Our public land is truly unique in the world. Once we lose it, we never get it back.

Nick's Take

The framework that governs American public lands was built incrementally over about 70 years, from roughly 1891 to 1976. The Forest Reserve Act, the Antiquities Act, the National Park Service Organic Act, the Wilderness Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act: each piece was a response to something — usually resource extraction running ahead of any legal constraint, or the loss of landscapes that were gone before anyone thought to protect them. Mesa Verde was being looted. The forests of the Pacific Northwest were being cleared with no regeneration requirements. The response, at each point, was to build a new legal layer. The Congressional Review Act was passed in 1996 — the same year Grand Staircase-Escalante was established — as an oversight mechanism for federal rulemaking. For most of its first two decades, it was rarely used. It's now being deployed as the fastest tool available to dismantle that 70-year framework, one layer at a time.

The "substantially the same" clause is where the long-term stakes are highest, and it's the part of this story that's getting the least attention. A future BLM director who wants to protect the Grand Staircase fossil beds with a new management plan, or a future Interior Secretary who wants to reinstate a mining moratorium in the Boundary Waters watershed, faces immediate litigation risk over whether the new action is too similar to the one Congress voided. The fights happening right now aren't just about the specific landscapes. They're about what tools remain available in 2029, or 2033, or 2041.

Nick's Take

Chuckwalla has been a human crossroads for at least 10,000 years. The Corn Springs area in the Chuckwalla Mountains contains petroglyph panels — bighorn sheep, geometric figures, human forms — among the oldest recorded in California. The Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Mohave, Quechan, and Serrano peoples all moved through and lived in this landscape, using it as a trade and travel corridor connecting the Colorado River to the California coast. In 1942, General Patton chose these same desert valleys for the Desert Training Center, the largest desert military training program in American history — over a million troops prepared here for the North Africa campaign. The rusted remains of tank tracks and field camps are still scattered across the monument floor. All of that history, spanning 10,000 years of human use, sits within those 740,000 acres.

The legal theory behind the challenge has been raised in various forms since at least the Clinton-era designations and has never been upheld by a federal court. What makes this case worth watching isn't necessarily its legal merit, but the context surrounding it. The intervention by five tribal nations and nine conservation groups establishes defenders with independent legal standing, so that even if the federal government's position shifts, the monument has a legal voice in court that doesn't depend on which direction the administration points.

Nick's Take

The Kaiparowits Formation, which runs through the heart of Grand Staircase-Escalante, is one of the richest Late Cretaceous fossil beds on Earth. Paleontologists working there over the past three decades have identified more than a dozen entirely new dinosaur species from roughly 75 to 80 million years ago, when this part of Utah sat on the edge of Laramidia — an island continent split from eastern North America by the Western Interior Seaway. They've barely scratched the surface. The 2025 management plan includes specific paleontological protections that its predecessors lacked: protocols governing what happens when fossil-bearing strata are encountered during permitted surface activities. Voiding the plan doesn't just remove a policy document. It removes those protocols, mid-research, in one of the most scientifically productive landscapes in the country.

It's worth being precise about what the resolution does and doesn't do. It doesn't eliminate the monument — the monument boundaries are set by presidential proclamation. What it eliminates is the operational framework: the management plan that tells BLM how to evaluate grazing permits, where to allow motorized access, what conditions apply to mineral exploration, how to coordinate with the six tribal governments that have formal roles in monument oversight. The monument continues to exist, legally, but land managers are left with a legal obligation to manage it and no valid instruction set for how.

Nick's Take

The Antiquities Act was signed in 1906 because looters were destroying Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings in the Southwest faster than anyone could stop them. Congressional debates at the time show explicit concern about the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings and Chaco Canyon — sites that had survived for 800 years and were being picked apart in a generation. Congress gave the president a unilateral tool specifically to respond quickly, without waiting for the full legislative process. The Congressional Review Act, passed 90 years later, is now being used to run the same logic in reverse: a mechanism that lets Congress act quickly, except this time the direction of travel is removal rather than protection. That symmetry is worth sitting with.

The "substantially the same" clause is where the real long-term risk lives. Under the Antiquities Act, one president can reduce what another established — but that reduction can be challenged in court and reversed by a successor. The CRA doesn't work that way. If a resolution of disapproval passes and becomes law, a future BLM director who wants to issue a new, protective management plan faces immediate legal exposure over whether the new plan is too similar to the one Congress voided. What's being built here isn't just a policy outcome — it's a constraint on what future policymakers can do.