EDITORIAL: Overprotecting our public lands

Colorado’s western frontier is the latest ground zero in the nation’s unending standoff over public lands. And as is often the case, a bid to “protect” the lands in contention could do more harm than good.

The Gazette reported this week that a group with the backing of the national environmental movement is pushing for nearly 400,000 acres of public land spanning Mesa and Montrose counties to be Colorado’s next national monument. Many of the people who live in the region, and who try to make a living there, are pushing back.

The proposed Dolores Canyons National Monument would mean new restrictions on the land’s use, particularly on mining. The remote area lies in Colorado’s uranium belt.

With uranium imports from Russia banned by the Biden administration — and our country, meanwhile, moving from fossil fuels — critics of a national monument designation believe once-booming uranium mining in the proposed national monument is poised to take off again.

The uranium is needed to serve national defense as well as to fuel a predicted resurgence of nuclear power as the U.S. economy adopts renewable energy sources. Vanadium, another mineral mined in the area, also serves strategic U.S. interests for its use in hardening steel.

Mining, of course, serves the local economy, as well. It creates relatively high-paying jobs in a sparsely populated part of Colorado where good jobs are hard to come by.

A national monument could stymie all that.

“The national monument designation would drastically limit future opportunities,” Mesa County Commissioner Bobbie Daniel said in The Gazette’s account. He said next-gen, small-scale nuclear reactors as well as “critical supply chain resources” for semiconductors and electrical vehicle batteries could be served by the area’s mining.

“The designation would unnecessarily put our national security, economy and ally nations at a significant disadvantage at a time when pivotal resources must be readily available to ensure security and stability domestically and abroad,” Daniel said.

Local critics also contend the protections a national monument designation purports to add to the land aren’t needed. There are regulatory guardrails on the land, enforced by the federal Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service.

As one local organizer of the national monument opposition told The Gazette, “We love this country. There’s nobody that wants to protect it more than us.”

What they don’t want, understandably, is to see it protected to the exclusion of all else.

It’s an all-too-familiar faceoff reflecting fundamentally conflicting priorities. Almost everyone agrees public lands should serve the public; that’s the easy part. At issue is how the public is best served.

Advocates of greater restrictions on public land use would allow little leeway for other human activity except for tourism. A crush of tourists, by the way, is something the local residents and their elected leaders in this case seem to fear, as The Gazette reported.

The locals, in turn, express pride in the beauty of their region’s natural wonders and a desire to preserve them. But they can’t afford to shut down the local economy and, because they live near the land, see many other uses for it in general.

By rights, the citizens of the communities neighboring our nation’s public lands aren’t there to serve those lands but rather to be served by them — just like the visitors from more populous regions who come for a weekend to take in the sights. Shouldn’t policymakers try to consider all of their interests?