The US President returns to the decision of his predecessor, Donald Trump, to amputate 85% the area of this park in the very rich basement.
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In the Indian tribes, anxiety had stopped rising. And if Joe Biden did not hold his promises? Eight months after the inauguration of the Democrat, Native Americans are relieved. By a decree signed Friday, October 8, the US President restored the size of Bears Ears National Monument (Utah), designated as such by Barack Obama in December 2016 and amputated 85% of its area a year later by Donald Trump. The nearby Park of Grand Staircase-Clleante, created by Bill Clinton in 1996, and reduced by 45% by the Republican, was also restored in its original size.
Joe Biden relied on the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the Chief Executive the power to protect exceptional cultural or archaeological areas. The Bears Ears region, a summit considered sacred by the Navajos, recognizable with its two bears-shaped mounds (one to 2,721 meters above sea level), houses Spectacular landscapes of canyons and red rocks covered with petroglyphs buried in the sand. In 2016, the paleontologist Robert Gay had discovered hundreds of phytosaur bones, ancestors of crocodiles, dating from some 220 million years.
Donald Trump had also invoked the Antiques Act to cancel the decision of Barack Obama. Environmental defense associations had sued it, arguing that the 1906 law has been designed to increase the protection of a site, in no case to reduce it. The New York Times had shown that the Ministry of the Interior had established the layout of the monument in cooperation with the representatives of the oil and mining industry, interested for a long time by the wealth of the subsoil of the region (gas, coal, uranium). After Mr. Trump’s decision, the very name Bears Ears had disappeared from cards and the information point for visitors had been eliminated. It will reappear, and the Rangers will be assigned to the monument.
Important step
The restoration of the Grand Bears Ears has been strongly criticized by Republicans, who deplore the federal government’s hold in a state where 66% of land escape local control. The “National Monument” (a step in the hierarchy of the National Park Service, the administration that manages 129 national monuments and 63 parks) can be used for hunting and grazing animals – great demand of ranchers – but will be prohibited to ‘extraction and circulation of quads, favorite pastime, though destructive, many premises.
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