In late June, the Babylon Fire burned roughly 107,000 acres of the Elk Ridge landscape within the Manti-La Sal National Forest west of Monticello, Utah. This is the high country above Dark Canyon Wilderness, lying almost entirely within Bears Ears National Monument. The U.S. Forest Service is now proposing a fast-tracked public process for a sprawling “post-fire recovery” project, including commercial timber harvest, hazardous fuels reduction, road reconstruction, new temporary roads, and other vegetation removal and manipulation activities across a 95,000-acre project area.

The agency is accepting public comments on the project through Tuesday, Nov. 3. Click here to let them know you oppose this reckless approach to fire recovery.

The problem isn’t the idea of helping the burned landscape recover; it’s how the Forest Service wants to do it. Instead of analyzing the specifics of this unique and extremely important landscape, including its soils, cultural sites, wildlife, and recovery needs, the agency proposes to rely on a generic, nationwide post-fire environmental assessment prepared in Washington, DC.

Even more frustratingly, the project proposal never once mentions that it must conform to the Bears Ears National Monument Management Plan. Despite the Trump administration’s illegal reduction of the monument this summer, that plan remains the governing policy for the entire Bears Ears landscape at present. Fire recovery in Bears Ears should follow the plan written to protect this landscape, not sidestep it.

In your comments, please tell the Forest Service to:

• Follow the Bears Ears plan’s protections for fire recovery and logging.
• Meaningfully involve Tribes in planning and implementation.
• Allow logging only when it protects monument resources and supports ecological recovery.
• Disclose exactly where logging and other work would occur and what methods would be used.
• Protect steep slopes, fragile soils, and streams from further damage.
• Identify and protect cultural sites, wildlife habitat, and culturally-significant plants before work begins.

The agency needs to follow the existing management plan and reject a one-size-fits-all framework for this unique and remarkable landscape.