BY TRUST STAFF
The new Navajo administration remains firmly opposed to the proposed Escalade tramway, though developers are still courting investors. We’re keeping an ear to the ground, monitoring developers’ activities and lobbying efforts.
An appeal is underway to halt uranium mining at the Canyon Mine, six miles from the South Rim. In the interim, Canyon Mine may resume sinking shaft at any time.
As for the proposed Tusayan mega-development, the Forest Service is still deciding whether to require a full-blown environmental impact statement. A petition appealing EPA’s proposed rule for coal power plant emissions that are reducing visibility at the Grand Canyon and other national parks is pending before the 9th Circuit Court. Meanwhile, efforts to craft a clean energy transition for Navajo Generating Station, with Hopi and Navajo partners as equity shareholders, are ongoing.
After years of meetings and field visits, Utah Representative Rob Bishop is finally slated to release draft legislation in Congress for up to eight eastern Utah counties under the Public Lands Initiative (PLI). If done correctly, the PLI could resolve public lands issues across 18 million acres in Utah by designating 4 million acres of new wilderness, national conservation areas and watershed protection zones while exchanging state lands out of newly protected areas. If not, we may be facing the fight of the decade to improve or defeat odious legislation in Congress.
As one door closes in the PLI, another is opening in the form of a unique tribally-led effort to protect the Bears Ears cultural landscape in southeast Utah as a new 1.9 million acre national monument (see Alastair Bitsóí’s article “The Land Is What I’m Here For”).
The Native America team is assisting the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition, set up and led by tribes to push for a new tribally co-managed Bears Ears National Monument.
Meanwhile, ourintertribal gathering at Southern Ute, along with the Intertribal Learning Center in Tuba City, have focused on climate change adaptation and traditional farming and food systems. An intertribal knowledge exchange trip is planned to coastal First Nations in British Columbia to learn about efforts to create tribal land protections there.
We’re moving forward with the general management planning project to build a world-class Navajo Nation tribal park system by conducting a small pilot project on cultural mapping in the Little Colorado region.
The Native American Business Incubator Network will graduate its first class of Native entrepreneurs this summer and is actively seeking funding sources to empower a new cohort of aspiring entrepreneurs and support sustainable, community-based development for tribes.
The Utah Forests team is wearing the soles of their hiking boots thin, reassessing beaver dams in three creeks to document the unique ability of beaver to slow and store water, raise and repair stream channels, and transform our forests over time. The team is also documenting how landscapes suffer where beaver are killed.
In addition to pitching in on native grass studies in the White Mesa Cultural and Conservation Area, removing thistles in reference areas in the Manti-La Sal and Fishlake National Forests, and assessing springs on Elk Ridge, the team is in the second year of a 2-year project looking at biological soil crusts (the “skin” of the desert) at 200 sites in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, as well as documenting the havoc exotic goats are wreaking in the Mt. Peale Research Natural Area.
4FRI’s first 1 million acre effort to restore northern Arizona’s ponderosa pine forests—the culmination of decades of work by dozens of organizations and individuals, including the Trust, is finally moving forward.
400,000 acres will be thinned and burned, protecting the headwaters of watersheds critical to millions downstream. Tens of thousands of acres of critical wildlife habitat will be protected, 72 springs restored, and hundreds of miles of unnecessary roads closed.
The project will create more than 600 jobs and inject $100-$200 million per year in taxable revenue into rural economies. 4FRI will also bring per-acre treatment costs down from a prohibitive $1,000 per acre to about $200 per acre or less, saving hundreds of millions of dollars in wildfire suppression and rehabilitation costs.
The 850,000 acre landscape of the North Rim Ranches is an ideal outdoor classroom and research laboratory. Currently, we’ve teamed up with scientists and researchers to model wildlife habitat use through camera trapping, seed and study native plant “greenstrips” to stop invasive cheatgrass in its tracks and reduce the impact of wildfire, and set up gardens to monitor plant responses to climate change over time.
We’re also restoring springs and surveying songbirds and bats on the North Rim Ranches. Initial results suggest at least 30 songbird species and 19 bat species live on the Paria Plateau (read the interview with bat biologist Dr. Michael O'Farrell “The Night Shift”).
“With potential risks of rattlesnakes, fire ants, bees, and worst of all–getting a 5.7-liter-engine Dodge Ram truck stuck in the sand–our isolated field biology job could sound like a nightmare or a dream. But misadventures aside, the act of listening, observing, and responding to the landscape created an intimate relationship and sense of place I’ve only experienced on the plateau.”
-Contract field biologist Ysa Diaz, who spent four weeks on the Paria Plateau identifying birds for the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument Songbird Survey
So far this year, 260 volunteers have donated 13,000 hours to support Trust work across the Colorado Plateau.
120 citizen scientists contributed their sweat, muscle, and brainpower to over a dozen fieldwork projects, including climate change adaptation research, habitat restoration, and data collection that will influence public lands management decisions.
180 young conservationists have contributed over 9,000 hours to Trust program work through conservation internships, the Uplift Conservation Conference, and service learning projects on public and tribal lands.
The Trust is leading the effort to reform obsolete and flawed mining regulations that allow uranium mines to operate in the Grand Canyon region without updated environmental review or adequate monitoring. Our campaign to prevent the White Mesa Uranium Mill from harming public health or contaminating southeastern Utah’s air, water, and land continues on multiple fronts with our lawsuit in progress and outreach to regulators. A short advocacy film will be released in 2016.
This summer, we finalized our lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to allocate 810,000 acres of public lands in the Colorado River Basin for oil shale and tar sands mining. We’re also working to ensure that the BLM regulates methane—a potent greenhouse gas—from industrial oil and gas operations on public lands.
