The forces arrayed against conservation in southern Utah were deeply rooted. County commissioners, state elected officials, the entire Utah congressional delegation — all were against the monument from the moment of its creation in 1996. They considered it a usurpation of local power, and they had acted at every chance to attack its legitimacy. A 2016 pro-Bears Ears & Grand Staircase National Monuments article in The High Country News.  

Here it is in full: Restoring Monuments Bears Ears & Grand Staircase Nat’l Monuments + more. This beautiful restorative news. A Tweet by Terry Tempest Williams @TempestWilliams edges; words; and birds

The depth so far is what’s so powerful. We’re suddenly a very long ways from ‘do you believe in climate change? A Tweet from Bill McKibben @billmckibben Author, Educator, Environmentalist and Founder of http://350.org Opinions emphatically my own Vermont billmckibben.com

President Biden has come out jabbing and I love it. With a cascade of Executive Orders, President Biden has undone much of what President Trump did over the last four years. Of course, much of what Trump did was undoing what Obama had done several years earlier so now the undoing will be undone. In Executive Order 13990, Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis, Biden halted the Keystone pipeline which made the front pages of most newspapers, of more direct interest to me, he also essentially restored three National Monuments that Trump had downsized. Two of them, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, established by President Obama, are in Southeastern Utah and are among the beautiful places on earth.

When President Trump reduced both Monuments, I was disappointed but I thought it made some sense since all the local politicians representing the local counties and towns were against the Monuments. But, it turns out, the local governmental agencies were composed of old white guys elected and re-elected without much opposition and, just four years later, their composition has changed and now better reflects the real local attitude. Both of the affected counties, Grand and San Juan, and several of the local towns have written to the Biden Administration asking for the Monuments to be restored. As best I can tell – without spending the entire of next week reading the local papers – the change is for two reasons. The local economy has become more reliant on tourism rather than running cattle and the governing boards, themselves, because of new state laws, have changed from three-person executive/legislative governing boards to larger part-time legislative boards with full-time executive managers. In Grand and San Juan Counties, the new legislative boards are more ethnically diverse because the board members now have to represent different geographic areas. This has resulted in several Native American county board members who are pro-Monument. (The two biggest cities – Monticello at 1,972 souls and Blanding at 3,375 souls – in San Juan County still support getting rid of the Monument but the tide still seems to have turned.)

President Biden is making no secret that he is going directly after President Trump’s anti-environmental Executive Orders with Biden’s Executive Order 13990 saying: The heads of all agencies shall immediately review all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, and any other similar agency actions (agency actions) promulgated, issued, or adopted between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021, that are or may be inconsistent with, or present obstacles to, the policy set forth in section 1 of this order. 

BTW, Executive Order 13990 also stops oil drilling in the Arctic which, as an aside, I don’t think I quite understand. Why would anybody spend the money to look for oil in the Artic when the biggest collection of oil fields ever found in the United States, the Permian Basin in West Texas, has barely been touched? It’s not like we are going ahead and continue to use oil – or any fossil fuel, really – no matter what the cost, and getting oil from above the Arctic Circle is going to be non-competitive in a diminishing market. End aside.

The most striking and probably the most important section in Executive Order 13990 is Sec. 5 which says It is essential that agencies capture the full costs of greenhouse gas emissions as accurately as possible, including by taking global damages into account.  Doing so facilitates sound decision-making, recognizes the breadth of climate impacts, and supports the international leadership of the United States on climate issues. Acknowledging the damage we are causing to Earth by burning fossil fuels in making decisions is groundbreaking and even after reading the section three or four times, I find it hard to believe it is actually there. Biden must have thought about this and he must know how disruptive it is going to be and it shocks and thrills me that It is essential that agencies capture the full costs of greenhouse gas emissions made it all the way through a process that, at least in part, was set up to eliminate changes to the status quo. It will be very interesting to see if this actually plays out. I hope so.