A Grand Return

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was created as "the science monument." It's time to make real restoration happen.

BY CAROLYN Z. SHELTON

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument lies not far beyond my back door. I walk up an arroyo, seeking quiet and open space, seeking beauty. Here I restore myself. Sheer red sandstone walls, alcoves, and sand dunes stand frozen in deep time. But perhaps my favorite are lichens. Some grow less than one millimeter per year — the thickness of a credit card. Living from 500 to 5,000 years, these gloriously beautiful botanical creatures amaze me. Why do they thrive here? Because perfect conditions collide: superbly clean air, a rocky perch, and little to disturb their life’s journey through time. The land is alive. Anyone who spends time in wild places knows this. 

BLAKE MCCORD

A good part of this place remains wild and mostly undisturbed. Consider the original 1.9 million acre national monument: nearly 882,000 acres (about 47 percent) of Grand Staircase lie in wilderness study areas. Wilderness study areas are undeveloped public lands found to have wilderness characteristics and managed to preserve their natural conditions until legislation releases or further protects them. But most people who visit Grand Staircase would agree, the entire monument is wild, a rare commodity in this day and age. 

In 1996, President Clinton established Grand Staircase as the first national monument managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an outdoor laboratory with a unique mission of conducting science, research, and education in order to protect, conserve, and restore this unique place. This monument would become the first of many codified by Congress into law in 2009 as part of the National Landscape Conservation System. These crown jewels of the public lands would become known as the “National Conservation Lands.” 

With great enthusiasm I moved from my own interpretive consulting business in Seattle to Kanab in 2001, to be a part of foundational development of the BLM’s first national monument. For several years I led exhibit design and construction for four new visitor centers in surrounding communities. But love of the red rock is powerful. I moved into management for the last nine years of my career, trying to support and rebuild a strong science and visitor services program. I retired on my birthday in the summer of 2016.

National monuments like Grand Staircase are created by executive order through presidential proclamation. In particular, “objects” named in the proclamation must be protected, as required by a law called the Antiquities Act of 1906. And further, we must manage this vast and complex place so that our uses don’t degrade these objects.

Soon after designation rose a great tide of science and research directed toward understanding this little-known region, the last place mapped in the continental United States. Intensive baseline studies began, simply to identify what is here. This massive inventory job is still unfinished, with some plant, animal, and insect species, as well as fossils, unnamed and not yet identified by science. 

BLAKE MCCORD

Why focus on science and research at Grand Staircase? We do science and research to better understand and inform our actions, like on-the-ground management. And research, both basic and applied, helps contribute to knowledge in all of the fields for which Grand Staircase was established: geology, paleontology, archaeology, history, and ecology. Other aspects of research, like having reference areas, doing long-term monitoring, and conducting relevant analysis, all contribute solid evidence for making land-management decisions. 

There is good reason for both observation and experimentation in this outdoor laboratory. Various land-management restoration techniques could be tried here, while carefully documenting their progress, successes, and failures. This vast landscape of native pinyon, juniper, and sagebrush could also serve as a carbon sink in our fight against climate change.  

In an example of basic research, paleontologists study prehistoric plants that lived during times of great climatic variation. Although this research isn’t solving an immediate land-management problem at Grand Staircase, it might someday help us better cope with climate change in the future, and help struggling plants and animals adapt.

Applied research can directly help public-land managers make decisions now. Ecologists study biological soil crusts, a unique lifeform identified as an object to be protected in the 1996 presidential proclamation. They examine their composition, how they function to fight erosion, their interplay with air, soils, microorganisms, wildlife, and other plants. Better understanding these soil crusts helps managers do a better job with grazing and recreation in Grand Staircase, so as not to destroy this keystone lifeform of the Colorado Plateau. 

It is important to foster both basic and applied research. Land-management agencies almost exclusively fund and support applied management; in the early years at Grand Staircase, we funded both. 

Even though Grand Staircase was established to protect myriad special objects and resources, the biggest challenge lies not with biological soil crusts, threatened, endangered, or endemic plant and animal species, like the Kodachrome bladderpod, or fragile geologic formations. It is the increase in human population and human desires that substantially impacts wild places. Perhaps the way we view the land leads to trouble. To cope and to better understand these conflicts, I’ve been reading some classics during COVID-19 isolation. Remember Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac”? Published in 1949, Leopold starts out saying, “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a commodity to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

In December 2017, President Trump reduced the boundaries of Grand Staircase by nearly 50 percent. Subsequently, the BLM wrote a management plan that treats areas cut from the monument as no more special than “regular BLM.” I believe this was done with intent to make the National Landscape Conservation System fail and to placate local special interests. 

However, the nation’s public lands belong to all Americans, and National Conservation Lands are special. That’s why they were designated as national monuments and other protected areas. They deserve to be treated in a special manner, under the National Landscape Conservation System requirements of protection, conservation, and restoration. Many groups immediately went to court to fight for return to the rightful Grand Staircase boundaries, including the Grand Canyon Trust, Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, The Wilderness Society, and the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology.

MIKE POPEJOY

Therein lies the role of every American, not just environmental groups. These special places are our unique heritage, and if we don’t fight for them, we will lose them, as we saw in December 2017 when then-President Trump removed special protections for over 2 million acres of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. What happens to one can happen to any public lands, including places within the national park and national wildlife refuge systems. And, if you visit these landscapes, you’ll see there is substantial healing that needs to happen for these lands to be truly healthy again. 

What does it mean to help the land heal? Technically, this is called “restoration.” Restoration means the return of entire system functions prior to disturbance. Think about it. Once we “paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” — as Joni Mitchell put it — it’s incredibly difficult to go back to the wildflower meadow or juniper forest with thick biological soil crusts beneath. Returning a natural array of plant and animal associations, healthy soils, wildlife, insects, myriad microbial life, and water flows to a disturbed area is more than a job for humans! However, in partnership with nature, we see success over time. 

TIM PETERSON

The BLM and U.S. Forest Service call particular kinds of vegetation removal “restoration.” Manipulating the landscape for further commodity production, such as ripping out native pinyon, juniper, and sagebrush and replacing them with non-native species like crested wheatgrass provides cattle with high-protein forage. But it is not restoration. This kind of land manipulation requires repeat treatments every five to 15 years. This is expensive, labor intensive, and not sustainable on its own. 

On Grand Staircase, over 96 percent of the land can be grazed, so the incentive to provide better forage for cows is high. But these aggressive treatments over tens of thousands of acres cause irreparable damage to legally protected objects like biological soil crusts and archaeological sites. And because of persistent drought conditions, many treatment areas remain choked with tumbleweeds and cheatgrass, unproductive for cattle or anything else.

Another common technique is putting native or non-native vegetation back in a disturbed area to stabilize and keep it from further degrading. This is not restoration, but simply revegetation.

Threats come in many forms. Our first and most important task must be to cause no more harm. If we don’t pave paradise, we don’t have to try to restore it. But here in the West, we have caused harm, and so we need to work toward real restoration. We need to work with the land until natural ecosystem processes can sustain themselves. And we’ve seen successful restoration at Grand Staircase.

GRAND STAIRCASE ESCALANTE PARTNERS

In the early 1900s, the highly adaptable and invasive Russian olive was introduced in the Great Plains and the Southwest to prevent erosion, serve as windbreaks, and provide wildlife habitat. Unfortunately, it got out of control, choking out native plants along rivers and streams and “spreading like a botanical wildfire,” as noted by monument researcher Paul Evangelista. Less than 1 percent of total monument lands are ecologically valuable areas along streams or other water sources. The loss of native plants and animals and natural hydrologic systems, like annual flooding in these fragile areas, demanded attention.

Enter the Escalante River Watershed Partnership (ERWP). Now in its 12th year, ERWP is a model of how government agencies and the private sector can cooperate to help the land heal. Over 90 miles of critical river corridor are now free of invasive Russian olive. Young Conservation Corps members, including Native American and underserved groups, accomplish the physical work. Since 2009 they have contributed over 200,000 hours of hard work, immersed in the grandeur of red rock canyons, while learning about ecology. In 2012, ERWP was acknowledged by then-Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell as one of the top river-restoration projects in the nation. Although a great accomplishment, the work is far from done. 

We know that a healthy environment provides us food, water, and oxygen. But vast, wild places like Grand Staircase provide much more. They are a refuge for fellow creatures that share our planetary home, and a refuge for us to find solace and connection to something deep and meaningful. I believe there is merit in protecting a place for its intrinsic values.

BLAKE MCCORD

As if the political climate isn’t challenging enough, the actual climate poses far greater dangers. We need to question “best practices” in the current environment of climate change and instability, not just at Grand Staircase, but across the country. 

Fire is rampant in the American West. In December 2020, the BLM approved what can only be described as a scorched-earth policy, all in the name of restoring ecosystem health, preventing wildfire, and protecting the iconic and threatened sage grouse. Current proposals to clear-cut native pinyon and juniper exacerbate the problem. These low-fire-risk forests and sagebrush steppe have been here for thousands of years. When these highly adapted plants are removed, soils erode and flammable fuels like invasive tumbleweed and cheatgrass grow with vigor. Cattle selectively eat any native woody plants and wildflowers, especially vulnerable in spring when they try to set seed to reproduce.  

Allowing large and controversial vegetation removal projects to occur on public lands across 223 million acres in six western states, without involving the public or the scientific community, is simply bad management. At present, Grand Staircase is vulnerable.

Grand Staircase is too precious to allow it to degrade further. President Biden can restore the original boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and with it clear instructions to protect, conserve, and restore this place through a science-based process. 

The real question is: Can we change our way of thinking, acting, and being? This requires understanding that for humans to survive, everything is not about us. We have not been on this planet very long, and our time may be even shorter if we don’t respect those creatures that have come before and still live among us. Perhaps at Grand Staircase, we can fulfill the vision of better understanding this complex web of nature and sharing what we learn with everyone. 

It is time to engage people who have informed perspectives and close connections to the land. It is time to listen to scientists, as they relate what they observe. It is time to listen to Indigenous voices as we begin to allow this place to be truly restored. Restoration will happen on many levels, and we will all be better for it. 

Carolyn Z. Shelton cherishes the wild public lands behind her house every day. She currently serves on the board of directors of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, the friends group that advocates for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocate contributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.