at the West. It was a win for uranium mines and tailings ponds, for more roads and private ownership, for extraction over protection. For most Americans, it was a striking and unfair loss.

One of the first and most important voices here in Mountain Gazette is of course Edward Abbey who saw this coming. Stationed in Arches National Park in the 1960s, Abbey realized that space and wilderness were human needs and that human expansion was going to eliminate them if left unchecked. In Desert Solitaire, his chronicle of what he learned during his time in Arches, he wrote: “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”

But what really angered me the most about Trump’s wave-of-a-hand shrinking of the two national monuments was that it was done without any public input. Saving landscapes, saving wildlife, saving ecosystems, saving cultural sites that predate European occupation by millennia takes work. Years and years of grueling, thankless toil. Creating these monuments took a concerted effort that demanded public support. While Grand Staircase Escalante was created by the stroke of a pen in 1996 after decades of efforts by conservationists to protect the fragile ecosystem, the management plan for the monument took years to prepare with thousands of public comments taken into account. President Obama created Bears Ears in 2016 after years of public comment periods, with up to 95% of commenters supporting the monument, and the involvement of tribes who consider the land sacred and whose ancestors lived here long before the idea of America existed.

How can anyone demand such work to preserve a place and then wave it away and give the profits to their buddies. Yeah, I know, dumb question. 

It all makes me think of the words of another early contributor to Mountain Gazette, Hunter S. Thompson:  "In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile — and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together." Indeed, we need to put our acts together when it comes to the future of our public lands.

The iconic red rock canyon walls found in the Grand Gulch Primitive Area within Bears Ears National Monument, Utah. Photo by Doug Schnitzspahn.

The only silver lining here is the sheer weight of public support behind national monuments, public lands, wild places, and even the right of wildlife to exist. The American public wants these places protected. An incredible 91% of voters in seven Western states want to keep national monument designations in place. In Utah, 61% of the populace wants to keep Bears Ears, while only 19% were opposed to the monument. As far as the American people are concerned, conservation is a good thing, despite what excites the swine currently making decisions.

And here’s what gives me hope. These monuments were not just backed with tremendous public input; they were created for exactly the reasons why national monuments are supposed to be created. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives presidents and Congress the ability to create monuments on federal lands to preserve "historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest,” while stipulating that these monuments may only encompass “the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected."

While monument opponents claim that the act was only meant to preserve little archaeological structures, precedent and science have interpreted the act differently from the get go. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt first used the Antiquities Act to preserve Devils’ Tower in Wyoming in 1906 and he would later swing his big stick to protect 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a national monument in 1908 (it later became a national park by an act of Congress in 1919). For T.R., the language in the act was clear: Entire landscapes could be considered “objects of historic or scientific interest” and in many cases the smallest area compatible with preserving them could be massive. He understood that human influence on these great landscape would only take away from them: “Leave it as it is,” he famously said upon first seeing the Grand Canyon. “You cannot improve on it.”

Almost every president (excepting Nixon, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Trump) in the 120 years since have agreed, creating 138 monuments in 33 states, Washington D.C., and various territories that preserve various objects of interest, from Civil Rights and World War II sites to marine sites covering hundreds of thousands of square miles and entire landscapes like the 1.3 million acres of Bears Ears or the over 1 million acres of Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, created to preserve an array of interacting and interconnected “objects of interest” from songbirds to paleontological resources, alongside and necessary, but not within, the Grand Canyon itself. Many more national parks from Grand Teton to Acadia were first preserved as monuments before Congress was able to agree to give them greater protection. 

Edward Abbey, photographed by Phillip Harrington. Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons Public Domain from the Edward Paul Abbey Foundation.

It’s important to realize how much the world has shrunk since 1906, when cars were still a novelty for the rich and the U.S. population was just 85.5 million as opposed to a growing 349 million now. Our understanding of objects of scientific and ecological interest has broadened; we see entire landscapes as vital to the functioning and understanding of wildlife, history, geology, archaeology, and more. With so much pressure on wild lands and cultural resources, with so many people crowding once empty spaces, these vast landscapes are all we have left to understand the way nature, of which we are after all a part, functions. Wild landscapes themselves are objects of interest—and fading fast from the Earth. This was the idea behind President Clinton’s Sec. of Interior (and former Arizona Gov.), Bruce Babbitt, creating the Bureau of Land Management’s National Landscape Conservation System (or National Conservation Lands), to ensure that the great wide open spaces of the West, that not only define the American character but also protect the large-scale working of complex ecological systems as well as record the cultural history of North America including European settlement and millennia of Indigenous history. Our understanding of our planet, of the interconnection of systems on it, continues to grow and evolve and it requires leaving at least some of it alone. The case for creating monuments to preserve entire landscapes began with Teddy Roosevelt and has continued through the Depression, World Wars, the Cold War, the housing crisis, the golden age of TV, the moon landing, and the career of the Grateful Dead. National monuments are part of the American fabric.

As the anthrocentric world and its technology and its push to crowd us closer together and give us even less space to escape and for a moment know who we are within the wild world fades, we need these places. Utah legislators should know that. The public lands and parks in their state are some of the most popular and treasured on the whole planet, and they are quickly becoming overrun. Over 1.5 million visitors flood Arches National Park, where Abbey found his desert solitaire, every year. Zion National Park sees close to 5 million visitors annually. There’s not much space left. Abbey himself certainly understood the pressure on our last big open landscapes even 60 years ago when he wrote, “Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.” And, perhaps most importantly, is what these places mean to Indigenous people who have been connected to them at the deepest levels long before European settlers overran the continent.

The rock formation featured on the December 1974 cover of Mountain Gazette #28 depicts the iconic desert sandstone columns of The Atlas, located in the San Juan River / Comb Ridge region of southeast Utah. Mountain Gazette 28 famously included an early excerpt titled "Where's Tonto?" from Edward Abbey's seminal environmental protest novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, which was published the following year.

Here’s where the hope comes in. When Presidents Clinton created Grand Staircase Escalante and President Obama Bears Ears, they did not do so out of whimsy. The objects of historic and scientific interest were carefully cataloged; the millions of acres they protected justified. The deep canyons and remote arches left to the processes of weather and time. The slot canyons made safe from commercialization. The sweeping fossil record in the Kaiparowitz Plateau kept away from bulldozers. The songbirds allowed space. Desert bighorn sheep, mountain lions, and California condors allowed the right to exist on their own. The precious micro-ecosystems of water in the desert, tinajas and hanging gardens, allowed to thrive. The records of history left untouched. This matters. It matters so much as we continue to pave over the planet. This is the way we must continue to think and preserve places as we look to the future.

The past matters too. Bears Ears in particular is filled with sites and memories of the people whose ancestors lived here. These are not ruins. They are living connections to the lifeblood of Indigenous people who still come here for spiritual and cultural connection. All too often these sites are looted, dug up and trashed by those looking for a quick buck or even hikers looking to take home a souvenir. I certainly have been to sites out here once filled with pot shards and arrowheads, that are now stripped bare. And Bears Ears was a chance to finally give Indigenous people the chance to have a voice in managing these, their ancestral lands. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition brought together the Navajo (Diné) Nation, Hopi Tribe, Ute Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Zuni Pueblo to determine how to best preserve their heritage. When Trump shrunk the monuments, he also shut the tribes out of management in the monument. But the tribes will not be pushed aside so easily. “You can abolish a commission, you can redraw a boundary, but you cannot erase our prayers from this land,” coalition co-chair Davina Smith-Idjesa (Diné) told High Country News, “You cannot erase the footprints of our ancestors from this land. You cannot erase us. We are still here.”

Those who oppose monuments, and who have opposed them in the past, think that the vast size is against the intent of the law. I argue that Roosevelt and Presidents since have done some of our country’s best work by using the act as they have. The shrinking of Grand Staircase Escalante and Bears Ears is headed to court and while that might seem reason to be hopeful for a return to how the monuments were supposed to be since there has been so much precedent for creating monuments and the objects of interest in them have been so well cataloged and justified, it also runs the risk of Trump friendly judges on the Supreme Court declaring that all national monuments are too big. Again, I can only put my hope in the work that went into creating these cherished and protected places and our evolving view of our place and interconnectedness to nature on this planet winning out.

Photo by Doug Schnitzspahn.

The shrinking of the monuments, which made Lee and Cox so giddy, are a giant step backwards to what we now see as the mistakes of American expansion in the West: unbridled extraction, the splintering of intact natural systems, the theft of Native lands, an attitude that nature exists purely as a human commodity. We understand our planet—and our history, and ourselves—so much better now. We can do so much better. And, yes, anger is justified. This is not a decision that reflects public opinion or that ensures better management of these resources. It’s one of small-minded spite, short-term thinking, an outdated idea of the West as a place to dominate, and a desire to cash in and pay off cronies. It’s cheap and leaves nothing but wreckage in its wake.

So what’s left? Speak up. Protest. Demand to be heard. These are your lands and you deserve to have a say in how they are treated. At the very least they should be managed as they were when they were created, through long, healthy public dialog, not by quick mandate. Contact your politicians. Contact and support the Bears Ears Partnership and Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. Don’t sit back and let it happen even if you feel powerless. As Abbey said: “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."