That approach is relevant for those of us working to protect public lands as we confront the equivalent of a massive hemorrhage. It is Congress’ unconstrained use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to destroy management plans that were thoughtfully considered and years in the making.

With only simple majority votes required in each chamber of Congress, bypassing committee review and without the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster, management plans that involved extensive public participation are being thrown out.

The CRA has already been used to undo six resource management plans and one mining prohibition. What replaces these plans is unclear and has plunged public land managers, local communities and even industry into uncertainty that will linger for years.

Last month, Congress used the CRA to remove protections against mining for roughly 225,000 acres at the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. This was a major blow to the watershed of America’s most visited wilderness and a grim moment for conservationists. Now, the focus has shifted to Utah.

Senator Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, both Utah Republicans, have introduced joint resolutions to undo the management plan for the 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. When you think of Southern Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante is at its heart; its vast landscape of canyons and mesas knits together Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef national parks and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

If this CRA resolution passes, it could devastate the monument, turning it into a place where out-of-control off-road vehicle use, landscape-level clearcutting, and other extractive activities would all be possible. 

The good news is that this fight is one that we, together, can win. When we do, it will set a precedent to protect all national monuments, national parks and beloved public lands that might be next in line.

In the House of Representatives, the ever-changing margins are razor thin—just ask Republican Speaker Mike Johnson, who struggles with vote counts daily. In the Senate, Mike Lee has proved notorious for wasting valuable time with legislation that has little chance of passing.

We know these elected officials have been hearing from their constituents who are unhappy about their previous votes using the CRA. In both chambers, a growing list of Republicans find they need to bolster their public lands and environmental credentialsbefore the mid-terms.

Lee and Maloy’s doomed efforts last year to sell off public lands proved highly unpopular nationwide and in Utah. Knowing that, members of Congress might want to think twice before tying themselves to the duo’s latest attempts to weaken protection for Grand Staircase-Escalante.

At the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, we’re no stranger to an uphill battle. Ever since SUWA was founded in 1983, we’ve sparred with Utah’s anti-public-lands politicians, who show a level of disdain for our national heritage that seems bizarre in its tenacity. A deep-rooted belief that a federal public lands system simply should not exist seems to drive these politicians—defying logic, economic data and poll after poll.

That’s why we are not shy about asking people outside of Utah to join us in speaking up for protecting public lands in Utah. Public lands belong to all Americans, and every day, we urge people across the country to tell their elected officials to speak up for public lands, Indigenous sacred sites and intact ecosystems in Utah—because our politicians won’t.

This is the moment to urge members of Congress to vote “no” on the Grand Staircase-Escalante CRA resolution. A vote could be coming anytime in the next few weeks. Time is of the essence.  

To make the case, everyone who cares about the magnificent red-rock canyons of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Southern Utah needs to act now. The more our voices are raised and registered, the stronger our message urging Congress to listen to the people who want protection and stewardship, not short-term exploitation of our public land.

Scott Braden is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA).

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As for Trump’s pick for Interior Secretary, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum: If Burgum tries to turn America’s public lands into an even bigger cash cow for the oil and gas industry, or tries to shrink America’s parks and national monuments, he’ll quickly discover he’s on the wrong side of history.

Public lands have strong bipartisan support in the West. The annual Conservation in the West Poll, last released by the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project in February 2024, found that nearly three-quarters of voters—including Republicans—want to protect clean water, air quality and wildlife habitats, while providing opportunities to visit and recreate on public lands.

That’s compared to just one-quarter of voters who prefer maximizing the use of public lands available for drilling and mining. According to the poll, which surveyed voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—80 % of Westerners support the national goal of conserving 30 % of land and waters in America by the year 2030.

Bipartisan support for more conservation and balanced energy development has been a cornerstone of the poll’s findings since it began in 2011. Under the leadership of President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the current administration has made progress over the past four years in bringing public land management in line with the preferences of Western voters. That includes better protecting the Grand Canyon, increasing accountability for oil and gas companies that operate on public land, and putting conservation—at last—on par with drilling and mining on public land.

The President-elect may find it hard to immediately block what Westerners want. After Trump took office in 2017 promising to transform public land management, his team was unprepared and used its power to benefit its own interests, ignoring the wishes of the American people.

Trump’s first Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, misused his position to advance his dream of owning a microbrewery in Montana. Trump’s second Interior secretary, oil and gas industry lobbyist David Bernhardt, put his finger on the scale in the interest of a former client. Trump’s choice to run the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley, served illegally without being confirmed by Congress.

We worked hard to shed light on this corruption and defend public lands from Trump’s attacks. Still, Trump’s Interior department allowed oil and gas companies to lock up millions of acres for bargain basement prices.

In his second term, Donald Trump will attempt to shrink national monuments like Bears Ears in Utah and permit drilling and mining in inappropriate areas. The president-elect has already committed to undoing President Joe Biden’s energy and environmental policies.

Project 2025, the policy handbook written by former Trump

officials, clearly lays out a plan to gut the Interior Department and remove environmental safeguards that ensure the health of our public lands.

Project 2025 would give extractive industries nearly unfettered access to public lands, severely restrict the power of the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of Alaska wilderness to drilling, mining and logging and roll back protections for spectacular landscapes like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. It would also remove protections for iconic Western species such as gray wolves and grizzly bears.

What can we do about this assault? The law and public opinion are on our side. Public land protections are stronger today than ever, thanks in large part to the grassroots efforts of Tribes, local community leaders and conservation organizations.

We know much of what’s in Trump’s public lands playbook, and we will fight back. We’ll continue to shine a light on corruption within the Trump administration and hold it accountable.

Our partners will work in Congress to stop bad policies and projects from going forward. We are ready to take action in the courts and in the streets. And we’re not waiting until Inauguration Day to start.

Jennifer Rokala is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues. She is executive director of Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan public lands advocacy group.

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I’ve driven Interstate 15 in Utah dozens of times over the course of two decades, travelling from my home in western Colorado to one of my favorite adventure playgrounds in Zion National Park and nearby. The route takes me through Saint George, Utah, an area referred to as the state’s “Dixie.”

There are a lot of Utah Dixies, though there’s movement to change some names: Dixie National Forest, Dixie State University, and Dixie Downs Drive. Saint George is a retirement community, and Chamber of Commerce signs on the highway extoll the many virtues of retiring to the Dixie area.

But here’s what I notice: Every sign, no matter how often it gets replaced, always features white couples.

I used to ski patrol at one of the Aspen ski resorts. Every year the Aspen Skiing Company would unveil a new marketing campaign, and employees were required to attend a meeting to see what the company would promote that year. Ads and movies featured many hundreds of happy people — happy white people.

I met with the senior executive VP of marketing and pointed out that he was sending a message to folks that Aspen was a playground for whites only. Twenty years later, the Aspen Skiing Company, a company with the best of intentions in advocating for and creating racial justice, still does not include any Black images in its advertising, so ingrained is the image of skiers being white. And full disclosure: The Aspen Skiing Company has engaged me to help them with their mission and advocacy. 

A few years ago I toured the national capitol in Washington, D.C. The tour ended in the rotunda where the guide proudly drew our attention to a huge ceiling painting and border sculptures that had plenty of room to capture key moments in the development of the nation: Brave-looking white guys astride ferocious looking white horses. Chinese railroad workers. Noble “savages,” aka Indigenous peoples. Men, woman and children trekking the Oregon Trail.

But what wasn’t there, in a building built with Black labor, was any depiction of a Black American.

When we sing the national anthem, if we get to the third verse, we pay tribute to slavery even there. The man who wrote this ode to freedom owned human beings who never experienced the freedom that Francis Scott Keys wrote about.

When we were very young, all of us were taught about George Washington’s father’s cherry tree, and the “Father, I cannot tell a lie” story. But most of us learned on our own, years later, that the father of our country owned slaves. But his slave-owning isn’t the odd part. The odd part is that we perpetuate an unimportant lie and neglect an important truth about the father of our country.

On our $20 bill we honor a ruthless slave-owner. In an ad headlined “Stop the runaway,” which Andrew Jackson placed in the Tennessee Gazette in 1804, he promised to pay not just $50 for the return of his escaped slave, but also “ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of 300.” I will be glad to see Harriet Tubman’s face replace Jackson’s on the bill after a long fight to get this done. 

And every Black person has had the experience of waiting in some check-out line, only to have a white person cut into the line right in front of them. In a sense, it’s not even rudeness. America has made us invisible.

So now, here we are… a country tearing itself apart with hate, distrust and dysfunction. Over time I’ve come to realize that racism, intentional or not, is the ladle that stirs this dangerous, unpleasant brew. Do we want a better country for everyone? Recognize racism. Fight it. We’re all in this together.

Wayne Hare is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a retired park ranger, manages wildland fires, and is a decorated U.S. Marine. He writes from Grand Junction, Colorado, and is co-founder of TheCivilConversationsProject.org.

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