The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: This land is our land

The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: This land is our land

By Christa Sadler

On Sept. 18, 1996, I stood in the crowd watching President Clinton establish the newest and most exciting unit of the American public lands system: the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. I was excited because I had worked in the area as a paleontologist, and I knew firsthand the scientific wonders that lay buried in those lands. I was excited because this was a sea change in the way we view and manage some of our public lands. This monument was different: established not just for recreation or preservation but also for traditional uses, science, and education.

Over the intervening decades, I came to know the monument in many other ways: as a traveler, hiker, photographer, author — and simply a lover of one of the last truly wild places remaining in the lower 48 states. I fell even more deeply in love with this craggy corner of our country, the last place to be revealed to us by scientists and explorers. I came to understand and appreciate not just the jaw-dropping sandstone canyons that make the covers of magazines but also the convoluted badlands and dissected mesas in the areas where fewer people travel. I came to treasure not just its scientific and educational resources but also its necessary size and extent as a haven for plant and animal diversity. And I discovered a place that could hold my heart and soul like almost no other place in the world.

Now, more than two decades after the monument was established — more than two decades after it has become a part of the local economy and has attracted a vibrant and thriving tourist industry and local community to add to the existing generations of homegrown residents who live in the region, more than two decades after people from every corner of the world have come to learn about the region’s fossils, ancient cultures, history, and biology — we are in a fight not only for the life of this monument but for the life of public lands throughout the West.

This wild, beautiful, and precious land belongs to all of us: to Utahns, West Virginians, Kansans, and Alaskans alike. We were heartbroken but not surprised to learn that the administration ignored its own data and evidence demonstrating the health of the local economies and of the ecosystems within monument lands in making this action. We were enraged but unsurprised to learn that this administration and its corporate cronies sealed the monument’s fate long before nearly three million people commented in favor of its protection.

The relentless and consistent swing between heartbreak and rage over the past two years has been exhausting. Writing letters and making calls to politicians who have already made their minds up is disheartening. But neither I nor any of the myriad people fighting for these lands are giving up. I’ve joined one of the lawsuits as an affiant, hoping to speak for the millions of others who do not perhaps know the monument as well as many of us but love it nonetheless. They love this place and this special thing about our country that makes us great — our incomparable wilderness and public lands system. On the 22nd anniversary of the establishment of the magnificent Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the American people have spoken. We will fight tirelessly that our lands are protected for all of us and for the future.

Christa Sadler is a paleontologist and wilderness and river guide and the author of “Where Dinosaurs Roamed: Lost Worlds of Utah’s Grand Staircase.”

The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.

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