National monuments help local economies
An aerial view of the Valley of the Gods, an area that used to be in the Bears Ears monument, but was cut out in 2017 (Bureau of Land Management/)When President Trump declared plans to downsize Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in 2017, supporters of the decision claimed that the monuments could harm the industries that nearby communities relied on. After Bear Ears’ original designation, residents of adjacent counties had worried about the impact on mining and ranching.However, a new economic analysis published Wednesday in Science Advances finds that monuments give more to a community than they take away. In fact, there’s no evidence that they’ve really taken away any jobs. Public lands management is inherently a balancing act. In the West, more than 50 percent of lands are federally owned. Across most of this area, the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service work to conserve natural...