In a 1973 TV spot, the United States Forest Service sage Smokey Bear admonished that “one careless second with a match and America the beautiful becomes America the ugly.” So what would Smokey say now when a few careless seconds with a pen allowed President Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to remove protections from two million acres of precious American wilderness? If courts uphold Trump’s executive orders of last December, they would reduce southern Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments by 85 and 46 percent, respectively, constituting the biggest rollback of federally protected land in American history.

Though he's probably fighting uphill, U.S. Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva wants members on the House Natural Resources Committee to sign off on a letter to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke asking that he withdraw the land inside Bears Ears National Monument’s "traditional, lawful boundaries from new oil, gas and mining claims."

Although there are pending lawsuits that challenge the legitimacy of President Trump's dismantling of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is moving forward to develop management plans that could allow mining within the original boundaries of the monuments.

The American people did not vote for Donald Trump because they wanted their forests logged, bounties placed on wolf packs, national monuments reduced in size, and a resumption of the universally outlawed ivory trade.