Roughly two and a half years after President Biden resurrected and even expanded President Obama's original Bears Ears National Monument, the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service unveiled on Friday (March 8) their joint Draft Resource Management Plan Environmental Impact Statement for the monument, a 678-page blueprint that would guide the agencies' land-use decisions for the next 20 or so years. It’s an important benchmark – Biden might call it a BFD. This is also submitted for your consideration: The BLM and Forest Service are currently seeking comments from the general public about the proposal. The comment period lasts 90 days. Then, the agencies will evaluate the merits of what John and Jane Q. Public (plus the special-interest groups) had to say. Months later they will approve something. However – and this is the elephant in the room that so far nobody’s talking about, at least publicly, a possible deal-breaker – any attempt to put a finalized plan into effect
On May 10, 1869, crews working for the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads completed the nation's first transcontinental rail line at Promontory Summit in northern Utah—a historic achievement in the timeline of the United States' development and one that is indelibly etched into the psyche of the West's Indigenous peoples. The story is expressed in many ways across Indian Country, perhaps most beautifully told through the traditional art of Navajo weavers. Many pieces—including some that are now priceless, museum-caliber heirlooms—depict locomotives chugging across the sage landscape, benignly interspersed among ancient symbols and motifs. The strands of wool are dyed from extracts of native plants and then threaded through a loom one at a time by an elder preserving a uniquely American art form. A darker interpretation involves the dreams of spiritual leaders—of trains rumbling unstoppable through wildlands, destroying everything and everyone in its path. "Th