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Mr. Zinke has said that the agency review process made no presumptions about the outcomes. “We want to make sure that everyone’s voice is heard,” Mr. Zinke said at a news conference in May during a visit to Bears Ears. He has also disputed that the review of Bears Ears was related to the potential for energy production, suggesting that the agency’s own surveys showed there was not a great deal of potential there.

“We also have a pretty good idea of, certainly, the oil and gas potential — not much!” Mr. Zinke said last year. “So Bears Ears isn’t really about oil and gas.”

Most of the deliberations took place behind closed doors. The internal Interior Department emails — more than 25,000 pages in total — were obtained by The New York Times after it sued the agency in federal court with the assistance of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale University Law School. The lawsuit cited the agency’s failure to respond to an open records request in August asking for internal records related to the deliberations.

The bulk of the documents made public by the Interior Department — about 20,000 pages of them — detail the yearslong effort during the Obama administration to create new monuments, including input from environmental groups, Indian tribes, state officials and members of Congress. President Barack Obama created or expanded 29 national monuments during his tenure, representing a total of about 553 million acres, more than any of his predecessors.

The remaining pages, a total of approximately 4,500 files, relate to the Trump administration’s reconsideration of these actions by Mr. Obama and other presidents.

Heather Swift, the Interior Department spokeswoman, said in a statement that, in reviewing monuments, “The Secretary took into consideration the views of a variety of interested parties, such as members of congress, governors, state and tribal leaders, and the public, including the views of those parties as to possible revised monument boundaries. One such organization that weighed in was the State of Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) which is responsible for funding so the children of Utah receive a quality education.”

Matthew Whitlock, a spokesman for Senator Hatch, said that the senator has been involved in discussions around Bears Ears for years. He emphasized that some of the land had long been designated to help fund local schools, and that Senator Hatch’s interest was to protect the school funding.

The internal Interior Department emails and memos also show the central role that concerns over gaining access to coal reserves played in the decision by the Trump administration to shrink the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about 47 percent, to just over 1 million acres.

Mr. Zinke’s staff developed a series of estimates on the value of coal that could potentially be mined from a section of Grand Staircase called the Kaiparowits plateau. As a result of Mr. Trump’s action, major parts of the area are no longer a part of the national monument.

“The Kaiparowits plateau, located within the monument, contains one of the largest coal deposits in the United States,” an Interior Department memo, issued in the spring of 2017, said. About 11.36 billion tons are “technologically recoverable,” it projected.

From the start of the Interior Department review process, agency officials directed staff to figure out how much coal, oil and natural gas— as well as grass for cattle grazing and timber — had been put essentially off limits, or made harder to access, by the decision to designate the areas as national monuments.

President Trump and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah at the White House in December.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

One memo, for example, asked Interior staff to prepare a report on each national monument, with a yellow highlighter on the documents emphasizing the need to examine in detail “annual production of coal, oil, gas and renewables (if any) on site; amount of energy transmission infrastructure on site (if any).” It was followed up by a reminder to staff in June to also look at how the decision to create new National Monuments in Utah might have hurt area mines.

“Sorry about this, but this came from DOI late yesterday,” Timothy Fisher, the leader of the National Monuments and Conservation Areas program at Interior wrote to his colleagues, referring to the Department of Interior headquarters in Washington. “Are there mines or processing facilities near or adjacent to a National Monument?” he wrote. He also asked how the protection of the federal lands may have affected mining.

In another email exchange, in May, two Bureau of Land Management officials said that Mr. Zinke’s chief of staff for policy, Downey Magallanes, had phoned to ask for information on a uranium mill in or near the Bears Ears monument. The request sought “economic data to the extent available,” as well as grazing and hunting maps.

And on July 17, Ms. Magallanes and Mr. Zinke’s counselor for energy policy, Vincent DeVito, met with representatives of a uranium mining company. The company, Energy Fuels Resources Inc., said its representatives hoped to discuss its White Mesa uranium mill as well as the Daneros uranium mine, both adjacent to the Bears Ears monument.

In addition to Paul Goranson, a top executive at Energy Fuels Resources, the meeting included Mary Bono, a former Republican congresswoman from California; and Andrew Wheeler, then a lobbyist at the firm Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting and now awaiting confirmation to be deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Ms. Swift, the Interior Department spokeswoman, said that no uranium mine or milling operations were located within the boundaries of either the original or modified Bears Ears National Monument.

DOCUMENT

Inside the Interior Department Decision

The New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request for copies of documents related to the decision by the Trump administration to shrink two National Monuments.

The debate over oil and gas reserves below the ground in Bears Ears started during the Obama administration, the documents show, with officials from Utah State Board of Education writing to the Interior Department objecting to the plan to designate the area as a national monument.

Before Utah became a state, in 1896, the federal government granted so-called trust lands to support state institutions, like the public schools, given that nearly 70 percent of the land in the state is federally controlled.

The state has generated more than $1.7 billion in revenue from the trust lands to support public schools, mostly by selling off mineral rights and allowing private companies to extract oil or gas. The Bears Ears National Monument created by President Obama in 2016 included about 110,000 acres of these trust lands, eliminating the potential for resource sales, the state said.

John Andrews, associate director of the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, which oversees the lands designated for school funding, acknowledged that the new Bears Ears boundaries approved by Mr. Trump, which reduced the land removed from the trust’s management to about 22,000 acres, reflected his group’s request to exclude trust lands from federal protection.

But he noted that Mr. Trump ultimately reduced the monument by a much larger amount than his organization had sought.

“Obviously they were looking at facts other than the ones we had raised, we assume,” he said.

Mr. Whitlock, the spokesman for Mr. Hatch, said, “Senator Hatch is grateful these emails have been released because they make very clear that his priority in addressing the Bears Ears situation was looking out for the people of Utah.”

Correction: March 2, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that Bears Ears National Monument was created. It was 2016, not 2017.

PRO SOURCE #2

Coming Together to Protect Bears Ears

November 29, 2017 Rhea Suh

Trump plans to further his disregard for America’s indigenous groups by removing protections for sacred public lands.

It wasn’t enough to hijack a ceremony to honor Navajo code talkers so he could deride a U.S. senator as “Pocahontas.” President Trump now plans to go to Utah on Monday to decimate the Bears Ears National Monument, public land that’s sacred to five tribes of Native Americans.

Not content to relegate a historic figure to a partisan punch line, Trump is poised to build on a shameful legacy of betraying indigenous Americans. He is breaking a solemn promise to forever safeguard ancestral lands that speak to vital parts of our country’s history.

He reportedly intends to shrink the Bears Ears monument from more than one million acres to a mere 200,000 and to similarly gut the nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. And he aims to expose hundreds of thousands of acres of these lands to destructive industrial mining and drilling that profit the few at the expense of the many.

That formula increasingly defines the Trump agenda. It strikes at the very ideals of equity and government by the people that sustain our notions of nationhood. In this case, it also revives an acutely painful injustice to the original American people. Wresting land from tribes was disgraceful in the 19th century. We’re not about to countenance it now.

During Monday’s White House ceremony to honor the heroism of the Navajo code talkers—who used their native language as the basis for a secret code that helped the U.S. Marines prevail in some of the bloodiest fighting in World War II—Trump used the occasion to scorn Senator Elizabeth Warren, calling her “Pocahontas.” He managed in a single blundering stroke to offend the dignity of the event, mock Warren’s claim to Native American heritage, and belittle a woman of great importance in our nation’s history.

“Pocahontas is a real person . . . not a caricature,” Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye told CNN. “This is a person, a young lady and Native American woman, that played a critical role in the life of this nation.”

Much of what is believed about Pocahontas comes from the accounts of English settlers. Captain John Smith wrote in his memoirs that she twice saved the first permanent English settlement in America, at Jamestown. According to accounts by him and others, Pocahontas spent much of her life trying to bridge the conflicting transatlantic worlds of her native Powhatan people and the English invaders.

It is documented that she was the first Native American known to have married an Englishman. She gave birth to the first English-American child of record. And she crossed the Atlantic to bolster flagging investor support in London for the foundering English colony in Virginia. Without Pocahontas, by the settlers’ own telling, Jamestown would have failed.

It’s bad enough Trump doesn’t know history. His plans, now, have echoes of one of the most shameful chapters in our past. The lands of southeastern Utah have been home to indigenous peoples for thousands of years. It’s a majestic region of sandstone canyons, desert mesas, forested highlands, and red rock formations. One area in particular, named for twin buttes that resemble the ears of a bear, contains ancient cliff dwellings, rock art, and more than 100,000 other archaeological, cultural, and spiritual sites. They attest to varied and diverse American civilizations that existed long before the first Europeans arrived.

That’s why President Obama created Bears Ears National Monument, setting aside 1.35 million acres of public land for special protections meant to preserve this special place for all time.

Remember, this is public land, protected in the public interest―and in this case, with a twist. The indigenous people whose ancestors lived on Bears Ears lands have a direct say in the monument’s management and long-term planning. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition is made up of leaders from the Hopi Nation, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah Ouray, and the Pueblo of Zuni. It makes sense to tap into the wisdom and experience of people who’ve known these lands for centuries.

Native peoples have a voice, and we all have a stake, in the lasting preservation of Bears Ears. That’s why, since Trump first hinted at carving up Bears Ears, more than a million public comments have poured in to support this unique monument.

If history is the conversation we have with the past, we need to listen closely. Trump, though, is listening to industry’s version, not the American people’s. Well, he won’t get away with it. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives presidents the authority to designate national monuments. It does not empower them to slice up monuments designated by others. If Trump tries to do that to Bears Ears, we and others will take him to court.

And we’ll carry with us the inspiration of patriots like Peter MacDonald, who was 15 years old when he volunteered to become one of the 400 Navajo code talkers serving our country. Today, he’s one of 13 still alive to tell their story. “What we did truly represents who we are as Americans,” MacDonald said at Monday’s White House ceremony. “We have different languages, different skills, different talents, and different religion. But when our way of life is threatened, like the freedom and liberty that we all cherish, we come together as one.”

And we will come together as one in the next few days, with our community partners, to block any illegal attempt by this president to eviscerate protections for Bears Ears.

Natural Resources Defense Council et al. v. Trump (Bears Ears)

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