Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and equipment company, has joined a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump’s decision to significantly shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, removing protections from nearly 3 million acres. In July, the president approved reducing 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 “given to higher priority use” and that they contained critical minerals important for “resource independence…[and] National security.” Trump previously attacked the monuments, which are sacred to tribes, in his first term. Joe Biden eventually overturned him. Patagonia sued Trump in 2017 when he first tried to reduce the size of public lands in Utah. His proclamations earlier this year represented an even more dramatic reduction of monuments than he sought in his first term. The retailer announced Wednesday that it would join a lawsuit to end what it described as illegal orders that “betray sovereignty tribal.” “The Antiquities Act allows presidents to establish national monuments, but does not give the executive the authority to undo them, Gellert wrote. Trump’s move was an effort to “force the secession of federal lands to the state and allow private companies to extract natural resources from those lands.” Gellert said, pointing to mining claims that have already been filed in areas that are no longer part of the monuments. “Protecting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante is worth more than any amount of money. The vast majority of Americans agree,” Gellert said. Barack Obama established Bears Ears in 2016 during his final weeks in office, after years of advocacy by Native American tribes, while Bill Clinton established Grand Staircase-Escalante. The Natural Resources Defense Council, which filed the federal lawsuit Wednesday along with several other conservation groups, described Trump’s proclamations as “one of the largest rollbacks of public lands protection in American history.” “These monuments protect places that took millions of years to form. President Trump is trying to destroy them with one stroke of a pen. That can’t stand,” said Christy Goldfuss, executive director of NRDC. “Once these lands are opened to mining and drilling, what is lost does not return: ancient cliff dwellings, dinosaur fossils found nowhere else on Earth, and sacred sites linked to tribal nations.” Biological Diversity, Great Old Broads for Wilderness and the National Parks Conservation Association.
