Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company, has joined a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump’s decision to significantly reduce the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, removing protections from nearly 3m acres.
In July, the president approved the reduction of the sites by 90%, clearing the way to open the land to oil and gas companies. He argued in his proclamations that doing so would allow lands to be “put to a higher-priority use” and that they contained critical minerals important to “resource independence …[and] national security”.
Trump previously targeted the monuments, which are sacred to tribes, in his first term. Joe Biden ultimately overturned it.
When in doubt, destroy and use up irreplaceable things. Always choose destruction.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, which filed the federal lawsuit on Wednesday along with several other conservation groups, described Trump’s proclamations as “one of the largest rollbacks of public land protections in US history”.
“These monuments protect places that took millions of years to form. President Trump is trying to destroy them with a stroke of a pen. That cannot stand,” said Christy Goldfuss, the NRDC executive director.
“Once you open these lands to mining and drilling, what gets lost is not coming back – ancient cliff dwellings, dinosaur fossils found nowhere else on Earth and sacred sites tied to the tribal nations.”
Do not destroy the dinosaur fossils! I’m serious.
The other groups that challenged Trump’s rollback in court include the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and Earthjustice, which represents Grand Canyon Trust, WildEarth Guardians, the Sierra Club, Western Watersheds Project, the Center for Biological Diversity, Great Old Broads for Wilderness and the National Parks Conservation Association.
Great Old Broads?! Sign me up!
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