High off his Arizona monument declaration, Biden might answer activists’ calls in Utah next.
High off his Arizona monument declaration, Biden might answer activists’ calls in Utah next.
J oe Biden banned new uranium-mining projects on almost 1 million acres of Arizona land last month. Climate activists are asking the Department of the Interior to do the same in Utah, where, they allege, mining poses a huge risk to Bears Ears National Monument.
Environment America, a group that petitioned Biden to designate Arizona’s monument, claimed this past week that Energy Fuels’ White Mesa Mill outside of Bears Ears is a “radioactive waste dump,” asking the Biden administration to altogether ban mining in the region. The mill processes uranium-bearing material, then recycles low-level radioactive waste to recover and use its uranium in nuclear-energy projects, Energy Fuels CEO Mark Chalmers said last year. White Mesa is permitted by the State of Utah, which limits and regulates the amount of waste material allowed at the site.
“Bears Ears was just recently restored to its rightful size after the Trump administration shrank its boundaries by 85% back in 2017,” Environment America said. “We can’t let it be put at risk again — especially not by new uranium mining right next door, which is devastating to land, water and air wherever it takes place.”
Environment America’s stance against mining in Utah, while not at all new, should be taken seriously. The group will likely, in the coming months, help construct a narrative similar to the one that fueled Arizona’s new monument — that uranium mining is harmful beyond dispute to the environment.
Vancouver-based exploration company Atomic Minerals received a permit in July to drill 20 exploratory holes in search of uranium at Harts Point in Utah. The exploration site is outside of Bears Ears, which itself already encompasses 1.35 million acres of land.
Activists tried but failed to add Harts Point to Bears Ears in 2015, which would have banned mining exploration in the area. An intertribal coalition is now “working with public land managers on writing a plan for Bears Ears now, and we expect a draft monument management plan in November,” the Grand Canyon Trust said this month. (The Grand Canyon Trust also played a large part in rallying support for Biden’s Arizona monument.)
Barack Obama first established Bears Ears by presidential proclamation in 2016, Donald Trump shrank the monument by 85 percent in 2017, and, finally, Biden restored the monument to its original size in 2021. Biden said at the time that it was the “easiest thing” he’d done so far as president.
Although the Antiquities Act gives an executive power to federalize land, it does so with constraints: namely, that presidents must limit monuments to “the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” Utah’s attorney general filed a lawsuit last year, claiming that the state’s monuments are too large to manage. Bears Ears neighbors the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument (a Clinton-era declaration), and, combined, the two take up 3.2 million acres of land. That’s a plot of land almost the size of Connecticut.
“The Act does not authorize the president to declare generic and ubiquitous items or plants and animals as national monuments,” the lawsuit states. “The Act does not authorize the president to draw boundaries around an enormous land area and then stitch together hundreds of items and features within those boundaries to try to reverse engineer a landscape-scale national monument.”
Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts has invited challenges to the Antiquities Act, for this very reason. There are few “meaningful restraints” on monument designations, he wrote in 2021. If Utah’s case reaches the Supreme Court, the Court may clarify the law to specify what qualifies land for a monument designation. As it stands right now, the “smallest area” standard seems vague, at best.
Supporters of executive land grabs in Utah, mainly the five Native American tribes that first sought Bears Ears’ designation, say that the monument and its surrounding area hold great cultural importance. “This is our land. This is our homeland,” San Juan County commissioner and member of the Navajo Nation, Kenneth Maryboy, told the Salt Lake Tribune. “And we like to protect all of our traditional values just as [others] would like to protect their churches.”
Cutting off millions of acres of mineral-rich land due to the land’s cultural significance doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, especially because the U.S. currently obtains much of its uranium supply from Russia, and rare earths from China. National security demands that America invest more in domestic mining, which, to his credit, Biden seems to understand on paper. Biden wants to decrease reliance on Chinese and Russian imports and increase clean energy but at the same time is banning access to valuable mineral deposits.
Biden promised via executive order to conserve at least 30 percent of lands and oceans by 2030, to, he said, address the climate crisis. So far, the administration has declared the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona, Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada, Castner Range National Monument in Texas, Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado, Bristol Bay and the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and surrounding watershed in Minnesota. If an expansion of Bears Ears in Utah is next, hundreds of thousands of pounds of uranium could be lost.
Energy Fuels’ Pinyon Plain mine, Arizona’s sole active uranium mine, has proven that modern mining practices are safe and nontoxic. It’s true that toxic waste from uranium mines was left behind in Utah and Arizona, before local, state, and federal regulators implemented rules to ensure that miners assess and reclaim land used for mining projects. Land reclamation ensures that a drill site’s land is restored to its original condition after excavation. It’s not true that uranium mining will turn Utah into a radioactive wasteland, especially now that vast regulations require land reclamation and various safety precautions and limit waste-disposal activities.
Environmental groups won’t stop until mining is banned in the Southwest region. High off his Arizona declaration, Biden might answer activists’ calls in Utah next.