× Expand US Department of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (l) in Grand Staircase National Monument earlier this year.

After months of riding the range, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced this week that he will not recommend that the president eliminate any of twenty-seven national monuments under review. But he will advise that Trump downsize at least four of them, potentially opening up these public lands to new fossil fuel and mineral extraction leases. Zinke’s recommendations for the remaining monuments, and Trump’s response, is expected in the coming weeks.

Advocates for cultural and environmental protections on public lands are girding for a fight. “If Secretary Zinke expects Americans to be thankful because he wants to merely erase large chunks of national monuments instead of eliminating them entirely, he is badly mistaken,” said Jennifer Rokala of the Center for Western Priorities in a statement. Jamie Williams, president of The Wilderness Society stated, “This bogus review was all along a front for a much more ominous and well-orchestrated agenda to dismantle America’s natural treasures for the benefit of private profiteers.”

Zinke’s monument “popularity contest,” is a strong indication that the Trump Administration means business for public lands—the fossil fuel and mining industries in particular. The horse-riding Zinke has been acting on Donald Trump’s executive order, issued only four months after the president gained office, to review a list of twenty-seven monuments determining if they create barriers to “energy independence.”

Several of the monuments fell under review just because of their size, specifically over 100,000 acres, but the declared purpose of the review was to challenge the “lack of public outreach and proper coordination” of the 1906 Antiquities Act, which Congress and sixteen past presidents have used to protect special natural, historical and cultural areas on public lands.

At a press conference in April, when the President signed the executive order, Trump described the purpose of his order as a move to “end another egregious abuse of federal power.”

“I also want to recognize Senator Orrin Hatch, who—believe me, he’s tough,” the President said referring to the Republican congressman from Utah. “He would call me and call me and say, you got to do this. Is that right, Orrin? I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do. But I really have to point you out, you didn't stop.”

Hatch has a longstanding animosity toward federal oversight of public lands in his state, especially regulation of mineral extraction. He objected vociferously to Bill Clinton’s creation of the nearly 1.9 million acre Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument in 1996. More recently he articulated opposition to the Bear’s Ears National Monument, established by President Obama with the support of Native American tribes. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, oil and gas interests have expressed a desire to lease 105,000 of those acres, which are now vulnerable to being auctioned off under Zinke’s recommendations.

Zinke’s monument “popularity contest,” is a strong indication that the Trump Administration means business for public lands—the fossil fuel and mining industries in particular.

Earlier this week, Zinke announced that he recommends leaving intact one monument on the hit list, the million-plus acre Grand Canyon-Parashant. He pronounced that he’d given it a pass because the land “has some of the most pristine and undeformed geological formations in North America”—somewhat mystifying criteria given that deformation, by weather, heat, and extreme pressure, is a distinctive characteristic of the Parashant’s geological features.

But if defenders of the Grand Canyon watershed felt any relief, it was likely short-lived. Public lands, even those with monument protections, are accessible to mining and other extractive interests with existing claims under the 1872 Mining Law. Public lands around the Grand Canyon National Park have been previously targeted by Koch-backed mining interests seeking access to uranium.

And the Trump Administration appears to be at work creating markets for mining industries, and uranium in particular.

On August 23, Secretary Rick Perry’s Energy Department released a long-awaited study of the country’s electrical grid. As with Zinke’s monument review, the Energy Department’s assessment targeted regulations and subsidies potentially “burdensome” to business interests. In a letter introducing the study, Perry wrote, “It is apparent that in today’s competitive markets certain regulations and subsidies are having a large impact on the functioning of markets, and thereby challenging our power generation mix.” In its recommendations, the Energy Department study concludes that in order to attain “reliability” and “resilience” for the electrical grid, it would be advisable to ease Environmental Protection Agency permitting requirements for coal-fired plants and safety requirements for nuclear plants, as well as to subsidize existing coal and nuclear plants to keep the power supply “reliable.”

You can almost hear the coal and uranium industries cheering. And they need the help.

You can almost hear the coal and uranium industries cheering.

Nuclear energy is a struggling commercial venture across the country, with two of the last four commercial nuclear power plants under construction in the United States recently cancelled. Technical underperformance, soaring costs, and competition from gas, wind, and solar power are all working against a “nuclear renaissance.”

“We saw a uranium frenzy some years back with concern over climate in Washington, and cap and trade programs and carbon taxes. The nuclear industry thought they could ride that wave and announced a nuclear renaissance,” Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, told The Progressive. But now, because of “over-investment” in uranium extraction, he says, uranium prices are vastly lower. Spot prices for uranium peaked at $135 per pound in 2009, but in June 2017 uranium comes in at about $20 per pound.

Undaunted by economic reality, and sensing shifting federal priorities regarding public land this past May, members of Arizona’s northeastern Mohave County Commission sent a letter to Secretary Zinke exhorting the Administration to “take a look” at uranium extraction on the Arizona Strip (federal lands north of Grand Canyon National Park), because a uranium mining ban under President Obama “took away much needed growth and jobs.”

“Uranium is useful in many ways,” the Mohave County commissioners’ insisted in their letter, emphasizing that the area has “enough uranium to provide power generation for the state of California for over 20 years.”

Never mind that California, doesn’t want nuclear power. And never mind that uranium ore mined near the Grand Canyon must be trucked out of a remote region on small roads shared with tourists and residents of the area, particularly Native Americans, opposed to uranium mining.

Although the region is speckled with mining claims, it has never been especially profitable. Large and well-established uranium mines in Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, and Russia produce a surfeit of the abundant mineral. But that hasn’t quelled the prospecting spirit. According to the Pew Charitable Trust, on one small area on the outskirts of Grand Canyon National Park data showed about 100 mining claims in 2005, but in 2006 excitement about the potential for nuclear power drove a claim-staking frenzy on that plot of more than 3,200 new claims. In 2007, when the price of uranium hit a 40-year high, an additional 2,900 claims were staked.

× Expand Stephanie Smith, Grand Canyon Trust Uranium claims pepper the lands around Grand Canyon National Park, Kaibab National Forest, tribal lands, and Grand Parashant Monument. All these lands are connected by springs and underground aquifers.

“All the evidence is that demand for uranium in the west is going to be going down,” notes Makhijani. There is no need to mine uranium for military purposes since highly enriched uranium has been in surplus since the end of the cold war when many weapons were dismantled, he emphasized. The price of uranium has been low for years, due in part to some $16 billion spent on exploration between 2004 to 2013.

“The hardest thing to get my mind around is when concepts like uranium mining in the Grand Canyon become political football,” Tom Martin of the River Runners for Wilderness told The Progressive. “I find it terrifying. We are talking safety and protection of basic water supply, as well as protecting wilderness.”

And it’s not like the threat of contamination ceases when the mine has exhausted the supply of uranium, he points out. “The contamination is always a threat,” says Martin, describing how this past spring the public learned that a uranium mine shaft just south of the National Park had filled with water with more than three times the federal drinking water standard for dissolved uranium. “The water was ‘hot,’” Martin explained. “Mine owners were pumping it out and trucking it to the [uranium processing] mill in Blanding [Utah].” The company also used water jets to spray the contaminated water into the air to speed up evapotranspiration.

× Expand Chip Thomas Large scale wheat paste installation by Chip Thomas, artist and doctor of many uranium mining workers suffering from kidney failure and cancer, and other health impacts of uranium extraction and processing.

Uranium mining has exacted a terrible cost in the region already. Nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo Nation land between 1944 and 1986, and 1,000 abandoned uranium mines remain. Navajo people exposed to uranium suffer from high rates of kidney failure and cancer, and new research from the Center for Disease Control shows uranium in babies born now. In 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey reported fifteen springs and five wells near the Grand Canyon have concentrations of uranium that exceed safe drinking water standards, as well as radioactive dust several hundred feet from a North Kanab Mine site.

Uranium mining has exacted a terrible cost in the region already. Native American groups have been fighting uranium mining on and near tribal lands for years.

Native American groups have been fighting uranium mining on and near tribal lands for years. At a hearing for one of two lawsuits the Havasupai have filed in federal court to protect their water supply from uranium mining contamination, tribal chairman Dan Watahomogie said: “We are the Havasuw ‘Baaja, which means people of the blue-green water. Our very being and continuance as Havasupai depends on the continued flow of our water and our ability to continue that reliance forever.”

The support for uranium extraction by the current administration is only more confounding in the context of energy production alternatives. But with its lack of a market, environmental injustice, and potential to permanently harm a region full of natural and cultural wonders, the specter of uranium mining exposes the true perversion of the Trump Administration’s extractive agenda for public land.