The Drive for Protection (page 2 of 6)

An essay by Ray Wheeler

Monument Country

Waterpocket with flowering rabbitbrush, Grand Staircase National Monument. Photo © 1999 Ray Wheeler.

On September 18, 1996 President Bill Clinton continued the now century-old tradition when he bellied up to a small table precariously close to the south rim of the Grand Canyon to sign an executive order creating a 1.7 million acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument at the heart of the Colorado Plateau in southern Utah. Within minutes of the ceremony the lamentations of ranchers, miners, and county commissioners throughout Southern Utah began rising to the heavens and glutting the media airwaves. For weeks afterwards Utah politicians lined up to condemn the President for what they described as an unprecedented abuse of executive power.

But though notable for its size, the new national monument was anything but unprecedented.

Fossil forests in Grand Staircase National Monument. Petrified logs once blanketed the BLM lands bordering Capital Reef National Park, but much of this important geologic feature has been lost as the fossils are removed from the area by visitors. Photo © 1999 Ray Wheeler.

The list of previous presidents who have used executive orders to protect the natural wonders of the Colorado Plateau is surprisingly long, impressive and emphatically bipartisan. It begins with President Benjamin Harrison, who created by executive order a Grand Canyon National Forest in 1893. It is relevant to note that on no less than three occasions prior to 1983, as a Senator from Iowa, Benjamin Harrison had sponsored unsuccessful legislation to create a Grand Canyon National Park. As Harrison discovered, the perennial problem of national park legislation is that it can so easily be sabotaged in the U.S. Congress by the omnipotent and implacably anti-park corporate mineral and energy lobbies. By invoking his special powers as President, Harrison had contrived an elegant and enduring solution to the problem of the almighty corporate lobby.

By far the most prolific user of the national monument strategy was archetypical Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, who in rapid succession established Grand Canyon National Game Preserve (1906) and new national monuments at Mesa Verde and Petrified Forest, Arizona (1906), the Grand Canyon and Natural Bridges (1908), Navajo and Mukuntuweap (Zion) Canyon (1909).

Roosevelt s bold action would be a prototype as useful for future presidents as the Hoover dam project had been for developers. During the quarter-century between 1909 and 1933, six different presidents would create, by executive order, an additional eleven national monuments on the Colorado Plateau. All but one of the Plateau's existing natural parks made their debuts, by executive order, as national monuments.

Follow these links to:
Parallel Realities Converge
Coming of Age
Turning the Tide
The Birth of a New Grand Plan