While it might seem wonderful to me a New Jerseyite living 2000 miles away, there are many people local to the Monument areas who felt this imposed on their rights and wishes. The magnitude of Obama's decision should have gone through Congress so the People could decide, not just one person. Then it could have been set up as a National Park rather than a Monument. Presidents aren't kings.
Presidents aren't kings...and you are saying that about who? Obama?
The facts of the case of federal vs state and local control was litigated at length in
Trump II so I won't bother to retry the case against what Trump has done....but the founder and CEO of Patagonia are engaged in a strong fight against what Trump has done. You can read more about it in this NYTimes article
Patagonia v. TrumpThe outdoor retailer has supported grass-roots environmental activists for decades. Now it is suing the president in a bid to protect Bears Ears National Monument.
I will say that the local control isn't a great argument...not when local yahoos with rifles shot up ancient petroglyphs as reported here
As Utah County develops, what is being done to protect ancient petroglyphs?Provo • As Steve Acerson perused ancient petroglyphs on the west side of Utah Lake on an unseasonably warm February morning, he started getting more and more upset.
The rock art enthusiast and president of the Utah Rock Art Research Association goes out frequently to identify rock art, and is intimately familiar with many of the known petroglyphs in Utah County — he helped discover many of them.
But as he reached down to point out a petroglyph depicting a bighorn sheep, he noticed the top half of the sheep had been damaged to the point that anyone who wanted to could pick up the detached piece of rock depicting the sheep's head, put it in their pocket, and walk away.
The reason for the damage? The piece of rock depicting the bighorn sheep lay at the base of a ridge used as a backdrop in a popular target shooting area on public lands.
But it's not just random mindless destruction going on but also wholesale looting of ancient Indian site as reported by Smithsonian magazine:
An Exclusive Look at the Greatest Haul of Native American Artifacts, EverAt dawn on June 10, 2009, almost 100 federal agents pulled up to eight homes in Blanding, Utah, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying side arms. An enormous cloud hung over the region, one of them recalled, blocking out the rising sun and casting an ominous glow over the Four Corners region, where the borders of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet. At one hilltop residence, a team of a dozen agents banged on the door and arrested the owners—a well-respected doctor and his wife. Similar scenes played out across the Four Corners that morning as officers took an additional 21 men and women into custody. Later that day, the incumbent interior secretary and deputy U.S. attorney general, Ken Salazar and David W. Ogden, announced the arrests as part of “the nation’s largest investigation of archaeological and cultural artifact thefts.” The agents called it Operation Cerberus, after the three-headed hellhound of Greek mythology.
It seems that locals from Blanding Utah (the closest large town near Bears Ears) have been systematically looting all over southern Utah...but yeah, they are locals and should have the right to control their own territory huh?
And you don't really want to know how the locals are hoping to exploit that land removed from Bears Ears and Escalante...
Drilling and Mining Interests Pushed to Shrink Utah National Monuments, Documents RevealEven though Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke insisted “this is not about energy,” environmentalists and public lands advocates have long suspected the Trump administration's cuts to national monuments were driven by its push for more drilling, mining and other development.
Now, internal Interior Department documents obtained by the New York Times show that gaining access to the oil, natural gas and uranium deposits in Bears Ears and coal reserves in Grand Staircase-Escalante were indeed key reasons behind President Trump's drastic cuts to the two monuments in Utah.
In March 2017, an aide to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) asked a senior Interior Department official to consider reduced boundaries for Bears Ears to remove land that contained oil and natural gas deposits. Hatch's office sent a map depicting a boundary change for the southeast portion of the Bears Ears monument to “resolve all known mineral conflicts,” the email said, referring to oil and gas sites on the land that the state's public schools wanted to lease out to increase state funds.
As the Times reported, the map that Hatch's office provided—and notably sent about a month before Sec. Zinke publicly initiated his review of national monuments in April—was incorporated almost exactly into the much larger reductions President Trump would later announce.
Yeah, sorry...pretty sure the locals aren't the best judges of what is done. So far they have not been good stewards. Seems greed is their primary motive...kinda like Trump, huh?