This June, the Antiquities Act turns 120 years old. Since Teddy Roosevelt signed the law on June 8, 1906, nearly every president has used it to designate national monuments — a total of nearly 170 cherished preserves. Only Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush chose not to use this powerful conservation tool.

The Utah congressional delegation is not likely to celebrate. They’re chomping at the bit to challenge this executive power. In the Senate, Utah Republican Mike Lee leads the charge against what he calls “presidential abuses of the Antiquities Act.”

The act, though, deserves high praise, and Iowa U.S. Rep. John Lacey, a witness to cultural vandalism run rampant in New Mexico, deserves our belated gratitude for championing the law.

The law allows presidents to establish preserves solely on public lands that already belong to the people of the United States, and only if these lands harbor “objects of historic and scientific interest.”

These objects can be big. One of Teddy Roosevelt’s first uses of the act protected the Grand Canyon, a bold interpretation of the law that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1920.

After a president uses the act to conserve historic places or significant landscapes, Congress often later elevates these national monuments to national parks, as happened with Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Grand Teton, Olympic, Death Valley, Saguaro and two dozen others.

One national park pilgrimage traced by millions of awestruck travelers begins at St. George following an itinerary that wouldn’t exist without the Antiquities Act. Heading east, first comes Zion, preserved originally as Mukuntuweap National Monument by William Howard Taft in 1909, and now the second most visited national park.

This national parks tour leads next to Bryce Canyon, where you perch above hoodoos protected by President Warren Harding in 1923.

Winding east on Scenic Byway 12, you drive through the slickrock bowls and fossil-filled badlands of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. President Bill Clinton designated Grand Staircase in 1996, and for the first time gave the Bureau of Land Management a conservation role instead of transferring control to the National Park Service. President Joe Biden used the Antiquities Act in 2021 to restore the monument after its evisceration by Donald Trump.

Highway 12 leads to Capitol Reef National Park and its great wall of barrier cliffs. Established as an Antiquities Act national monument by Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, it was later greatly enlarged by both Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson.

Onward through Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which embraces Rainbow Bridge National Monument, designated by President Howard Taft in 1910, to Bears Ears National Monument, Barack Obama’s 2016 bow of respect to regional tribes and their sacred lands. After a five-year truncation by Trump, Joe Biden restored Bears Ears to full size.

On to Moab, past Canyonlands National Park, created by an act of Congress and so the single exception to all these Antiquities Act preserves, and, finally, to Arches National Park, first designated a national monument by Herbert Hoover in 1929.

This is only a partial list of Antiquities Act preserves in Utah. Why so many?

The answer: aridity. Utah has the nation’s second-highest percentage of public land because we are the second driest state. Our arid land couldn’t provide a living to homesteaders, so two-thirds of Utah remains publicly owned. Utahns surrounded by these public lands have inherited a gift.

All Americans have equal say over national public lands, yet the Utah delegation claims state rights that have no basis in law or history. They pepper the Supreme Court with lawsuits and are attacking Grand Staircase right now, seeking to overthrow the current conservation-leaning resource management plan.

The American people believe otherwise. An impressive 91% of Western voters say national monuments should retain existing boundaries; 94% say rollback of environmental laws is a serious problem. In Utah, 75% of voters want the delegation to prioritize conservation on public lands over energy production.

On its 120^th anniversary, let’s celebrate this essential law that allows presidents to maintain, strengthen and highlight the bedrock values of our diverse lands, cultures, and communities. The writer Wallace Stegner famously said that national parks are “America’s best idea.”

The visionary Antiquities Act brings this idea to life, on the ground, for us all.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. A new edition of his classic natural history of the Great Basin Desert, The Sagebrush Ocean, will be published in October.

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Utah Republican Rep. Celeste Maloy is irritated. Her most recent attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument spurred wide and deep opposition. She pushed back in a video with direct, if misleading, language.

Maloy has long criticized this southern Utah national monument that was halved by President Trump during his first term, then restored under President Biden. One million awestruck visitors come here every year and spend money in the two Utah counties surrounding the monument, whose towns total less than 14,000 residents. Yet Maloy discounts data showing the economic value of preserved public lands. She neglects the world-class scientific value of these 1.9 million acres, detailed in Biden’s proclamation.

Maloy’s attack is wily. She and the rest of the congressional delegation know there’s too much public support to ask President Trump to again chop down the monument’s size. Nearly three out of four Utah voters are on record as wanting to keep Grand Staircase-Escalante protected as a national monument.

So Utah politicians are betting the public won’t pay as much attention to management retrenchment as they would to downsizing. They’re using a controversial tactic to force the Bureau of Land Management to abandon the current Resource Management Plan — a blueprint for how the BLM puts the presidential proclamation into effect on the ground.

But monument supporters are paying attention because management plans matter.

After President Biden restored the boundaries of Grand Staircase in 2021, the BLM worked with the public for two years to create the 2025 Resource Management Plan, listening to every conceivable collaborative partner. Such plans guide decision-making for years, and this true compromise keeps ranchers’ grazing permits in place while also factoring in a warming planet, persistent drought, the need for biodiversity and a sustainable future.

Now, Maloy has obtained an opinion from the Government Accountability Office to treat the 2025 plan merely as a “rule” that Congress can overturn. This unprecedented allowance can’t be challenged in court and permits the Utah delegation to use the Congressional Review Act to kill the conservation-based plan and bar the agency from issuing any “substantially the same” plan in the future. The Trump-era plan that would take its place leaves much of the monument unprotected from extractive industry and off-road vehicles.

Maloy said that emphasizing conservation “undercuts rural economic development.” Frrom 2001 to 2022, however, real per capita income grew by 41 percent in the monument’s counties.

She said that local residents and “trail users” oppose the Biden plan. This is cherry-picking. Motorized trail users always want greater access, even though the Biden-era plan left more than 800 miles of dirt roads and trails open for motorized vehicles.

When Maloy talks about “deep cultural traditions” being disrupted by the current management plan, she isn’t listening to indigenous people who have made this place their home since time immemorial. The six Native Nations of the Grand-Staircase Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition oppose her move, noting that without the “clear roadmap for protection and conservation” provided by the current management plan, “our ancestral lands and … cultural sites within the monument would be at greater risk of looting, vandalism, graffiti, and degradation.”

To support their attacks, Utah’s politicians use their timeworn template to argue exclusively for “the needs and voices of the people who live and work on this land.” These politicians, however, listen only to county commissioners and legacy ranchers, not to a much broader constituency.

This is Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, not Grand Staircase County Park. The environmental, scientific, interpretive and indigenous values and potential of these public lands have national and international importance.

This new attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante from Congress — along with a parallel attack on Minnesota’s Boundary Waters — would set a national precedent with no public input that could upend public lands protection for years. Even the deeply conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation said it fears a “Wild West” for land-use planning if Congress acts on Maloy’s radical approach.

The exhausting years-long battle to protect the resources and restorative magic of Grand Staircase-Escalante can wear out supporters. But this place gives us no choice but to speak up once again. Staying silent puts federal agencies in an impossible position and places all of our public lands at risk. Let your members of Congress know that preservation of the monument requires leaving the current resource management plan in place.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He’s been hiking in Grand Staircase and writing about Colorado Plateau conservation for 50 years.

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Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument rarely leaves the news. The political tussle over this stunning expanse of red rock canyons exemplifies all the cultural dissonance in the rural West.

Three presidents have signed Bears Ears proclamations. Barack Obama established Bears Ears National Monument in 2016, and supporters were devastated when Donald Trump eviscerated the monument the following year, reducing its area by 85%. In 2021, President Joe Biden restored the original boundaries and then some, disappointing others.

What’s clear is that Bears Ears remains reviled by Republican officials and cherished by Indigenous tribes and conservationists.

The monument, 1.36 million acres in southeast Utah, lies within San Juan County. The Navajo Nation covers 25% of the county, and native people account for more than half of the 14,200-person population. Just 8% of the county is private land, while 5% is state trust land.

The rest — 62% of the county — is federal land owned by the people of the United States and administered by the departments of Agriculture and Interior. This immense commons testifies to the sublime difficulty of the place — beautiful enough to warrant preservation as national parks, monuments and forests. But it’s also arid enough to attract only a few 19th-century settlers to what had been indigenous homeland for millennia.

I think it’s fair to say that San Juan County’s white residents never envisioned challenges to their political power. But in 2009, the feds came down hard on generations of casual pot hunting by local white families. Then, after a century of oppressing their indigenous neighbors, lawsuits strengthened native voting rights. The county commission became majority Navajo from 2018 to 2022.

Native influence keeps expanding. The five tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition first envisioned a national monument and became co-stewards for these 1.36 million acres. They have a champion in Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, but such historic changes make the dominant culture uneasy.

In February, Gov. Spencer Cox dramatically withdrew from a Bears Ears land exchange poised for completion. This swap of state trust lands for Bureau of Land Management lands would hugely benefit the state. Details were already negotiated; each side compromised; the stakeholders were largely content.

But in 2024, Utah politics are stark, compounded by distrust and disinformation.

At statehood in 1896, Utah received four sections per township to support public schools and universities. The Utah Trust Lands Administration manages these scattered lands — blue squares on ownership maps — but blocking up these blue squares into manageable parcels means trading land with federal agencies.

Such trades aren’t rare and can be grand in scale. A 1998 negotiation between Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt traded Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument’s 176,000 acres of school sections for BLM land elsewhere — along with a hefty $50 million payment to Utah from the U.S. Treasury. Utah Trust Lands still brags about the deal on its website.

But the old guard is up in arms about the draft Bears Ears Resource Management Plan released for public comment in March. The BLM’s preferred alternative emphasizes traditional Indigenous knowledge and land health.

Any such gestures toward conservation elicit local outrage about the feds “destroying” the pioneer way of life. The subtext: The people long in charge don’t want to lose power.

Denouncing federal overreach is always a sure win for Utah politicians. In this year’s Republican primary, San Juan County-based legislator Phil Lyman is challenging the incumbent governor with fierce anti-public lands rhetoric. Gov. Cox must protect his right flank.

Meanwhile, school trust lands within Bears Ears remain at risk. The second tallest structure in Utah, a 460-foot telecom tower with blinking red lights, could rise on state land in the heart of the monument. It’s been approved by county planners, and the Trust Lands Administration could add poison pills on other lands proposed for exchange.

The elected leaders of Utah have decided that the monument’s integrity and the needs of the state’s children matter less than political gamesmanship.

The five tribes of Bears Ears know better: “It is our obligation to our ancestors … and to the American people, to protect Bears Ears.” Their big hearts will win in the end.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Utah and will publish the 35th anniversary edition of his book “The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin” next winter.

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When I read the Salt Lake Tribune editorial on July 2, my heart sank. A Utah man with severe mental illness had died in a poorly regulated care home, with a mere $8,000 fine levied against the managers.

The editorial was fierce: “It doesn’t seem to matter how horrible the care … how many of these residents live in filth and squalor … the responsible authorities apparently make little to no effort to whip the homes into shape or, failing that, shut them down.”

In 1976, my disabled brother, Mike Trimble, died in just such a care home, in Denver. I’ve spent a decade researching his life and death for my book, “The Mike File,” and I know well the details and politics of his death.

Mike left home after turning 14 when his diagnosis — “paranoid schizophrenia, capable of violence” — shattered our family. A court committed him to the Colorado State Hospital in 1957. He never lived at home again.

When mental hospitals emptied their wards a decade later, Mike was mainstreamed back to Denver. Rejoining our family did not go well. Angry and resentful, Mike’s visits triggered emotional chaos. He soon cut off all contact.

In 1976, Mike died during a seizure, alone in his boarding home and undiscovered for three days. The Denver media used his solitary death to expose the “ratholes” that warehoused people with mental illness. Our mother found out about the loss of her 33-year-old son from the front page of the Denver Post.

The owner of Mike’s ironically named “Carefree Guest Home” described his death as a “slip up.” The staff member who should have checked on Mike was “snowed under.” Two other residents had died unnoticed in previous months.

In the days following Mike’s death, the director of the Colorado Commission on the Disabled demanded action. “I’m …thinking …of the other 85 residents there,” he said. “How many of them were not seen over the weekend but did not die?”

Officials issued “a severe reprimand.” Dr. Paul Kuhn, director of Denver’s Personal Health Service, said that Carefree had made “significant improvements,” but he mentioned only one: “Anyone not in the breakfast line is sought out and checked.”

Kuhn gave Carefree a break because of poor funding that left the guest home perpetually understaffed. “This is more than a Denver problem,” he said. “It’s a statewide problem. It’s a great societal problem.”

Reprimand issued, case closed, but hardly progress.

In 2002, The New York Times ran a Pulitzer Prize-winning series that included the story of Randolph Maddix, living in a private home for the mentally ill in Brooklyn. Maddix died during a seizure and wasn’t found for many hours. “His back, curled and stiff with rigor mortis, had to be broken to fit him into a body bag.”

In 2006, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran a series on the horrors of board-and-care homes, including the tale of a resident who died and wasn’t found for three days. These stories of outrageous neglect keep recurring, always about people overwhelmed by their mental disorders and neglected by their caregivers.

Why does Dr. Kuhn’s “great societal problem” persist?

As we steadily eliminated more than 500,000 beds in state psychiatric hospitals starting in the mid-1950s, according to a study by the American Psychiatric Association, the number of people with severe mental illness was growing with the U.S. population. Stigma and shame often silenced their families. Effective treatment disappeared into the fog of competing agencies, with no coordinated plan for people with chronic mental illness. Then add today’s epidemic of homelessness and prisons crammed with people who need psychiatric treatment more than incarceration.

While researching my book, I spoke with a Colorado psychologist who summed up our failure to care for our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters, our children and friends: “The mentally ill don’t have a strong lobby.”

The recent Tribune editorial proposes incentives for decently run care homes and appropriate punishments for neglect. But what we really need is a transformative system of care for the vulnerable and voiceless, and housing for those without homes. We know what to do. So far, we have chosen not to act.

This problem remains with us, just as it did in 1976 when I lost my brother. Please don’t let us read these same plaintive stories and unanswered calls for action when another 50 years have passed.

Utah writer Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. His latest book is “The Mike File: A Story of Grief and Hope.”

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