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President Donald Trump signed an executive order drastically shrinking the size of two national monument areas in Utah on Monday.
The order applies to the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, shrinking their total coverage by roughly 90% from 3 million acres to 300,000. The areas were established as federal monuments by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2016, respectively.
“They took the land from the people quite honestly,” Trump said during the Monday signing ceremony. “We’re giving it back.”
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox also attended the signing and praised the move, saying the original size of the monuments was far too expansive.
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“We believe that under the Antiquities Act, it’s very clear that these monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area possible to protect the antiquities, and these multimillion-acre monuments that are bigger than the state of Delaware certainly do not fit that designation,” he said.
Local Native American groups have criticized the move, however, as both monument areas contain parts of their history, including cliffside villages and petroglyphs.
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“From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not simply a piece of federal public land,” said Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. “This is a living cultural site that holds our histories, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines and our ancestors’ footprints.”
Protections for national monuments apply to the surrounding landscape as well, preventing drilling, mining and construction. The original designations for the two monuments contained large deposits of coal and uranium.
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Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have pushed for using more federal land to expand U.S. energy production, clearing the way for mining and oil drilling in Alaska as well.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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