This weekend I learned that there
are plans in the works to significantly reduce a couple of national monuments
in Utah. Today those plans were officially announced. Bears Ears is slated to
be downsized by about 85%, while Grand Staircase Escalante will shrink to just half
of its current size.
I’m mildly optimistic that none of
this will hold up in court, but it still worries me. My wife and I were just in
Grand Staircase Escalante in October, and we drove right around Bears Ears too.
We could see the namesake buttes from the road we were on. It was just a little
too remote even for us though—at least given our time constraints and the fact
that we had just come off four consecutive nights without running water. And
that is precisely one of the main points of these monuments. They’re remote.
They’re wild.
 |
| Exploring a Slot Canyon |
While in Grand Staircase we talked
about how it was an absolutely incredible place, somewhere you wish everyone
could experience, yet it wouldn’t be what it is were it any more developed or busy.
While part of us would have liked the washboarded, unpaved roads there to be
smoother, we were mostly glad they weren’t. It made the place more remote. Part of us wished for better maps and trailmarkers, making it easier to explore the various slot canyons. But we appreciated them as hidden treasures that much more. Part
of us wished there had been better signage leading us to the dinosaur
footprints, but as it was we had more of an adventure looking for them and we
were the only ones in sight. That’s part of the allure of such places. They’re
places you can get truly alone and disconnected from everything else going on
in the world, at least for a couple days.
Places like Grand Staircase Escalante
and Bears Ears are also religiously significant for indigenous peoples, and
anyone who professes to care about freedom of religion really has to care about
this too. As it is, I find it deeply ironic that the party touting itself as a
champion of religious freedom is leading the backlash against preserving a
religiously significant site like Bears Ears, but that’s really another matter
for another writer, I think. I can really only suggest reading something
written by native people for a better perspective on this entire matter, and a
good starting point might be here
or here.
My only connection to this is that my wife and I were just there a little over
a month ago.
Grand Staircase was probably our
favorite place we visited on our entire road trip—and that’s competing with
Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. It was silent, it was empty, it was peaceful,
and it was utterly beautiful. Reducing it by half is a disturbing precedent to set, and
I shudder to think what will become of the place if fossil fuel companies have
their way.
No comments:
Post a Comment