Republicans try prevent turning Bears Ears into a national monument

[struggle4progress]

TUESDAY, JUL 12, 2016 05:56 AM EDT
AMANDA MARCOTTE

... Last summer, 26 tribes — from the Hopi Tribe , Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni, and the Ute Indian Tribe — joined together to form the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition to ask President Obama to designate the Bears Ears area as a national monument.

“The proposed 1.9 million acre monument is a landscape of deep, carved canyons, long mesas, inspiring arches, and arresting red rock formations,” explains the Inter-Tribal Coalition’s proposal. It’s a place where the “landscape records their ancestors’ migration routes, ancient roads, great houses, villages, granaries, hogans, wikiups, sweat lodges, corrals, petroglyphs and pictographs, tipi rings, shade houses, and burial grounds” ...

... a newly radicalized Republican party that, under pressure from groups like American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Americans for Prosperity (AFP), has decided to start quietly dismantling the system of federal land protections, with an eye towards turning America The Beautiful into America The Strip-Mined ...

This Saturday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell will be having a public meeting to discuss the future of Bears Ears, an important step if Obama is to make the area a national monument. Jewell has previously spoken about the need for the national parks and monument system to be more inclusive of Native Americans ...

http://www.salon.com/2016/07/12/war_on_federal_parks_radicalized_republicans_try_prevent_turning_bears_ears_in_utah_into_a_national_monument/

[liberal N proud]

1. Is there any humanitarian effort the GOP is not against?

[dhill926]

2. just because they're fucking assholes...

a plague upon our country...

[MFM008]

4. you win the internet today...

[L. Coyote]

3. Expect the fossil fuel lobby to bus in a lot of astroturf opposition.

This may be turned into a confrontational scene, a la #BundyTeaParty, Phil Lyman, Utah Land Grabbers, et.al., because there is so much money to be made extracting resources.

I notice in online fora that there is a concerted effort to troll any support for Bears Ears designation. Someone is pumping Big Oil money into the opposition.

[2naSalit]

6. And backing from these asswipes...

Utah land grab “institute” used false data about recreation on Utah state lands

Washington state data used to represent Utah.

Occasionally land grab groups produce reports intended to show how state management of lands is superior to management of our national public lands by the BLM, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, etc.

About a week ago one such group in Utah, the Sutherland Institute, issued a report that claimed their data showed Utah’s state parks were managed both more efficiently and were more popular than the national parks of the West.

They used some very odd indicators of popularity and efficiency. For example, for popularity they calculated “state park visits per acre.” They found that per acre Utah’s small and smallish state parks got more visitors per acre than most national parks. This kind of measurement makes the vast backcountry of the national parks count negatively in the measure. Instead of Yellowstone Park’s overcrowded roads, what counts to the Sutherland Institute is that the wilderness backcountry has no traffic jams, and so an inefficient use of the land. By the metric they use, crowded and tiny city parks would be the best managed recreation land of all.
---SNIP---

More at link http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2016/07/06/utah-land-grab-institute-used-false-data-about-recreation-on-utah-state-lands/

[L. Coyote]

7. The lawyers get paid with state funds no matterhow badly they fail!

[Wellstone ruled]

5. That area of Utah

does not have a shortage of hate filled persons who support stealing Public Lands to be sold to the highest bidder.

Has the opportunity to hike and camp in that area,absolutely beautiful and many many artifacts as well as ancient dwellings. That was 15 years ago,and our guide was a off duty BLM Ranger. Thank you BLM.