The Trump administration's proposed management plan for Bears Ears National Monument was decried Friday as being destructive to the landscape and cultural aspects of the monument/BLM file

Chaining, the practice of using heavy chains stretched between tractors or bulldozers to rip out vegetation, would be allowed in parts of Bears Ears National Monument under the Trump administration's proposed management plan. The plan, which also would allow new roads and utility lines to cross the landscape in southeastern Utah, drew immediate condemnation Friday from environmental and tribal groups, who are hoping their legal moves to reverse President Trump's redrawing of the monument's boundaries will prevent the plan from taking effect.

The Proposed Monument Management Plans and Final Environmental Impact Statement Shash Jáa and Indian Creek Units of Bears Ears released Friday addresses the small portion of the original monument designated by President Obama that remained after President Trump in December 2017 issued proclamations that, if upheld in court, would significantly shrink both Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Carleton Bowekaty, lieutenant governor of the Zuni Pueblo and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said since the federal protections were eliminated from the larger region by Trump's proclamations, a great amount of damage has been registered on cultural areas of the original monument.

“It’s like seeing that your grandmother’s house has been robbed,” Bowekaty said Friday. “These lands are sacred to us and they are being destroyed — sometimes inadvertently — by people who don’t understand our culture and way of life. That’s why we want all of this area protected, so we can help educate others and share our traditions with all people.”

Conservation groups remained optimistic that, in the end, their contention that President Trump lacked the authority to shrink the two monuments would prevail.

“If we win the legal fight to restore Bears Ears National Monument, this plan will just be 800 pages of wasted effort,” said Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountains office. “Even in the parts of Bears Ears that President Trump left intact, he’s planning on putting destructive activities before the American public’s interests. Bears Ears is not the kind of place for chaining thousands of acres of forest or stringing up utility lines. These are wild, sweeping monument lands.”

Some Democrats in Congress also condemned the plan, saying it was written with "input from the newly appointed and reconstituted Monument Advisory Council, which is composed entirely of outspoken critics of the original monument and was formulated without government-to-government consultation with sovereign tribal nations."

“This management plan is a cynical attempt to support President Trump’s illegal move, and publishing it before the judge has ruled smacks of disrespect for the judicial branch,” U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva said. “Trump officials released this just as lawmakers are leaving Washington for the recess, hoping to avoid questions for which they have no answers.

"If they believed their changes to the monument and the management plan were legal or defensible, they wouldn’t be rushing them through before the courts have weighed in on the legality of the president’s decisions – and they would send us the explanatory documents we asked for months ago," the Democrat from Arizona said. "This plan relies on the advice of a rigged panel of monument opponents. It will waste a mountain of taxpayer dollars. Fortunately, I’m confident that when the courts rule, these illegal actions will be overturned and Bears Ears National Monument will be restored.”

When President Trump declared new boundaries for Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, a move that shed 2 million acres combined from the two, the president claimed he was acting to preserve "states rights." At the same time, his action could also allow those 2 million acres of federal lands to be opened to energy development and other uses monument status had banned.

At the time, Trump maintained that Presidents Clinton and Barack Obama, who established Bears Ears in December 2016, "severely abused the purpose, spirit, and intent of a century-old law known as the Antiquities Act." His proclamations cut the 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by a bit more than 1 million acres and broke it into three monuments to be known as Grand Staircase, Escalante Canyons, and Kaiparowits. Bears Ears National Monument would be shrunk to a bit more than 201,000 acres from its original size of 1.3 million acres if his actions withstand legal scrutiny.

Conservation and environmental groups immediately challenged Trump's authority to shrink the two monuments, filing a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., that December. The lawsuit remains pending while the U.S. District Court mulls the administration's request that it be dismissed.

The legal action didn't stop the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, which share management of Bears Ears, from devising new management plans for the area. The draft management plan released Friday outlines an aggressive appropoach to managing the landscape. Though the document states that the plan would "provide for the proper care and management of Monument objects and values including the 'object[s] of antiquity' and 'objects of historic or scientific interest'" within the monument, it would allow "fewer land and resource use restrictions and allowing for more discretion for multiple uses."

The proposal would:

* Open certain areas of the Indian Creek Unit to new rights-of-way (e.g., roads);

* Adopt transportation and utility rights-of-way outlined in a 1991 resource management document;

* Adopt the San Juan County (Utah) off-road vehicle route system as much as practicable (San Juan County officials in the past have bridled at federal management of public lands and at times encouraged ORV use in areas where the BLM had banned it) ;

* Permit target shooting, which has been blamed in many instances for sparking wildfires on public lands, outside of designated campgrounds;

* Manage lands with wilderness characteristics for multiple use, and;

* Permit landscape improvements (e.g., fencing, guzzlers, storage tanks, corrals, vegetation treatments) to support livestock grazing.

The proposal does outline safeguards for paleontological and archaeological resources, management of "natural quiet," and nesting raptors.

“The illegal decimation of Bears Ears National Monument opens up ancestral lands of the Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni to development that will likely degrade critical wildlife habitat, fragment migration corridors, and potentially expose southern Utah communities to unacceptable pollution and health risks,” said Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. “Now the management plan for the meager remnants of the original monument simply pours salt in the open wounds of the tens of thousands of tribal leaders and citizens who fought for decades to conserve these sacred lands.”

At the National Parks Conservation Association, President and CEO Theresa Pierno called the management plan "an insult to the public, who overwhelmingly spoke out in favor of protecting Bears Ears— and all our national monuments. Today’s plan opens the monument to damaging uses that carelessly put troves of scientific resources, sacred spaces, and adjacent national park landscapes in jeopardy. Our parks don’t exist in isolation, and the administration’s plan ignores the long-recognized threats to parks from harmful activities outside their borders, putting at risk their air and water quality, dark night skies and expansive viewsheds, as well as the multi-million-dollar economy they support. The only management plan acceptable is one that encompasses Bears Ears’ entire landscape and protects the values and resources for which the monument was originally and legally created.”