As you know, SUWA works day in and day out to protect Utah’s magnificent wild lands.

From our lawsuits challenging President Trump’s illegal reductions of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments to our campaign to stop the BLM from chaining our public lands and fragmenting wilderness with oil and gas drilling—the effort to protect Utah wilderness never ends and is fought on many fronts.

That’s why I wanted to let you know about the next big opportunity we have—to protect the San Rafael Swell and other wilderness areas in Emery County, in the central part of Utah.

You’ll recall that Rep. Rob Bishop’s Public Lands Initiative (PLI) was introduced in the House with much fanfare in 2016. Although it began with good intentions, the final PLI was little more than a one-sided wish list for energy interests and off-road vehicle enthusiasts. Accordingly, it died a quick death in Congress.

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Out of the ashes of the failed PLI, Utah’s newest representative, John Curtis, and Senator Orrin Hatch have expressed interest in creating a comprehensive lands bill for the Emery County region—which includes the San Rafael Swell and Labyrinth Canyon.

We appreciate that Rep. Curtis and Sen. Hatch have committed to work with all sides, including SUWA. After all, these lands belong to all Americans. Only legislation negotiated with conservation interests will succeed.

There are already numerous points of agreement, but a successful bill to protect the San Rafael Swell and Labyrinth Canyon must:

• Not enshrine old, court-overturned travel plans into law. In the wake of a judge overturning the Richfield BLM’s motorized travel plan, an extraordinary agreement was reached between the Trump administration and off-road vehicle and conservation groups that ended litigation in favor of developing new travel plans, including for the San Rafael Swell. Emery County’s current proposal to enshrine the old and defeated travel plan is unacceptable. The State of Utah must also relinquish any RS 2477 claims in areas designated for protection.
• Focus on front country development, not backcountry fragmentation. Places like Bell and Little Wild Horse Canyons are seeing increased use and crowding. However, it would be a mistake to add new recreational amenities and, in turn, additional use to this remote area, as has been proposed. Any recreation and tourist infrastructure should be built in the front country near local communities such as Green River and the towns along Highway 10.
• Address scattered state sections. These sections, intended to help fund public schools, are isolated and often economically worthless. Legislation that trades out those sections and consolidates them elsewhere would benefit both education budgets and conservation.
• Protect the San Rafael Swell and Labyrinth Canyon. The western bank of the Green River in Labyrinth Canyon falls within Emery County, while the eastern bank is in Grand County. We should not limit our thinking to the arbitrary political boundaries of the county. All of Labyrinth should be addressed.

We’re excited about the opportunity to work with Rep. Curtis and Sen. Hatch to protect the places we all treasure. But it must be a good bill—a bill worthy of the landscape it seeks to protect.

In the coming weeks, we’ll send you more information about the emerging San Rafael Swell bill and the opportunities you’ll have to participate in the process.

Thank you for continuing to be a part of the movement to protect Utah wilderness. We cannot succeed without you.

To say the Nov. 8 election was unalloyed bad news for the Redrock is flogging the obvious.

What is at stake? Just about everything you and SUWA care about here. The state will redouble its efforts to wrest millions of acres of public land from the American people and it will press its nightmarish RS 2477 road claims even harder—but now with a compliant White House. Any trend by the BLM toward reasoned judgements in its stewardship will be throttled in infancy. The wretched Bundy clan and other militia types will be emboldened in their defiance of the law—in everything from criminal trespass to armed confrontation with public employees. We’ll face both administrative and legislative efforts to roll back America’s legal protections for our air, water, land and our public land managers.

Any hope we had of quickly driving a stake through the sclerotic heart of Rep. Rob Bishop’s Public Lands Initiative (PLI) is dashed. The fates of both the PLI and the Bears Ears monument are now unclear. The Utah congressional delegation will likely try to move the PLI legislation, or a new variant, in the new Congress; the Obama administration will assess the election before making its next move on designating the Bears Ears.

That dismal list is enough to make the point that needs to be made here. This is not a drill. The threats I delineate here are not hyperbolic. Neither, though, are we powerless. It is true that Bishop’s infernal House Natural Resources Committee will continue to spew ridiculous anti-public lands legislation. It is also true that our House sponsor of America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, Alan Lowenthal, won his re-election. He is a stalwart. Another is Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois. He was not up for re-election this time around and he remains our Senate champion. If the Utah delegation intends to take either of them on in an effort to dismantle redrock wilderness, it will be in for a fight.

In significant ways, there is little new in any of this. From the beginning of SUWA and the campaign for redrock wilderness, the challenge has been difficult. Faced with intransigent Utah politicians, we have rarely NOT been on the defense. That is the nature of what we do. We have ensured that millions of acres of Utah are still wild. We have done it by holding the line, by fighting acre by acre to keep it wild.

When the 1994 election flipped control of the Senate and House to the Republican party, the Utah delegation sought to enact statewide anti-wilderness legislation. We stopped them in both chambers. And we faced the same unified Republican control after the 2004 election during George W. Bush’s tenure. We fought back and beat the “drill baby bill” tidal wave through fights in both the courts and the Congress. We have faced overwhelming odds before, and with your help, prevailed. We will again.

The experience of defending the canyon country over three decades has taught us that that even the friendliest administrations are never as good as we hoped they’d be. And the most hostile were never quite as ugly as we feared.

Donald Trump’s misogynistic and racist campaign dragged our nation further down the road to Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness.” We now live in a country of fact-free “truth,” where any information inconsistent with blind ideology is rejected.

If there is an antidote to this mess, it is wilderness. The rain and snow fall, the sun rises, and muddy rivers flow with a murmur, not a twitter. We need the natural world more than ever. And it needs us to protect it.

The things that matter are not fleeting and are not lost in a single night’s election. We can still protect the places and values that matter. Together, we will.

Get ready for the fight. The Redrock needs us all.