Public lands in the American West may be on the verge of a major shift thanks to a recent series of rapid-fire policy changes from the Trump administration that have conservatives celebrating and environmentalists sounding the alarm.

The changes signal a cultural shift away from President Obama's legacy of conservation and environmental regulation to protect wildlands. Those policies led Obama to create a series of new national monuments in the West, setting aside more public land than any other US president.

While President Trump has not signaled he plans to undo all of Obama's legacy in the West, his Interior Department — which has been tight-lipped about any unifying strategy — has quietly carried out a series of policy changes that target symbolically important sites. When taken together these changes show the Trump administration is already in the midst of handing victories to those who want the federal government out of the West.

The most recent policy change came Monday when the Department of the Interior announced it would reverse course and allow motorized vehicles in a remote Utah canyon near the controversial Bears Ears National Monument. Access to Recapture Canyon has long been a point of contention between locals and the federal Bureau of Land Management (which is part of the Interior Department).



Days earlier, the BLM revealed that it was suspending surveys along the Red River, the winding waterway which divides Texas and Oklahoma. The surveys, proposed during the Obama administration, sparked controversy because they could have made public land out of what people in Texas believe is their private property.

The two locations, Recapture Canyon in Utah and the Red River in Texas, are separated by hundreds of miles but have two important things in common: both are epicenters of frustration with the federal government, and people involved in both cases attribute the recent policy changes to the Trump administration.

In the case of Recapture Canyon, the area was the site of a 2014 protest against federal land management policies, including access for vehicles in the canyon. The protest led by San Juan County commissioner Phil Lyman, involved dozens of demonstrators riding ATVs illegally through the canyon. Lyman and another protester were later convicted of misdemeanors for the ride but not before they became folk heroes to many westerners who have quarrels with the feds' approach to public land.

Lyman's protest came just weeks after the Bundy family led an armed standoff with federal agents in Nevada, exposing a growing sense of frustration among many in the rural west toward the federal government.