....and it's back.
President Joe Biden on Friday restored two Utah monuments to their original size via an executive order, upending the changes made by the Trump administration to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. Here’s what you need to know about the controversy.
www.deseret.com
President Joe Biden, as he promised during his campaign, restored Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments to their original boundaries in a White House ceremony Friday flanked by supporters, including Native American tribal leaders of the Bears Ears coalition and some Utah Democrats.
“This may be the easiest thing I have done as president. I mean it,” Biden said, emphasizing the sacred nature of Bears Ears and its ties to Native American tribes.
He underscored the biodiversity found at Grand Staircase and its bountiful amount of fossils and cultural artifacts.
“Today I am signing a proclamation to restore it to its full glory,” he said.
He said he spoke to both Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, about his decision on the Utah monuments, and while they told him they did not agree with him, he said they were “respectful.”
Right before he signed the order, Biden talked of a little girl who implored him to protect Bears Ears and on Friday he said he was fulfilling that promise.
“The protection of public lands must not become a pendulum depending on who is in office,” he said — even though that is what critics of monument designations say it has become.
In the ceremony, he also restored the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a nearly 5,000-square-mile area southeast of Cape Cod that had been designated in 2016 and subsequently overturned.
The move over Utah’s monuments brought swift condemnation by Utah conservatives, who have vowed to sue over the action and praise from environmental groups that had castigated former President Donald Trump when he greatly reduced the boundaries nearly four years ago.
Controversy over the two monument designations has dogged the state for years — decades in the case of the Grand Staircase — and is not likely to be resolved anytime soon with this latest executive action stoking the flames even more.