President’s order strips nearly 3m acres of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, sacred tribal sites, of safeguards
Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company, has joined a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump’s decision to significantly reduce the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, removing protections from nearly 3m acres.
In July, the president approved the reduction of the sites by 90%, clearing the way to open the land to oil and gas companies. He argued in his proclamations that doing so would allow lands to be “put to a higher-priority use” and that they contained critical minerals important to “ resource independence …[and] national security”.
Trump previously targeted the monuments, which are sacred to tribes, in his first term. Joe Biden ultimately overturned it.
Patagonia sued Trump in 2017 when he first sought to downsize the public lands in Utah. His proclamations earlier this year represented an even more dramatic reduction of the monuments than he sought in his first term.
The retailer announced on Wednesday it was joining a lawsuit to put a stop to what it described as illegal orders that “betray Tribal sovereignty”.
“We will not stand idly by while anti-public lands crusaders attempt to exploit these lands for their extractive-industry friends or disrespect tribal nations,” Ryan Gellert, the company’s CEO, said in a statement.
The Antiquities Act allows presidents to establish national monuments, but it does not give the executive the authority to undo them, Gellert wrote. Trump’s move was an effort to “force secession of federal land to the state and allow private companies to extract natural resources from that land”, Gellert said, pointing to mining claims that have already been filed in areas that are no longer part of the monuments.
“Protecting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante is worth more than any amount of money. The vast majority of Americans agree,” Gellert said.
Barack Obama established Bears Ears in 2016 during his final weeks in office, following years of advocacy by Indigenous American tribes, while Bill Clinton established Grand Staircase-Escalante.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, which filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday, described Trump’s proclamations as “one of the largest rollbacks of public land protections in US history”.
“These monuments protect places that took millions of years to form. President Trump is trying to destroy them with a stroke of a pen. That cannot stand,” said Christy Goldfuss, the NRDC executive director.
“Once you open these lands to mining and drilling, what gets lost is not coming back – ancient cliff dwellings, dinosaur fossils found nowhere else on Earth and sacred sites tied to the tribal nations.”
