Most of the lands removed from southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument would be available to coal mining and oil or gas drilling under federal draft plans released Wednesday, putting nearly 700,000 acres in play that otherwise would have been off-limits to mineral extraction.
The Bureau of Land Management’s “preferred” vision for these vast stretches in Kane and Garfield counties imposes the fewest restrictions of the four alternatives studied under an environmental analysis, prompting renewed charges from green groups that President Donald Trump’s controversial order reducing the monument by half was designed to sacrifice irreplaceable natural values in the name of his quest for U.S. "energy dominance.” On Wednesday, the BLM posted draft management plans for Utah’s two large national monuments that Trump slashed in response to pleas from state and county officials to shrink or erase monuments designated by his Democratic predecessors. The agency also posted thousands of pages of analysis for the plans that outline new management programs for the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante
national monuments, as well as a 98-page minerals report for Staircase
that details the rich deposits of coal, oil and gas, tar sands and other
minerals under the former monument’s 1.9 million-acre footprint...MORE
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