The Utah congressional delegation is not likely to celebrate. They’re chomping at the bit to challenge this executive power. In the Senate, Utah Republican Mike Lee leads the charge against what he calls “presidential abuses of the Antiquities Act.” The Act, though, deserves high praise, and Iowa Congressman John Lacey, a witness to cultural vandalism run rampant in New Mexico, deserves our belated gratitude for championing the law.

The law allows presidents to establish preserves solely on public lands that already belong to the people of the United States, and only if these lands harbor “objects of historic and scientific interest.” These objects can be big. One of Teddy Roosevelt’s first uses of the Act protected the Grand Canyon, a bold interpretation of the law that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1920.

After a president uses the Act to conserve historic places or significant landscapes, Congress often later elevates these national monuments to national parks, as happened with Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Grand Teton, Olympic, Death Valley, Saguaro and two dozen others.

One national park pilgrimage traced by millions of awestruck travelers begins at St. George, Utah, following an itinerary that wouldn’t exist without the Antiquities Act. Heading east, first comes Zion, preserved originally as Mukuntuweap National Monument by William Howard Taft in 1909, and now the second most visited national park.

This national parks tour leads next to Bryce Canyon, where you perch above hoodoos protected by President Warren Harding in 1923. Winding east on Scenic Byway 12, you drive through the slickrock bowls and fossil-filled badlands of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. President Bill Clinton designated Grand Staircase in 1996, and for the first time gave the Bureau of Land Management a conservation role instead of transferring control to the National Park Service. President Joe Biden used the Antiquities Act in 2021 to restore the monument after its evisceration by Donald Trump.

Highway 12 leads to Capitol Reef National Park and its great wall of barrier cliffs. Established as an Antiquities Act national monument by Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, it was later greatly enlarged by both Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson.

Onward through Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which embraces Rainbow Bridge National Monument, designated by President Howard Taft in 1910, to Bears Ears National Monument, Barack Obama’s 2016 bow of respect to regional tribes and their sacred lands. After a five-year truncation by Trump, Joe Biden restored Bears Ears to full size.

On to Moab, past Canyonlands National Park, created by an act of Congress and so the single exception to all these Antiquities Act preserves, and, finally, to Arches National Park, first designated a national monument by Herbert Hoover in 1929.

This is only a partial list of Antiquities Act preserves in Utah. Why so many?

The answer: aridity. Utah has the nation’s second highest percentage of public land because we are the second driest state. Our arid land couldn’t provide a living to homesteaders, so two-thirds of Utah remains publicly owned. Utahns surrounded by these public lands have inherited a gift.

All Americans have equal say over national public lands, yet the Utah delegation claims state rights that have no basis in law or history. They pepper the Supreme Court with lawsuits, and are attacking Grand Staircase right now, seeking to overthrow the current conservation-leaning resource management plan.

The American people believe otherwise. An impressive 91 percent of Western voters say national monuments should retain existing boundaries; 94 percent say rollback of environmental laws is a serious problem. In Utah, 75 percent of voters want the delegation to prioritize conservation on public lands over energy production.

On its 120^th anniversary, let’s celebrate this essential law that allows presidents to maintain, strengthen and highlight the bedrock values of our diverse lands, cultures, and communities. The writer Wallace Stegner famously said that national parks are “America’s best idea.”

The visionary Antiquities Act brings this idea to life, on the ground, for us all.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. A new edition of his classic natural history of the Great Basin Desert, The Sagebrush Ocean, will be published in October.

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That’s because after years away, I’m back in the West, living in western Colorado, near millions of acres of public land. If the love of wide-open spaces defines a Westerner, then our region gives us lots to love.

Alaska, which is 95.8% public land, may be king among all states, with so much wide-open space available to everyone, but Nevada is close behind at 87.8%, and Utah is next at 75.2%. Idaho ranks third at 70.4%, and Colorado has 43.3%, with most of that land west of the Continental Divide.

Until moving back West, I hadn’t thought about public land being vital for anything as basic as cutting firewood. Yet in most states without much accessible public land, firewood is an expensive proposition. Here, from May through October in Colorado, it’s ours for the permit, which costs about $4 to $10 for a cord of wood. That’s enough to fill a full-size pickup bed four feet high.

How much do you need? I’m told three cords add up to “just getting by” in Montana or Wyoming, but true winter wealth is more like six cords. While you’re gathering wood, you can also scout for a Christmas tree. That requires just an $8 permit — a world away from pricey conifers grown on a tree farm.

Writer Dave Stiller’s firewood-gathering advice is to take blowdowns or the slash piles left by logging companies. Once you’ve finished gathering, according to the Forest Service, “revisit and monitor the effects of your harvest… Become a steward of that place as you study the plants and how they respond.” In other words, think like an owner who cares about the land over the long haul.

Patrick Hunter, a Sustainability Studies student at Colorado Mountain Community College in Carbondale, thinks our public lands embody a “generational legacy” that’s become a cornerstone of our democracy. From young to old, the diehard fans of public lands are volunteers from nonprofits who “adopt” a trail, constructing and advocating for them.

Political cartoonist Rob Pudim tells of hiking a trail he’d worked on for several summers and feeling an onrush of possessiveness: “I own this land,” he recalls thinking. In a way, he’s right. We do own this land, though it is managed — even if we rarely see a ranger — by federal agencies.

No one knows how many people have gone to public land with one solemn purpose: to throw ashes of their dead into a stream or launch them into the air from a mountaintop, a practice that’s allowable in most Western states’ national forests. It forever connects someone to that particular place outdoors.

And for a lot of us, the best of life can be what happens during a summer of camping, mushroom hunting, fishing, wildlife watching or just “getting out there.” Some hunters also become advocates for wildlife and public lands, championing public access.

Still, the damage we’ve done to public lands in the West is visible and remains — mining, drilling, dam building, nuclear bomb testing, dumping nuclear waste piles along rivers and other sensitive places. Because of that legacy, the Superfund program, finally established in 1980, aims to restore these lands, some so altered that no real fix is possible.

Public land also serves as a link to modern history. Throughout the West we can still see architectural marvels built by Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago. And ghost towns that were once small cities continue to fascinate us as we think about the economic jolt that triggered their abandonment.

Today, we’re experiencing a similar jolt as increasing aridity alters how the West works. Or doesn’t work. Meanwhile, as we struggle to figure out what we’ve got to do to adapt, at least I know what I’ll say this Thanksgiving. I am forever grateful to the public land that gives us room to breathe.

Dave Marston is publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to lively discussion about the West. He lives with his family in Durango, Colorado.

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If you visit the area you will immediately see the blight that comes from all-out oil and gas production: More than 30,000 wells have been drilled throughout the region, yet 10,000 of those are inactive and many will never be plugged and reclaimed. Sacred landscapes have been transformed into an industrial wasteland littered with rusting tanks and drill pads and connected by now-abandoned roads and pipelines. 

Almost as troubling is that in 2014, NASA satellites detected clouds of methane gas from thousands of leaking wells and pipelines. The party responsible for the ongoing destruction is a federal agency — the Bureau of Land Management. It administers public lands extending for many miles around Chaco.

The BLM has a long history of deferring to industry and handing out concessions to oil and gas companies. But left out from these deals with private companies are the tribes and their desires to protect ancestral sites from harm.

With the arrival of the more open Biden administration, newly invigorated tribal governments — including the All-Pueblo Council of Governors, the Navajo Nation and the Hopi tribe — are calling for a thorough reform of BLM oil and gas leasing and sales.

The demands of the tribes are basic: to be consulted in advance of leasing proposals, and to participate as active partners in the management of their ancestral lands.

E. Paul Torres, former governor of Isleta Pueblo, calls Chaco “a vital part of our present identity through active pilgrimage, story, song and prayer passed to us from ancestors whose footsteps we follow today.” And Brian Vallo, the governor of Acoma Pueblo, adds, “If the department brings the tribes into planning and decision making about oil and gas leasing early and often, our irreplaceable ancestral resources will be better protected.” 

In a report just released by Archaeology Southwest, a nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona, archaeologist Paul Reed describes in detail the failure of the BLM to meet its trust responsibility to Native Americans. Tribal governments are generally ignored or consulted only at the last moment, Reed found, and when it occurs, “key decisions have been made, leaving the tribes to suffer the consequences of prior agency decisions.”

The Reed report recommends including tribal governments at every step of the leasing process. In addition, he recommends that tribal members and their cultural experts should be empowered to conduct field surveys to identify cultural sites, to look at alternatives to proposed oil and gas development, and to recommend any mitigation measures.

A final recommendation goes to the essence of what meaningful regulation and enforcement requires: Oil-gas operators should be prohibited from disturbing the land in any way “until all tribal concerns are identified and successfully addressed.” So far, however, tribal proposals along these lines have fallen on deaf ears.

For example, in 2019, the New Mexico congressional delegation sponsored legislation to establish a cultural protection zone within a 10-mile radius around Chaco. There, oil and gas leasing on federal public lands would be banned.

The legislation passed the House by a vote of 245 to 174, only to die in the Senate. Prospects for action in the present Congress remain uncertain. Meanwhile, a new pathway to reform has opened up.  President Biden’s appointment of Native American Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary is a first in the Department’s history. She is an enrolled member of Laguna Pueblo, and as a former New Mexico Congresswoman, co-sponsored the failed 2019 Chaco protection legislation.

Secretary Haaland has powerful management tools granted by the 1976 Federal Land Planning and Management Act. That act authorizes the Secretary to close tracts of public lands from all forms of mineral leasing for up to 20 years. That sets the stage for Secretary Haaland to protect Chaco by doing what Congress has failed to do — establishing a 10-mile buffer zone around the magnificence that is Chaco. 

All she needs is an affirmative “let’s go” from the President. The tribes have been waiting for a very long time. Bruce Babbitt is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a former Secretary of the Interior Department and also served as governor of Arizona.

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