Conservation Won Big Under Biden. Environmentalists and Tribal Leaders Fear Trump Will Undo Those Gains

From the red-rock country and canyonlands of the Colorado Plateau to the Joshua trees of the Mojave Desert, some of the West’s most iconic and wild places are now stitched together in the largest corridor of protected lands in the continental U.S. after former President Joe Biden created two new national monuments in California in his last week in office. 

Biden’s creation of 10 new national monuments and protections of 674 million acres of U.S. lands and waters make conservation one of his most significant legacies. But with his time in office over and President Donald Trump’s administration taking over, protections for the roughly 600-mile corridor he established on Jan. 14 could soon cease to exist, and a score of other conservation and public lands measures announced by the White House over the past four years face dismantling. Some are already being rolled back. Environmentalists, tribes and local leaders are preparing for the possibility that some national monuments they advocated for that became dividing lines between Democrats and Republicans will soon be on the chopping block, particularly three found in the new corridor across Utah and Arizona: Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon national monuments.

In his first hours in office, Trump issued executive orders targeting public lands and energy. One declared a “national energy emergency” to boost fossil fuel and mineral production in the country that called the policies of the Biden administration “harmful and shortsighted,” while another makes it government policy “to encourage energy exploration and production on Federal lands and waters.”

During Trump’s last term, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, created by the Obama and Clinton administrations, respectively, were shrunk to fractions of their original expanses, and then quickly restored to their initial sizes by Biden after he took office. Trump has said he will shrink the monuments again. And Republicans in Arizona objected to Biden’s creation of the Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in 2023 for how it could impact economic opportunities like the revival of uranium mining in the region, creating worry that the new administration will target that monument too.

“We’re hopeful that folks in the administration will see that this is not a worthwhile endeavor, but if they do, the trust, our partners and so many in the Arizona communities will be ready to push back against them,” said Amber Reimondo, the energy director with the Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental group focused on protecting the canyon and other nearby national monuments. 

Despite Political Opposition, National Monuments Are Popular With Public

Though the monuments have been politically controversial, they’re widely popular with the general public. Colorado College’s 14th annual Conservation in the West Poll, part of its State of the Rockies Project, surveyed voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming and found 85 percent support the creation of new national parks and monuments, and only 27 percent support rolling back protections. 

Polling last week commissioned by the Grand Canyon Trust found similar results in Utah and Arizona, the two states with the national monuments most likely to be scaled back. In Utah, over a third of those polled support the creation of new national monuments and maintaining the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. In Arizona, those sentiments were even more common. 

“Westerners value public lands. They support national monuments. They oppose national monument reduction,” said John Ruple, a law professor and program director at the University of Utah’s Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment. “To me, the question becomes, ‘Why would the Trump administration want to do this?’ What is it that they need by carving away at things that are almost universally loved? I don’t see the political upside. You’re going to be in litigation from day one, and you’re going to upset a supermajority of the American people. What’s the win? Solidifying your base in Utah and Idaho?”

That hasn’t stopped Trump before. In December 2017, he signed proclamations to reduce Bears Ears National Monument from 1.3 million acres to roughly 228,000 acres, an 85 percent reduction, while Grand Staircase-Escalante was cut nearly in half, from 1.9 million acres to about 1 million. Project 2025, the policy roadmap for a second Trump administration coordinated by the conservative Heritage Foundation, has called for reducing the size of those national monuments and others again, and even suggested repealing the Antiquities Act of 1906, the law that allows presidents to create national monuments that was signed by President Teddy Roosevelt, who later used it to protect the Grand Canyon as a national monument before it later became a park. 

Not only do both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante have widespread support, but they’re also culturally important to local tribes in the region. More than 30 Indigenous tribes have ancestral and contemporary ties to the landscapes. And Bears Ears itself was originally conceived and advocated for by five tribes, the Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Zuni Tribe, Hopi Tribe and the Navajo Nation, which have worked for years to create a collaborative management plan in which the tribes work with the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service to run the monument, a first-of-its kind oversight plan that was finalized last week.

For the Southern Paiute, Grand Staircase-Escalante holds thousands of years of history, and is known in their language as their holy land, said Autumn Gillard, the cultural resource manager of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah. “We are taught from infancy that we are the stewards of these lands which must be protected and preserved for future generations,” she said. The federal government is legally required to consult the tribes on management of the lands, she said, and her people will not be silent. 

The same is true of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, with tribes working for years to advocate for the creation of the monument adjacent to Grand Canyon National Park. It faces threats too, with an active uranium mine allowed to operate within the protected area because its claims preexist the creation of the monument. Environmental groups and tribes continue to fight that mine.

”We continue to oppose [the mining] because our lives are at stake with the water being contaminated,” said Bernadine Jones, chairwoman of the Havasupai Tribe, whose reservation is found within the Grand Canyon. Their only water source is the local aquifer, which tribal members fear will be contaminated by the uranium mine.

Trump Administration Signals Monuments Will be Shrunk

Though Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante have wide support in Utah, the state government has consistently opposed them. The state sued the Biden administration over its restoration of the two monuments, but a federal judge tossed out the case. Utah Sen. Mike Lee questioned Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Interior Department, Doug Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota, over how he would work with Utah to “fix that current mess” during his confirmation hearing last week.

“[The Antiquities Act’s] original intention was really to protect, as it says, antiquities, areas like, I would say, Indiana Jones-type archeological protections,” said Burgum, who consistently touted during the hearing the need to achieve “energy dominance” using public lands to produce energy of all sorts, including the fossil fuels driving climate change.

His claim, however, doesn’t match history, as the act was used frequently to create what are now many of the country’s beloved national parks. Political supporters of shrinking the monuments state that their original sizes didn’t adhere to the Antiquities Act’s goal of making them only as large as absolutely necessary. But the law doesn’t outright say presidents must make the monuments as small as possible, only that they should be “confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected” and that the government can expand the size of the monuments with other public lands or even by acquiring private lands “as may be necessary for the proper care and management of the object”

Ruple, the University of Utah law professor, said that, legally, Trump himself has little right to roll back protections for any existing national monument. 

“There’s no question that Congress has the ability and the authority to modify, reduce or even eliminate national monuments,” he said. “That’s the legally safe way to do it, to go through a public process that involves hearings, that involves a debate on the issue. If President Trump decides that he wants to act alone, there’s going to be litigation, and there’s going to be very significant, substantive questions about his legal authority, questions he’s going to struggle with. If you want it to be durable, you go to Congress.”

But Congress is already beginning to set the stage for repealing the Antiquities Act. Rep. Celeste Maloy, a Utah Republican who is a cousin of Ammon Bundy and the niece of Cliven Bundy, who led a standoff against federal agents in 2014 over their grazing permits on public land, introduced a bill to rescind the act last week. In a statement, Maloy said it is the job of Congress, not the president, to make decisions regarding public lands. 

“For over a century, presidents from both parties have used the Antiquities Act to protect America’s most iconic landscapes, including Zion, Arches, and the Grand Canyon,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a public lands advocacy group, in a statement. “The presidential power to protect public lands is widely supported by Western voters, who know that Congress is too gridlocked to get the job done. The Antiquities Act is one of the best tools we have to preserve America’s natural resources. Anyone who signs on to Rep. Maloy’s bill will unleash the ire of America’s hunters, anglers, the outdoor industry, and Tribal nations.”

The House of Representatives also voted on a rules package for the 119th Congress that allows lawmakers to more easily sell off federal land by not requiring them to evaluate the loss of revenue that would stem from the sale before making a decision on the sale. This week, Reps. Gabe Vasquez (D-NM) and Ryan Zinke (R-MT), who was President Trump’s first Interior Secretary, reintroduced the Public Lands in Public Hands Act, which would ban the sale or transfer of federal public lands unless the action is already authorized by another law. Conservation groups praised the reintroduction of the act, which alleviated some of their fears from the passing of the house rules package and Rep. Maloy’s proposed bill.

Other Conservation Measures Potentially At Risk

The new administration will likely target a variety of other measures enacted by the Biden administration that reformed how the nation’s public lands are managed, including the Public Lands Rule implemented by the Interior Department that put conservation on equal footing with extractive uses of lands managed by the federal government and imposed new rules for oil and gas development on public lands along with measures to promote the production of renewable energy. 

Congress could pass legislation to rescind the Public Lands Rule and others that are largely unpopular with Republican lawmakers and the fossil fuel industry, or federal agencies could begin the process of implementing new management rules that roll them back.

In its final weeks in office, the Biden administration also proposed multiple mineral withdrawals in Nevada that protect environmentally and culturally sensitive landscapes from any new mining claims or developments.

In Nevada’s Amargosa Valley, adjacent to Death Valley National Park and home to Ash Meadows Wildlife Refuge, where the world’s rarest fish is found, 269,000 acres of public land will be evaluated for a mineral withdrawal after a large, bipartisan coalition formed to protect the area. In 2023, a mining company began seeking permits for a lithium project just outside the boundaries of the refuge, uniting the community in opposition. Water wells for local residents there have in some cases already run dry, and studies found any new mining activity would further diminish the region’s scarce groundwater—both for residents and endangered animals in the area. 

“These are frontline communities without access to much opportunity,” said Mason Voehl, the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy, an environmental group that has helped lead the push to protect the refuge and build the coalition. “We take their water away and then that opportunity goes away completely. That’s why this [proposal] galvanized this coalition.”

The mineral withdrawals will go through an environmental review process, and only time will tell how a Trump administration may respond to it, though Voehl said the coalition is optimistic.

“We have a very diverse, bipartisan base of support, ranging from most progressive, leftist conservation organizations on one end to some of the most conservative, rural communities in the West on the other,” he said. “That is unusual, and maybe it’s fitting to have two different presidential administrations from different parties involved in this process, because we’ve just felt like this whole thing is above politics.”