BSJ: You are right of course. Better would be for the federal government, through Congressional action, to cede these lands to the states directly. Then it is done, for good.

I also do not expect that to happen in the near future. However, Trump’s action here changes the momentum. Up until now it has been considered politically advantageous to declare more federal land protected. Trump is showing that the political advantage is beginning to shift in the other direction.

At the same time, Trump proved his transitional character by not cancelling the executive orders of Clinton and Obama, but merely modifying them by reducing them somewhat. He really isn’t the man to push this as far as it should be pushed. Or maybe, the slow way in which government works requires this half measure first before it is politically possible to do the full measure.

This Presidential fiat isn’t any better than the last.

Just because it’s “your” guy making this decree, doesn’t make it so.

Obama did the same thing just before leaving office. He also did not visit the bears ears area. He signed a new national monument from his rental house in Hawaii… Stopping a new uranium mine from going into operation which would have been a big boon to a economically depressed area.
Robert, your observation of their not being very many monuments like this in the east is correct. When the nation divided, the northern states gave up their sovereignty to the central government to go to war with the south. The South had already succeeded from the union and was a separate nation. Well, almost was but the war put an end to that and it became conquered land along with all the territories.

This is why most of the west is controlled by the BLM by the rules of conquest. To deny states use of their own land. The federal government’s power over us is symbolized in the change of the American flag to have four colors. Red, white, blue, and gold. Only the federal flags have the gold.
This even occurred years later with Alaska, most of the mineral rights just happened to fall within parks. The Eskimos refused to be put on reservations, fortunately they had good lawyers and retain their land.

Speaking of lawyers, all of the environmental groups are joining together to fight this. I wonder if they still have tens of millions that Obama gave them?

Oral hatch introduced the president in the rotunda, Trump said he needed hatch to stay in office to continue his good work. This settles the question whether he’s going to run again or not. Apparently Mitt Romney established residency for nothing. The only time orin hatch is not a rhino Republican is the year before he runs for re-election which he has been doing since I was a teenager. President Trump is so popular here, this will secure him for another term. I hope he knows what he’s doing…

Aren’t you being a little harsh on the government? It isn’t as though the federal government thoughtlessly dumped three million gallons of toxic water into a western state’s rivers.

Oh, wait. http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/they-just-didnt-think/

But they would never let such a thing happen again. The government has smart people who learn from their mistakes and are adamant about protecting the environment and the water that thousands of farms and millions of people depend upon.

Oh, wait. http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/another-epa-wastewater-spill-in-colorado/

OK. Maybe twice, showing that they are idiots in government, but we can definitely trust them to never ever do it again. Because what is worse than idiots running our government and protecting our environment?

Oh, wait. http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/new-epa-toxic-spill-in-colorado/

Those thousands-and-thousands-of-miles-away fed regulators just don’t seem to care, or if they do care, they don’t take care to be careful. We certainly don’t want that kind of thing to happen to Utah or any other state.

I guess, wodun, it is a good thing that we have all that clean water in all those plastic bottles to send to Colorado, because with environmentalists like the EPA, who needs … (gee, has there ever been any company as damaging to the environment as the government)?

When you want to see competence, look to the government. Then turn around, because you’re looking in the exact wrong direction.

But many of the people who advocate for more government controlled land, it really isn’t “the people’s” land, are just fine with less people having access to the land. They build into the system that the people they like will have access while removing access for those they don’t like. That is at the heart of what Obama did. It wasn’t really about protecting the land but punishing groups Democrats don’t like.

The idea that we would let the people who gave us plastic water bottles and shopping bags control what we think about and how to manage the environment is insane. Isn’t it ironic that some of the worst things for the environment were introduced by environmentalists? Somehow that got memory holed, probably because that would lead to questions about their current “solutions”.