Patagonia joins Indigenous and environmental groups in lawsuit against Trump administration over Utah monument reductions

Outdoor retailer Patagonia joined a coalition of Indigenous and environmental groups suing the Trump administration on Wednesday over its decision this summer to massively shrink two national monuments in Utah, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

“What is happening in Utah is tragic,” Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert wrote in a blog post on Wednesday of his company’s suit, which concerns the Bears Ears decision. “President Donald Trump’s proclamations all but eliminating Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments betray Tribal sovereignty and scrap years of work to create groundbreaking management plans for some of the most culturally significant places in the country.”

In July, the Trump administration shrunk each monument by about 90 percent, opening millions of acres of public lands to oil drilling, uranium mining and other developments.

The suits seek to revive 2017 litigation challenging the first Trump administration’s attempts to shrink the monuments, arguing that President Trump lacks the legal authority to downsize the protected lands. The original suits were put on hold when the Biden administration reversed course from Trump and expanded the monuments.

Patagonia argues that the Antiquities Act, which gave Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton the power to create Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, respectively, contains no power to undo a monument designation.

The Independent has contacted the White House, Interior Department and Justice Department for comment.

A variety of Indigenous peoples consider the lands within both monuments sacred.

Bears Ears was the first national monument created at the request of Native American nations, after the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe and the Pueblo of Zuni successfully petitioned the Obama administration.

It was also the first national monument in U.S. history to be co-managed by Native American nations themselves, considered a watershed moment after centuries of the U.S. government dispossessing Indigenous peoples.

“It’s been disappointing to see how much work has been put into trying to do co-management with the tribes and the federal agencies, and then having all that work put on hold or shelved,” Angelo Baca, an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation and member of the Hopi Tribe, told the Salt Lake Tribune on Wednesday.

Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, as well as the state’s congressional delegation, supported the Trump administration’s move to shrink the monuments.

The Trump administration and its allies have argued that the Utah lands contain important resources and that past Democratic administrations exceeded the intended scope of the Antiquities Act.

“The Bears Ears region contains several resources that are vital to energy and resource independence and, in turn, critical to national security,” the president wrote in the order shrinking the monument.

“It’s very clear that these monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area possible to protect the antiquities, and these multi-million-acre monuments that are bigger than the state of Delaware certainly do not fit that designation,” Gov. Cox said at a July signing ceremony for the changes.

At least nine mining claims have been filed on lands that were protected until the Trump administration policy shift this summer.

Patagonia argues the Trump administration decision around the Utah lands is part of a larger attack on the environment that has seen the White House cancel renewables projects and attempt to pull back on regulating greenhouse gases.

“Since the first week of this administration, we have witnessed an aggressive whole-of-government campaign against protecting this nation’s critical air, water and land resources, including the undoing of environmental regulation, climate action and public land protection that will take years if not decades to undo,” Gellert wrote.