Water across the West at risk as Trump targets national monuments

In March, the Trump administration announced it would eliminate California’s Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands national monuments before removing language from a White House fact sheet announcing that decision. The following month, The Washington Post reported that the administration was considering downsizing or eliminating six national monuments, and in June, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an opinion that the president has the power to rescind national monument designations, backtracking on a decades-old determination on the matter.

During Trump’s last term, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, established by the Obama and Clinton administrations, respectively, were shrunk to fractions of their original sizes, but they were restored by President Joe Biden after he took office.

If national monuments are downsized or eliminated, the areas surrounding a waterway will lose protections from extractive industries, including oil and gas drilling, mining and grazing. Contamination from those industries could seep into streams and, in turn, rivers. Those industries also use water, sometimes vast amounts in arid regions, further reducing the supply that flows to nearby communities. (In certain cases, some mining and grazing are already permitted on national monument lands, but the activities are limited in scale and more regulated than they are outside the monuments.)

“Landscapes and waterways go hand in hand,” said Drew McConville, a senior fellow for conservation policy at the Center for American Progress and a co-author of the report. “The clean water depends on what comes into them from natural lands … Just protecting the wet stuff itself doesn’t guarantee that you’re keeping [water] clean and durable.”

The portion of historically marginalized communities living within the watersheds of the national monuments is greater than the average for watersheds nationally, it found. Twenty-three of the monuments studied are also found in regions expected to face water shortages due to climate change in the coming decades, making the arid regions downstream even drier.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, for example, protects 2,517 miles of waterways, according to the analysis, and nearly 90% of the watersheds within the monument are expected to see declines in their water levels. The monument straddles the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basins, with the Paria and Escalante rivers flowing within its boundaries and Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, just to its south. 

The monument is often thought of as a sparse, arid region, which it is, said Jackie Grant, the executive director of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, a nonprofit focused on protecting the monument that has spent $11 million to protect the Escalante River watershed and all its tributaries. It remains vital to the Colorado River System, which millions of people in the Southwest rely on. Grand Staircase-Escalante helps slow water from the Paunsaugunt Plateau in Bryce Canyon National Park, much of which starts as snowpack in the park before melting and flowing downstream. 

“People don’t think of water when they think of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument,” Grant said. “So when we can bring this view of water and how important it is to the protection of the monument, it helps us put another building block in our case for supporting the monument, because not only is it important for the animals, the native plants, the geology and the paleontology, water plays a huge role in the monument, and the monument protects the water itself.”

Stretching across 1.87 million acres of public land, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is one of the country’s most expansive national monuments, protecting scores of wildlife as well as archeological resources in southern Utah. But a nine-billion-ton coal deposit is buried in the center of the monument along with deposits of minerals, including uranium and nickel. The Trump administration has long touted boosting the country’s coal production, and has established a pro-mining agenda this year.