For more than two decades I have been privileged to explore the special southeast corner of our state. Constantly drawing me back are Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and the area now protected as Bears Ears National Monument. Their unique characters leave me wide-eyed and breathless, and I have visited only a fraction of each. My greatest desire is that my children, and generations after I am gone, will see it just the way I have: wild, unspoiled, vast, mysterious, challenging.

The Antiquities Act, which allows the president to protect places of “historic or scientific interest,” was rightfully and appropriately invoked in the creation of each of these inspiring places. These two monuments have within their borders artifacts of civilizations with histories that date back thousands of years; remains of previously unknown dinosaurs, and plant and animal species found nowhere else. Grand Staircase rightfully has been called “the science monument,” having yielded incredible discoveries in its brief 20-year history.

Bears Ears offers a unique opportunity to preserve and protect the ghostly, evocative reminders of those who settled the area long before the modern era. But an even more powerful opportunity comes from the tribes who longed and pleaded for this land to be set apart: the opportunity to see history through the eyes of direct descendants. I have never been at a meeting sponsored by Navajo, Hopi, Zuni or Ute people where the offer hasn’t been made: “Come and learn from us. We want to share our feelings for and knowledge of this land with you.” The offer is sincere and thrilling. How enlightening and humbling would be the lessons we could learn!

But our political class, seemingly able to focus only on things that can be measured with a dollar sign, would deny us the vast benefits bestowed by these remarkable monuments. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke’s “investigative” visit was an orchestrated sham, an inverse Potemkin village of the alleged aggrieved, a festival of cherry-picking. Subsequent public comment on these monuments, however, nearly 3 million in number, overwhelmingly sent one message: “Hands off our monuments!”

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So now Zinke’s “secret” plan — the destructive nature of which was never in doubt — is on the president’s desk, perhaps waiting for the right moment to cause yet another distraction from Washington’s chaos. Sadly, and unsurprisingly, it focuses on decimating both monuments and opening them to economic opportunity that, also unsurprisingly, corresponds with the interests of major political donors. Thus we can turn our precious public lands into an archipelago of trinkets, surrounded by a sea of the dirtiest, most devastating industries on earth — who, when the winds of economics blow slightly against them, will abandon to us a mess of polluted pottage.

We are blessed to have these lands, property of every citizen of the United States, within our state borders. As with every blessing, we have a responsibility: to protect and preserve them. Unfortunately, our political leaders, from the president to our county commissioners, seem blinded by shiny coins of speculative economic gain and unfounded legal theory. This corrupt and selfish sham must not be allowed to go forward.

We must speak out against Zinke’s plan to eviscerate and exploit our national monuments. We must respect the land, and learn from its original descendants, our Native American brothers and sisters, how to treasure it and be healed by it. We must ensure those who follow us do not look sadly upon an industrialized, desecrated landscape and ask the question with no good answer: Why?

Mike has lived, in aggregate, nearly 25 years in Utah, and his feelings and opinions are best informed by his Latter-day Saint faith. He is dedicated to preserving Utah's remarkable cultural and natural heritage.

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