This December, WildEarth Guardians filed suit to defend Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments from Trump’s illegal land grabbing.
On December 5, mere hours after Trump issued a proclamation that would reduce Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to half its current size, Guardians and allies filed suit to preserve this magnificent landscape. The president’s order opens up large portions of the monument, which is home to 648 species of wildlife, to exploitation at the hands of the coal industry.
Days later, Guardians filed a second suit against Trump’s evisceration of Bears Ears National Monument, which he shrunk by more than one million acres. Bears Ears contains ancient cliff dwellings, sacred tribal cultural sites, and iconic wildlife, and was designated a national monument after a historic inter-tribal coalition advocated for its protection. Without this protection, the monument’s lands risk being looted, drilled, and mined, as well as damaged by off-road vehicles.
Trump’s destruction of these monuments is illegal under the Antiquities Act, which grants presidents the authority to create national monuments, but not the authority to erase or alter previous presidents’ monument designations.
Read the Grand Staircase-Escalante press release.
Read the Bears Ears press release.
