Announcing the actions in Salt Lake City, President Trump has removed some 2 million acres from the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments and split the two monuments into five. Bears Ears was split into two separate areas: Shash Jaa at 129,980 acres and Indian Creek at 71,896 acres. Together the two comprise 201,876 acres, as compared to the 1.35 million acres that President Barack Obama named last December. Grand Staircase, named by President Bill Clinton in 1996, has been divided into three monuments: Grand Staircase at 209,993 acres, Kaiparowits at 551,034 acres and Escalante Canyon at 242,836 acres. The combined areas covered by monument status in the former Grand Staircase Escalante national monument is just over 1 million acres, down from 1.9 million acres originally designated.
We’ll talk about these changes and look to the future on Tuesday’s Access Utah. Our guests will include:
Ethel Branch, Attorney General of the Navajo Nation
Bob Keiter, director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the University of Utah
Jim Matson, Kane County Commissioner
Bruce Adams, San Juan County Commissioner
Kristen Brengel, vice president of Government Affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association
Ben Schreiber, senior political strategist at Friends of the Earth
Steve Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
