This is starting to effect my health ... just makes me sad to the bone.
Your Input is NEEDED NOW!
- Thread starter rando
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Stalking Light
Feral Grandpa
I love Utah for its' photographic and overlanding opportunities and have spent a decent amount of time and money there for years, but now I'm looking for things to do in other states and if I do decide to visit Utah I will make sure I am fully stocked with supplies before I go so I spend as little $$ as possible in the state. If the 'locals' want the land for themselves I don't want to subsidize their efforts.
Don't let it get to your "health",you need to be strong to fight the "evil empire"buckland said:
May the force be with you.
Frank
To some degree this has nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with Utah. I am sure Trump had no idea where Bears Ears or GSENM were, and likely still has no idea where they are. He is just appeasing the delegation from UT that supported him.
I too have spent months of time in SE Utah exploring the many wonderful areas, but made a promise that I would not be spending anymore money in UT after this debacle. Between the Outdoor Retailer show moving to CO and many of the smaller individual protests, lets hope UT feels some pain for this.
I too have spent months of time in SE Utah exploring the many wonderful areas, but made a promise that I would not be spending anymore money in UT after this debacle. Between the Outdoor Retailer show moving to CO and many of the smaller individual protests, lets hope UT feels some pain for this.
Charlie right on. I am an old hippie tho I don’t look like one anymore. I had plans to spend a lot of time in Utah but no more. I am of the same mind as you. If they think mining will give the average Joe anything in return then shame on them. Money will go to the likes of our Treasurer and his spouse who works so hard for those who have less. It is pitiful. Bottom line is we can’t ever bring it back once it is altered. Shallow minds deep pockets.
I went through the "Boycott Utah" stage when some of this first came about but I have friends there who rely on tourist revenues and after talking to them I figured out an alternative that works for me : I contribute more to SUWA, Friends of Cedar Breaks, GSENM Partners and other groups than I do to the state of Utah in the way of sales and fuel taxes. I know it isn't perfect but it helps me to feel better when I have to stop through someplace in Bluff, Kanab, Moab and such (as for Blanding, I won't spend money there regardless).
teledork
Pinyon Jay
Yes. And the projection/hypocrisy/psychotic rhetoric that insists parks/monuments/wilderness are "locking out" citizens (not to mention one not to be named news corporation proclaiming that oil and gas production would do less harm than tourism) begs the question: will the citizens who own the land be allowed to do so much as walk a dog on it when it is covered with oil and gas wells?Lighthawk said:
I agree with you on donating to SUWA, NRDC and NPCA, all of which I am a member off. My logic with the boycott is that since I don't vote in UT, UT politicians don't really care what I think. But if I can get a few more utwegians to speak up about how their policies are hurting their bottom lines, maybe, just maybe they will listen.
Cayuse said:
PaulT
Need gumbo
I see the issue coming down to two positions:
1. Nothing in the Antiquities Act of 1906 allow a successor president to revoke a predecessor's National Monument declaration.
2. The National Monument declaration is not being revoked. It is being reduced in size to comply with the Act's requirement to be as small as possible to preserve the object of scientific or historic importance.
This may come down to specifying the object(s) being preserved and what is required to preserve them.
As to the lawsuits, I suspect that this administration will not allow the "sue and settle" approach of some previous administrations.
For those with a hair trigger: Notice that this is to raise points of discussion rather than ad hominem attacks on the author.
Paul
1. Nothing in the Antiquities Act of 1906 allow a successor president to revoke a predecessor's National Monument declaration.
2. The National Monument declaration is not being revoked. It is being reduced in size to comply with the Act's requirement to be as small as possible to preserve the object of scientific or historic importance.
This may come down to specifying the object(s) being preserved and what is required to preserve them.
As to the lawsuits, I suspect that this administration will not allow the "sue and settle" approach of some previous administrations.
For those with a hair trigger: Notice that this is to raise points of discussion rather than ad hominem attacks on the author.
Paul
Stalking Light
Feral Grandpa
Exactly. The people of Utah continue to elect these clowns and they are the only ones who can change that.rando said:
It is sad but true that the only way to get them to realize that eco-tourists count for something big is to Vote with one's wallet as I am not a resident. Short sighted profit blinds being a steward of the land.
I recently read an article about the ladies who run the Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, UT. They mentioned how many employment opportunities tourism offered to the folks who live in Southern Utah, saying their employees made roughly twice minimum wage. On the Hell’s Backbone Grill web site there’s a long list of nonprofit organizations they support, including some mentioned above. Here’s a link to their site. http://hellsbackbonegrill.com/about/Cayuse said:
I think you also need to add:PaulT said:I see the issue coming down to two positions:
1. Nothing in the Antiquities Act of 1906 allow a successor president to revoke a predecessor's National Monument declaration.
2. The National Monument declaration is not being revoked. It is being reduced in size to comply with the Act's requirement to be as small as possible to preserve the object of scientific or historic importance.
This may come down to specifying the object(s) being preserved and what is required to preserve them.
As to the lawsuits, I suspect that this administration will not allow the "sue and settle" approach of some previous administrations.
For those with a hair trigger: Notice that this is to raise points of discussion rather than ad hominem attacks on the author.
Paul
3. Nothing in the antiquities act allows a successor president to modify an existing national monument.
But that aside, none of this has anything to do the antiquities act or the protection of specific resources - it is entirely a political exercise to appease the anti public lands politicians in Utah.
1. The whole 'review' was set up specifically to target these two monuments, why else does only include monuments in the past 21 years?
2. Secondly states where the republicans in their delegation supported their monuments (eg Colorado) were immediately removed from the list.
3.Finally one of the major pretenses for this review was that the 'public's voice wasn't heard' in the creation of these monuments. Yet when they solicited public comment and received millions of comments that overwhelmingly supported keeping these particular monuments as they are, they were ignored out of hand.
Foy
Resident Geologist
I, for one, appreciate this approach to analysis of the situation, and I am only interested in points of discussion as opposed to flames.PaulT said:I see the issue coming down to two positions:
1. Nothing in the Antiquities Act of 1906 allow a successor president to revoke a predecessor's National Monument declaration.
2. The National Monument declaration is not being revoked. It is being reduced in size to comply with the Act's requirement to be as small as possible to preserve the object of scientific or historic importance.
This may come down to specifying the object(s) being preserved and what is required to preserve them.
As to the lawsuits, I suspect that this administration will not allow the "sue and settle" approach of some previous administrations.
For those with a hair trigger: Notice that this is to raise points of discussion rather than ad hominem attacks on the author.
Paul
I've always been curious about the Antiquities Act, but never curious enough to look it up and read the statute. Have there been no updates/additions/modifications of the statute since 1906, or is the text within Paul's link here (earlier in this thread) really all which is codified?
Absent material updates/additions/modifications, I find substantial agreement with the position "no matter how much a particular potential NM is "worth saving", the Antiquities Act, as sometimes used at least in recent decades, surely seems to be the wrong tool for reserving large areas for highly restricted use.
There are some complex and extremely thorny issues involved in reserving areas of historical or scientific significance. What is of historical significance to one segment of the population may lack same to other segments. Ditto scientific significance. Who is the arbiter of what constitutes historic significance? The original Act is silent on those elementary questions.
In the views of some in the Eastern and Midwestern US, the West is a vast "inexhaustible" reserve of open land, including tens of millions of acres having NM or NP status and thus closed to economic development. Some Easterners (not yours truly) wonder "how much of the public lands need to be reserved for highly restricted access and removed forever from economic development?" I say this not in support of lessening acreage of protected Federal lands as a necessary thing, but instead to bring to the table the thought processes of others which is likely 180 degrees opposed to most regulars here.
I will add, just for the record and to better understand where I'm coming from, that my schooling as a geologist and some years in the mining business leaves me far more supportive of mineral development on Federal lands than most. As citizens of the US, the resources belong to all of us and proposals for minimally invasive/minimal impact development such as was proposed for the ANWR (with something like 4/1,000ths of its acreage "opened" for oil and gas drilling), doesn't trigger an automatic negative reaction from me. My own view is that the great majority of mineral development and oil and gas projects can be and nowadays are arranged to have minimal impact on the land.
So, back to the Antiquities Act: Are those 4 sections all there is in the United States Code? If so, methinks it's an uphill battle to prevent a sitting President, regardless of what we otherwise think of him and his political party, and regardless of what we think his/their underlying motivations may be, from simply tailoring prior reservations to more closely follow the Antiquities Act itself. I think a real constitutional test in now in the making, and that ardent conservationists (generally including me), need to work towards employing other tools in the toolbox to seek reservation of our favorite special places.
Foy
Smokecreek1
Smokecreek1
Okay Guys, I'm a retired fed archaeologist (BLM) and have spent a good part of my professional life working with and implementing this act and the regulations that try to make it work---and that's the problem. When Congress passed the actual act, they did not include details on how to make it work-it left that up to the government, working with them and the courts to work out the details (the regulations that make it work). While the law itself is hard to change, it is much easier to change the regulations that implement it. Every administration can and sometimes does interpret these reg's a little bit differently from another one and unless it is challenged, the agencies follow these new interpretations. That's what's going on here and now it;s up to the courts to figure out what happens next.
While the Act itself is fairly simple, making it work is another story. I was hired under the authority of what were called, the National Historic Act of 1964(NHPA) and the National Environmental Act (NEPA)-two of one of the many laws and regulations written on how to use and implement the 1906 Antiquities Act and other associated environmental policy and laws. It's all one big package that has been developed over the years and impacting one part of it affects all of it. My own part of it-Section 106, has it's own structure, process, rules and descriptions that generally details on how one determines whether or not an historic property is or is not eligible for inclusion on a list (the National Register of Historic Places)of properties that are protected. by the 106 Act. Once a property is on/or determined eligible for that list, the law says you have to take any impacts on it in consideration before you undertake any action which could impact it-lot's of interpretation there.
The general criteria used to determine whether a property is eligible is on how it rates in relation to other properties of the same general type in that geographic location, it's age,culture, historical importance, condition and/or how unique it is. A type of property can be eligible in one place and the same type of property not eligible in another. Good example: We had a historic rock cobbled road that we thought was important to the history of our area and we considered it National Register Quality and did not want it disturbed and it was being managed as a NR property- --the state wanted to build a highway over it and said it was not NR because there are allot of historic roads and neither side would budge. So the project went to arbitration at an organization designed to mediate such disputes in the Dept of Interior.
They backed us (the local) and the State gave up and the road location was changed. If they had wanted the state( or us) could have appealed to the Sec. of Interior. Generally speaking, most what is or is not NR is covered by agreements that determine significance that are made between the various states, Native Americans groups and federal government that cover specific areas and types of historic and cultural properties: most projects do not go to arbitration. Now magnify this project many times over when you are dealing with a National Monument that is covered by a whole bunch of laws that deal with not just historic properties but scientific, natural and geological objects and religious and cultural values. Signing ones names to some document will not change this process without taking the law into consideration.
Last comment: the Act itself covers a whole bunch of things from archaeological and historical objects , to geological and natural wonders-just about anything scientifically unique -a wonderfully inclusive act that has spawned a whole bunch of new laws, regulations and interpretations. That's how things work-or don't, but it is a process designed to follow the law. Hope this helps, so despite what the pres and his bunch think it's now up to the courts and not them, to figure out what happens next !
Smoke
While the Act itself is fairly simple, making it work is another story. I was hired under the authority of what were called, the National Historic Act of 1964(NHPA) and the National Environmental Act (NEPA)-two of one of the many laws and regulations written on how to use and implement the 1906 Antiquities Act and other associated environmental policy and laws. It's all one big package that has been developed over the years and impacting one part of it affects all of it. My own part of it-Section 106, has it's own structure, process, rules and descriptions that generally details on how one determines whether or not an historic property is or is not eligible for inclusion on a list (the National Register of Historic Places)of properties that are protected. by the 106 Act. Once a property is on/or determined eligible for that list, the law says you have to take any impacts on it in consideration before you undertake any action which could impact it-lot's of interpretation there.
The general criteria used to determine whether a property is eligible is on how it rates in relation to other properties of the same general type in that geographic location, it's age,culture, historical importance, condition and/or how unique it is. A type of property can be eligible in one place and the same type of property not eligible in another. Good example: We had a historic rock cobbled road that we thought was important to the history of our area and we considered it National Register Quality and did not want it disturbed and it was being managed as a NR property- --the state wanted to build a highway over it and said it was not NR because there are allot of historic roads and neither side would budge. So the project went to arbitration at an organization designed to mediate such disputes in the Dept of Interior.
They backed us (the local) and the State gave up and the road location was changed. If they had wanted the state( or us) could have appealed to the Sec. of Interior. Generally speaking, most what is or is not NR is covered by agreements that determine significance that are made between the various states, Native Americans groups and federal government that cover specific areas and types of historic and cultural properties: most projects do not go to arbitration. Now magnify this project many times over when you are dealing with a National Monument that is covered by a whole bunch of laws that deal with not just historic properties but scientific, natural and geological objects and religious and cultural values. Signing ones names to some document will not change this process without taking the law into consideration.
Last comment: the Act itself covers a whole bunch of things from archaeological and historical objects , to geological and natural wonders-just about anything scientifically unique -a wonderfully inclusive act that has spawned a whole bunch of new laws, regulations and interpretations. That's how things work-or don't, but it is a process designed to follow the law. Hope this helps, so despite what the pres and his bunch think it's now up to the courts and not them, to figure out what happens next !
Smoke
Foy
Resident Geologist
Thanks so much for the insight, Smoke. It stands to reason that there are (probably) thousands of pages of Regulations promulgated under the statute as well as thousands of pages of ancillary statutes and their own thousands of pages of regulations. The Internal Revenue Code, including the Regulations, with which I toil away under every day, started off with simple statutory language in 1913, just 7 years after the Antiquities Act was enacted, and look how voluminous it is today!.
I'd say you also confirmed that declaration of what property or asset should be preserved is the subject of much of the follow-on statutory and regulatory processes. Furthermore, we may assume that the initial boundaries of the two NMs now proposed for reduction in size had already been vetted in extremis for compliance with the statutes and regs. Lastly, it seems we may assume the effort to reduce the size faces a serious uphill battle if all of the i's were dotted and the t's crossed in the Executive Order creating or expanding them. Seems like it would take a reversal of position/opinion by the Dept of Interior itself to successfully argue that some sort of error or mis-statement was present initially. I can't envision legions of DOI managers and directors all saying "Never mind--we got it wrong" at this point, can you?
Thanks again.
Foy
I'd say you also confirmed that declaration of what property or asset should be preserved is the subject of much of the follow-on statutory and regulatory processes. Furthermore, we may assume that the initial boundaries of the two NMs now proposed for reduction in size had already been vetted in extremis for compliance with the statutes and regs. Lastly, it seems we may assume the effort to reduce the size faces a serious uphill battle if all of the i's were dotted and the t's crossed in the Executive Order creating or expanding them. Seems like it would take a reversal of position/opinion by the Dept of Interior itself to successfully argue that some sort of error or mis-statement was present initially. I can't envision legions of DOI managers and directors all saying "Never mind--we got it wrong" at this point, can you?
Thanks again.
Foy
I think it is important to look at the man who is in charge of the OUR Interior ... I am beginning to not like what I am learning:
The last two paragraphs, seem to say what I feel.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2266216/man-flies-his-own-flag
The last two paragraphs, seem to say what I feel.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2266216/man-flies-his-own-flag
So, what happens IF the government changes/changes its mind? Does it all flip back/forth again?Foy said:
I love that the conversations on this forum are informed, reasonable and respectful. Gives me hope in humankind!
I wish there was more us foreigners could do.
Vic
ok, that was a long read... man, I know more about american politics than ever. Not sure how I feel about that. I just wish for my kids and grandkids to be able to enjoy nature. With ever more people on the planet, it seems we should be working harder to preserve nature wherever we can. Sigh...buckland said:
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