By Derrick Z. Jackson Walls of red, walls of gold. Stratified hillsides exposing 270 million years of Earth formation with ribbons of cocoa, caramel, burned orange, and white. Hoodoo rock formations playing tricks on our minds as massive boulders appear to teeter atop eroded, pencil-thin spires. We walked under natural arches that gloriously framed the […]
By Zoe Woodcraft The sound is like a low, steady rumble, soothing yet powerful. Imperceptible to the human ear, the hums of red rock arches in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase National Monuments carry with them the deep patterns of the earth’s plates sparked by events like ocean currents colliding in the open Pacific that […]
A Department of the Interior (DOI) official who played an important role in opening public lands to fossil fuel interests has left the federal government to accept a job at BP, The Washington Post reported Monday. Former DOI Deputy Chief of Staff Downey Magallanes led the review that resulted in Secretary of the Interior Ryan […]
By David Gessner I am sitting near the top of the eastern ear, or rather the eastern earlobe, of Bears Ears, the redock buttes that give our most controversial national monument its name. From up here I can look back on my starting point, the meadow far below and two miles north where a big […]
By Rosalyn R. LaPier Forty years ago the U.S. Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act so that Native Americans could practice their faith freely and that access to their sacred sites would be protected. This came after a 500-year-long history of conquest and coercive conversion to Christianity had forced Native Americans from their […]
By Katherine Arcement Congress wants us to drill our lands and waters … or else! Some members of Congress are trying to rig the system to use public lands primarily for oil and gas drilling, and they are threatening to silence and punish anyone who objects. Under the Trump administration, public lands are being offered […]
The Interior Department on Tuesday is auctioning off 32 parcels of public lands in southeastern Utah for oil and gas development. The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) lease sale includes more than 51,000 acres of land near Bears Ears—the national monument significantly scaled back by the Trump administration last year—as well as the Hovenweep and […]
Even 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 […]
Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke is the winner of the Center for Biological Diversity’s 2017 Rubber Dodo award. The statue is awarded each year to the person or group who has most aggressively sought to destroy America’s natural heritage or drive endangered species extinct. “Ryan Zinke seems to wake up every day wondering how he can […]