Bears Ears - missing facts and misconceptions

Bears Ears - missing facts and misconceptions 

Bears Ears — missing facts and misconceptions

Bears Ears — missing facts and misconceptions

The Bears Ears National Monument controversy continues unabated and President Trump’s decision to reduce its size is sure to keep the fires burning. But media coverage has been dominated by the agendas of the corporate recreation industry.

Opinions need to be based on the best and most accurate information available. Consider these common misconceptions, and some badly needed facts: Monument status is essential to protect the region’s priceless archaeology.

It’s repeated ad nauseam on social media and it is false. National monuments are created via the 1906 Antiquities Act, but that law was hopelessly weak. In 1979, Congress passed the "Archaeological Resources Protection Act" to address those shortcomings. Former BLM Grand Gulch rangers co! mplained that the Antiquities Act "was a slap on the wrist. With ARPA, the looting and trafficking of archaeological resources was given a felony provision."

The Monument was already ARPA-protected federal land. We know funding is critically limited. Concentrate resources to enforce that law.

Without monument status, Bears Ears will be decimated by energy extraction.

Again, false. While environmentalists like SUWA board member Terry Tempest Williams insist that monument opposition is a "Big Oil"conspiracy, the facts indicate otherwise. While energy potential exists near the monument, federal land managers, geologists, and most local residents agree that opportunities for commercially recoverable oil are low inside it. Even the Grand Canyon Trust admits that "the uranium mining boom in sout! heast Utah has long since passed, and oil and gas are not reso! urces that exist in high quality or great quantity in Bears Ears."

Likewise, there are still a few Monument opponents who believe there are profitable resources to be extracted from it. I believe they’re also mistaken.

Opponents of the monument are funded by "Big Oil" and other wealthy energy extraction benefactors. Environmentalists are the underfundedunderdogs.

False. If Bears Ears National Monument had extended east into the Aneth Oil Field, then certainly oil companies would have been fighting hard to stop it. But it didn’t. The Daneros uranium mine near Bears Ears survived because President Obama, not Trump, excluded the mine and 500,000 acres from the original 1.9 million acre proposal.

Local groups in San Juan County a! re certainly not funded by "Big Oil" and while conservative groups like the Sutherland Institute have invested their resources in fighting the monument, environmental organizations have their own stable of wealthy benefactors. Venture capitalists, industrialists, bankers, and financiers, many of them billionaires, sit on the boards of directors of even "grassroots" groups like the Grand Canyon Trust (GCT) and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). In 2007, two of SUWA’s board members were convicted of "securities fraud" and did prison time. GCT board member David Bonderman is heavily invested, via his private equity firm TPG Capital, in energy extraction around the world.

In addition, the environmental community has become so closely aligned with and indebted to the powerful outdoor industry lobby — an industry that its leaders claim is bigger and more powerful than "Big Oil"! — that it has rendered itself utterly impotent to object to those impacts.

Bears Ears NM honors Native Americans by giving them "active co-management" of the monument.

False. Bears Ears will be managed by the federal government who will "retain ultimate authority over the monument." The proclamation specifically provides only for an advisory commission of the tribes to offer advice, but that’s as far as their authority extends.

Ultimately, tourism is a clean, less destructive economy that can transform the West.

Have you been to Moab lately? It was the Grand Canyon Trust’s Bill Hedden who said almost 20 years ago: "Everywhere we looked, natural resource professionals agreed that industrial-strength recreation holds more potential to disrupt natural processes on a broad scale than just about any! thing else."

It would be gratifying if everyone, including the Grand Canyon Trust, remembered those words.

Monument supporters need to be honest about their intentions. If they support the monument because they think it will be a boon to the tourist economy, and that the sheer numbers it will bring to the area will transform it in ways no one might have imagined just 20 years ago, if they think the rural West is better served by creating more Moabs, then by all means, they should support the monument.

But I think most monument proponents don’t want that. And so they need more hard facts. We all need information, not memes and tweets, to help us form intelligent opinions.

Jim Stiles is the founding publisher of "The Canyon Country Zephyr" and the author of "Brave New ! West: Morphing Moab at the Speed of Greed."