When President Joe Biden restored the Trump-shriveled boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears in southern Utah in 2021, I allowed myself to believe, for a moment, that the brutal battle over these national monuments had finally come to an end.

Surely the state of Utah, which has aggressively marketed the national parks within its boundaries, had finally acknowledged that having another layer of protection for federal land was advantageous. After all, even some of the most vociferous local opponents of the national monument designations have, in recent years, profited handsomely from tourism, opening their own B&Bs or hotels or guide services and directly targeting national monument visitors.

But Utah’s leaders once again allowed their deeply ingrained anti-federal-land-management ideology to, ahem, trump any sort of pragmatism. Last August, the state filed a civil complaint aimed at diminishing the national monuments yet again — and, ultimately, doing much more: drastically undermining the Antiquities Act, making future landscape-level designations impossible.

The case gained momentum this spring, as the defendants and plaintiffs tossed out a flurry of motions to dismiss, responses and briefs, revealing their legal cards. I found myself especially intrigued by the plaintiffs’ arguments and the logic — or lack thereof — behind them. Why does Utah want to erase protections from this land? And what would a Utah-acceptable national monument look like, anyway? I dove in and what I found out was, as my mother-in-law might say: Very interesting. Let’s break it down.

The contested law: In 1906, in response to widespread looting of cultural sites, Congress passed the Antiquities Act, which declared, in part: “The President … is hereby authorized, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest situated on federal land to be national monuments, and may reserve as a part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected …”

The national monuments: Ninety years later, President Bill Clinton used that authority to establish Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument on nearly 1.9 million acres of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service land in Kane and Garfield counties in southern Utah. In 2016, at the behest of five sovereign Indigenous nations, President Barack Obama established Bears Ears National Monument on 1.3 million acres of BLM and Forest Service land in San Juan County, Utah. President Donald Trump shrank both national monuments significantly in 2017. Biden restored the original boundaries in 2021.

What monument designation does: It withdraws the land from new mineral and energy leases and mining claims, but does not affect existing leases, claims or rights of way. Neither Bears Ears nor Grand Staircase’s designation had any effect on current or future grazing leases or rights; in fact, records show that the permitted number of cattle grazing in both has remained more or less the same since 1996. However, when Biden restored the monuments, he also included a provision saying that if a livestock operator voluntarily retired a grazing lease, the retirement would become permanent — meaning the lease would not be offered to another operator. This might have the effect of phasing grazing out of the monuments over time. But for now ranchers can pretty much do what they want on large portions of both national monuments.

Plaintiffs: Utah is joined by Zebediah Dalton, who has federal grazing leases within Bears Ears. Joining him are Kyle Kimmerle, who staked uranium mining claims there after Trump shrank it; Suzette Morris, a Ute Mountain Ute tribal member; and the BlueRibbon Coalition, a group that advocates for motorized off-road vehicle users.

Defendant intervenors: The Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Zuni and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — all members of the coalition that originally proposed Bears Ears — are intervenors on the defense side along with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

The plaintiffs’ beef, boiled down to the bone: The monuments, which together span about 3.2 million acres, are too vast to qualify for designation under the “smallest area compatible” part of the Antiquities Act. And that, the plaintiffs allege, is keeping them from mining, drilling, riding their ATVs, doing search-and-rescue work, grazing, chaining forests, managing wildlife, collecting religious items and maintaining roads on “twice the number of total acres in the President’s home state of Delaware … and just smaller than Connecticut.” (If I got a nickel every time someone used an East Coast state to illustrate how big something is in the West, I swear I’d have enough coins to fill the Grand Canyon. In its original complaint, Utah mentions Delaware five times, yet fails to note that San Juan County alone covers 5.2 million acres — it’s over three times larger than Delaware).

In fact, the plaintiffs argue, the Antiquities Act doesn’t allow the president to reserve a whole landscape at all — only discrete objects on the landscape, such as individual structures or landforms.

Utah’s ideal national monument: Utah argues that only nine “objects” out of all of the innumerable landmarks on the 3.2 million protected acres “could qualify for declaration as a national monument”: the Bears Ears Buttes; Butler Wash Village, Doll House and Moon House (Ancestral Puebloan sites); Newspaper Rock (a petroglyph panel); San Juan Hill and Dance Hall Rock (landmarks along the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail taken by Mormon colonizers in 1879); the Twentymile Wash Dinosaur Megatrackway; and Grosvenor Arch.

And that’s it, folks. That’s the entirety of Utah’s list of maybes for a national monument, which, in the plaintiffs’ dreams, would comprise just 6,480 acres — i.e., an area even smaller than Delaware — even smaller than Washington, D.C.!

Anyone who has ever visited either Bears Ears or Grand Staircase-Escalante knows how absurd, ignorant and illogical this list is. After all, if Bears Ears Buttes is worthy of national monument protections, then why not the equally significant Comb Ridge, Raplee Anticline, Arch Canyon, Grand Gulch, Valley of the Gods, Singing Canyon, Calf Creek Falls, Cosmic Ashtray, or the countless other landforms found in southern Utah? Why Moon House and Newspaper Rock but not the Citadel, Procession Panel, Split Level Village, Turkey Pen House, Wolfman Panel or House on Fire? Why are San Juan Hill and Dance Hall Rock — mere stopovers along the Mormons’ 1879 journey — worthy of protection, but not the Ancestral Puebloan “roads” that crisscross the landscape, or the countless ancient shrines or landforms that have played important roles in Indigenous peoples’ histories since time immemorial?

Even under the narrowest conceivable interpretation of the Antiquities Act, there are literally tens of thousands of cultural sites and structures and natural objects in these places that qualify for national monument protection. Making each and every one its own unit of a national monument would not only be illogical, but also impractical, not to mention culturally and environmentally myopic, conveniently overlooking the fact that these “objects” lose their meaning when they are taken out of the context of the larger landscape.

“The Bears Ears region is not a series of isolated objects, but the object itself, a connected, living landscape, where the place, not a collection of items, must be protected,” the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition noted after Trump had trimmed the boundaries by 85%. “You cannot reduce the size without harming the whole.”

The problem is, however, that “harming the whole” — at least the part in between the plaintiffs’ nine “qualifying” objects — is exactly what Utah wants the freedom to do, if these legal arguments are to be believed. In Utah’s ideal national monument, the Bears Ears Buttes would be protected, but the state would deploy what it calls “methods to maintain healthy soil — such as chaining” — i.e., obliterating piñon-juniper forests — across vast swaths of surrounding federal land. Kimmerle would rake in millions of dollars of profit from a would-be uranium mine within what is now Bears Ears National Monument. And massive draglines would gouge away at the Kaiparowits Plateau in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in search of every last bit of coal contained there.

Imagine if Utah’s notion of what a national monument should be were extended to Arches National Park, which was originally a national monument: Instead of a 75,000-acre swath of protected land, each arch would stand on its own, surrounded by a national monument boundary, while the landscape in between would be opened to drilling, mining, ATV-riding and potash ponds. The same goes for the other “Mighty Five” national parks in Utah (which together cover more land than, yes, Rhode Island).

Congress passed the Antiquities Act after years of deliberation and debate. The language is somewhat imprecise and even contradictory, both allowing the president to reserve areas “in his discretion” while also limiting it to the “smallest area compatible” with good management. This allows for broad interpretations for how it should be implemented. But the intent behind it is very clear: To protect and preserve the nation’s heritage and history. That simply cannot be achieved by tearing these objects out of their context. This is especially true when it comes to landscapes that are culturally as well as geologically significant, such as those at Bears Ears.

I’ll leave you with what I find to be a powerful and succinct argument for landscape-scale preservation. It’s from a 1991 paper on Ancestral Puebloan culture in the Four Corners region co-written by the late Rina Swentzell, a scholar from Santa Clara Pueblo:

“Here, the human landscape is meaningless outside the natural context — human constructions are not considered out of their relationship to the hills, valleys and mountains. The material village is one of the concentric rings about the symbolic center of the world. It is not given more weight or focus than the area of the fields, hills, or mountains. It constitutes one place within the whole. The web of human existence is interlaced with what happens in the larger natural context and therefore flows into the adjacent spaces, hills, and mountains.”

This opinion piece is reprinted with permission from Landline, a High Country News column.

The post Guest editorial: Utah’s latest attack on the Antiquities Act appeared first on Park Record.

In the middle of a sunny April day, something remarkable happened: The California Independent System Operator clocked several moments of negative net demand. Alas, the moment of breezy sunshine could not last, for it was doomed by the dastardly duck curve.

But wait! Is that salvation on the horizon? Could the TransWest Express be the duck-slayer we’ve awaited?

Say what? OK, maybe I went a bit too far in trying to spice up all the wonk there. Sorry. Let’s try again:

On two consecutive Sundays this month, solar panels on the California grid — with a bit of help from wind turbines — cranked out more juice than Californians consumed. Yes, you read that right: Nearly all of California’s gadgets and appliances and air conditioners and lightbulbs were powered by the sun.

This solar bonanza is significant because it offers a glimpse of a possible future, one in which the power grid runs on clean energy around the clock. Unfortunately, it was only a glimpse, and an ephemeral one at that. That afternoon, as is the norm, solar generation ebbed at about the same time as electricity consumption increased, causing net demand — or total system load minus solar and wind generation — to rocket upwards again. The pattern is repeated to varying degrees nearly every day and has come to be called the California duck curve. When plotted on a graph, the net demand curve resembles the outline of a duck (hence the nickname), with a midday trough followed by an afternoon upward swoop.

It’s problematic, because the steep incline in net demand must be matched by a corresponding increase in power generation — often from not-so-clean sources. More solar leads to a steeper curve, which tends to lead to more natural gas generation, more greenhouse gas emissions and more health-harming pollution in frontline communities. 

The duck curve must be tamed before California — and other solar-rich states — can reach clean energy and climate goals. But how?

On negative-net-demand Sunday, grid operators drew mostly from natural gas power to meet that rising duck-neck demand, but they also leaned on hydropower and the state’s growing fleet of batteries. That was helpful, but those sources will never carry the whole load: Batteries are expensive, fire-prone and short-lived, and they require lithium mining, while hydropower capacity has been seriously diminished by drought. (It got an atmospheric river boost this year, but it can’t be relied upon in the long term.)

That leaves something called “geographical smoothing,” or using widely located power sources to iron out the natural variability in solar and wind. The idea is that the sun is always shining or the wind is always blowing somewhere — and therefore potentially generating energy. The trick is moving all that power around. Which brings us to TransWest Express.

On April 11, the Bureau of Land Management gave the “notice to proceed” for the 732-mile high-voltage transmission line, in the works for nearly two decades, which will carry wind power from Wyoming to southern Nevada and points beyond. The Biden administration, intent on pushing renewable energy development on public lands, is also advancing a flurry of other long-distance, clean-energy transmission projects. The SunZia line from New Mexico to Arizona is expected to get the federal green light next month after 17 years of agency review. Last year, the Ten West Link in southern Arizona and the Gateway South in Wyoming were greenlighted. The Boardman-to-Hemingway line in Idaho and Oregon has also cleared its permitting hurdles.

Clean energy advocates are celebrating because these lines will enable the construction of utility-scale solar and wind power facilities by giving those projects a path to distant markets. It will also help stitch together the somewhat fractured Western grid, enabling more power sharing and coordination across the region. That will help decarbonize the power grid and make it more reliable and resilient to climate change-exacerbated extreme weather and wildfire.

Plus, some of these lines may help combat that dreaded duck curve.

TransWest Express, for example, will carry power from the 3,000-megawatt Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind facility, which is currently under construction in Carbon County, Wyoming, to the Hoover Dam in Nevada, where it will link up with the California power grid. SunZia is designed to carry a similar amount of juice from Pattern Energy’s planned wind power projects in eastern New Mexico to a substation near Phoenix, where it could continue traveling westward. All those gigawatts of wind power could help grid operators in California — or Nevada or Arizona — “follow the load” as solar generation wanes without burning a molecule of natural gas.

It’s got advocates asking: Given the myriad benefits of these projects, why the hell did it take so long to get them approved? And some clean energy advocates and even environmentalists are holding these projects’ challenges up as evidence that the National Environmental Policy Act — the federal law that requires big projects to be analyzed for impacts — is broken and needs to be reformed.

I’d beg to differ.

Fifteen years is, indeed, a long time to spend wading through bureaucratic red tape. Heck, I get aggravated after waiting 15 minutes for a clerk at the DMV to acknowledge my existence. But these projects are gargantuan and can have significant impacts. The lines span hundreds of miles and cross multiple jurisdictions, they further industrialize the landscape, and their hulking metal towers sully the view. Power line corridors are often cleared of trees and other vegetation and even treated with pesticides, harming the forest and fragmenting wildlife habitat. Up to 64 million birds die each year after colliding with or being electrocuted by power lines.

It’s not clear how a review of something so complex could be streamlined, or whether it would actually be desirable, even for the project proponents. In fact, a long and rigorous permitting process often results in a better project that is less vulnerable to future legal challenges — and the resulting delays. The Ten West Link, for example, was originally routed through the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. Environmentalists protested, and the BLM preferred a different plan. The developers rerouted their line around the refuge and got their permit.

The SunZia line went through a similar process in New Mexico. Because the line will carry wind power, it garnered the support of clean energy boosters like Western Resource Advocates and the Obama administration fast-tracked its permit, granting federal approval in 2015.

But it still had to get the go-ahead from the states. New Mexico regulators hesitated because of strong opposition from conservationists due to the proposed route’s potential impact on migratory birds. Also, the line would cross a portion of the White Sands Missile Range, making the Pentagon “uncomfortable.” So, in 2020, SunZia said it would reopen the NEPA process in order to reroute the line around wildlife refuges and the missile range, and it tracked migratory bird paths to determine where the line could cross the Rio Grande with the least impact. That alleviated most concerns, and so New Mexico gave its approval; the BLM is expected to rule on the amended route soon.

Unfortunately, the process didn’t work as well in Arizona. There, sovereign Indigenous nations and conservation groups have attempted to get SunZia to reroute the line away from the fragile, biodiverse San Pedro River, because it would endanger birds and other wildlife and potentially damage culturally significant sites. But that didn’t seem to faze Arizona regulators, who tend to be more amenable to such projects and less responsive to environmental concerns than their New Mexican counterparts, and they unanimously approved the project. So far, the BLM has gone along with the proposed route, too. That removed any incentive for SunZia to reroute the line in Arizona as it had done in New Mexico.

Now, the San Carlos Apache Tribe and the Tohono O’odham Nation are protesting the BLM’s preferred route along the San Pedro River. And a coalition is suing Arizona over its approval of the line, so that even if the BLM gives the go-ahead, the project could be mired in the courts for months or years to come, delaying construction indefinitely. Streamlining NEPA would only make this sort of hang-up more likely.

Cleaning up the Western power grid won’t be easy. It’s a huge machine that was built up over the last seven decades to move power from giant coal-fired plants and enormous hydropower dams to faraway cities and states. Since then, the way we use and generate electricity has evolved dramatically, and it will need to continue to change in order to slash greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution. This must include small-scale, distributed generation and energy storage and microgrids. We can and should blanket every warehouse, big-box store, parking lot, irrigation canal and home with solar panels. And, perhaps more importantly, we as a society need to learn to become more energy-efficient, using less power even as we electrify everything.

But even that won’t be enough. Utility-scale wind and solar installations will also be necessary, as will the long-distance transmission lines needed to carry the energy they generate. But just because they are needed does not mean they should be rubber-stamped for approval. Instead, they should be subject to scrutiny, go through a rigorous permitting process and be sited in a manner that does the least bit of harm to people and the environment — even if it takes 15 years to get there.

This article is republished from The Landline, a feature of High Country News (hcn.org).

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