Dear Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke,
Did you lick the same rocks?
Many of us worry about climate change, nuclear war—the fate of the whole world. Writing emails, letters, signing petitions, making phone calls…going to rallies…it can all feel like talking to rocks. And, like you, ultimately, all I want is peace.
For five hours I drove from Capitol Hill, in Salt Lake City. No, I wasn’t at the Bears Ears rally, though I would have been—I just live here.
I imagine you flew over the amazing landscape I drove through, which included Bryce Canyon and Kodachrome Basin. I drove to Grovsenor Arch and met up with my friend, a lawyer in SLC, and his friends—a doctor and his wife, a happy retiree, a science writer and her assistant, and our leader and guide, monument paleontologist Dr Alan Titus. As my little car was unfit for the drive, I got to have Dr Titus as my personal private guide—just like you did a couple days later.
In Titus’ BLM truck, we drove up and up and over the Cockscomb Ridge. Steep and rocky, high and narrow. My little car would have never made it. On the other side, we emerged in a new amazing landscape. Everything is incredibly beautiful, colorful rocks, budding and flowering bushes, blue skies. Even the main attraction for this stop was breathtaking—a coal seam.
Maybe you had the same tour. Alan starts “the tour” talking about how the Grand Staircase was created in 1996 by Presidential Proclamation that Clinton which came as a complete shock to everyone, including Titus, who was then teaching geology at Snow College. “I was just as upset and shocked as any body that this had happened because I had liked to take my students down here on field trips to collect fossils and stuff—so I thought ‘Oh, there goes that.’”
I’m sure you heard it. The rocks. How coal is formed. Who has tried to mine it. Of course, then, the mining talk begs the question, what does national monument designation actually mean? All previous monuments, all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt, had been given to the Park Service. Why did Babbitt and Clinton decide to give this very first one, the Grand Staircase-Escalante, to the BLM?
You know the answer: “Because of multiple-uses.”
"You can still target shoot over 98 per cent of here. You can hunt. You can ride your ATV. You can go horseback riding… You can do whatever you want, within reason, within the regular BLM rules and within our management framework.” Titus explained. "We still have thousands, about 10 thousand, cows grazing out there. We still have a producing oil field in upper valley. We still had, until recently, producing alabaster mines, gravel quarries—you know, that sort of thing. They are all still out here.”
So, we asked, “What then did the National Monument designation change?”
"Well, we have supplemental rules now that closed a lot of areas to collectors. On normal BLM you can pick up rocks, collect fossils, you can do all sorts of things. You can harvest vegetation. You can do …whatever. You can't do that in a monument. It's closed to collecting. And the monument also brought together a framework of more intensive management …and funding to support more intensive research and things like that, that you would never see in a normal BLM field office. Like, for instance, the paleontology. This sort of research that we do here wouldn't normally be supported by a normal field office.”
"So we can't collect coal for our camp fire?" I asked.
"Well, there are certain exceptions. You can harvest edibles for personal use. You can harvest firewood, as long as it's dead and down."
So, we can’t collect it, but can other people, companies, still mine?
"Hypothetically, yes. And hypothetically you don't need to do away with the monument to have a coal mine, you just need to have Congress reopen it to leasing. Existing leases, grandfathered leases, are honored in perpetuity, as long as the leaseholder desired to do whatever it was they were doing, as long as they continued to do it. But as soon as they retire it then it would go away, if there was no new leasing.”
What would happen if this area became a mining site is hard to say. “Big roads, big trucks…big guys,” Ted says. Yes. And a lot of traffic.
Don suggests Nala take a look at Nine-Mile Canyon, as an example of what would happen. "The petroglyphs are still there," says Don, "and there's nice interpretive signs. There's a little fence around them. And right over here,” he gestures, “is something going 'whooshka whooska whooska.'"
"One of the other main values that the BLM was tasked to maintain and manage here is the undeveloped character of the land—as well as the historic legacy and traditional uses, and things like that” preserving the sort of pioneer feel of when the first covered wagons rolled in. But, since “coal and fossil areas aren’t always on top of each other, paleontology and mining can co-exist without severely impacting each other,” Titus explains.
I heard you were a little shocked to learn that, though that’s the case, they still can, and ARE, found together. And when they are, the coal always wins. The operations are so massive that finding a bone means nothing. Nothing gets in the way of mining. Nothing slows it down. The bones get pulverized. That’s just the way it is.
So, what’s so important about dinosaur bones? What’s so important about the fossiliferous regions of the Kaiparowits plateau, the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears areas?
This staircase, these rocks of the Kaiparowits Plateau, are the texts of the story of survival. They contain, in about 75000 vertical feet, one of the most complete records of late cretaceous terrestrial organisms and ecosystems on the planet. Science-y. And cool. This is a snapshot of what earth was like up to the big impact of the meteor, the extinction, and the chaos—and how life adapted.
I think this should be of interest to you, to all “leaders” who have, in your high-power and high-paying job, taken on a responsibility for the health of EVERYONE’s future.
No matter what your hope, or fantasy, is of the future, I hope that you, and all our “leaders,” at least have the foresight to preserve and study the text “A Guide to Life After Catastrophe” etched in the National Monuments.
In Titus’ truck, I got to ask my burning questions, as you did, too. Mine were, “Are we going to annihilate the world? Is there hope for us? …And how do you learn that from dinosaurs?”
Not that he isn’t worried about the future, but Titus’ answer about what the bones have taught us was oddly comforting. "There have been lots of extinctions. The dinosaur extinction wasn't actually the worst that the planet has experienced. And life always finds a way. But it might be without us. There's always winners and losers in every extinction…and they are almost predetermined. For instance, ravens and cockroaches and those things, they're gonna win. They just always do. And then, from those, when you clear out an eco-space of all the inhabitants, of all the things that are niche specialized, then those generalists reradiate and fill up those niches again with specialists. It's beautiful actually.”
To me, it sounds like the title of the next best-selling business book, “Ravens, Roaches, and Rats: A Survival Guide.” It also makes me wonder, which are we?
As you know, Titus has discovered amazing things. And thanks to the monument designation, and funding, what he has learned is available for ALL to learn. I hope you visited the Museum of Natural History of Utah and saw all the cool bones.
The whole area, even without the dino-discoveries, is “Rainbows and Unicorns.” It looks as if someone had come out and paved the narrow stretch of the top of a long, high, steep hill with round, smooth jewels. Bright red. Orange. Purple. Black. It’s odd to me that the top of a ridge was covered with river stone. I learn the stones had been in a riverbed, and that, later, those same stones protected the area from erosion as the land around washed away. The gem-like stones glitter around every pinion and juniper tree (with Bert and Ernie hair), the sagebrush, the budding cacti and flowering yucca, the festooned cliff rose bushes perfuming the air filled with bird-song serenade. It really is Heaven.
But it’s also a crime scene and if you disturb the evidence, then you don't have any evidence, you can't get the data. For the first-time in the long life of my inner-fourth-grader, I was happy not to take anything home.
Like you, I left the monument with no bones, no gem-like stones, no flowers. Just memories. I licked a lot of stones, to see if they were dinosaur bones, and I left them for you. I have nothing to show for the trip except the dozen or two no-see-um bites on my face and hands, watery-allergy-traumatized-eyes, and a sweet memory of all the beauty. I left everything of beauty for the next tourist, you.
There is a Navajo tradition called Beauty Way. I don’t know much about Navajo religion or tradition but, to me, beauty connotes intrinsic respect.
Respect and beauty may not be the voices, the votes, our Utah leaders (or National leaders) always listen to—as evidenced by what was in the news last month around your visit:
You and others said you’re afraid of the monument’s restrictions. Hatch said they are too many to list. But, if none of you can bring yourself to say what you want to do, then ‘what you want’ probably shouldn’t be done. I’m sure your mother told you that. Hatch even said, “take my word for it.” But while he has recently denied a man a lung transplant for smoking marijuana, and is gunning for a lower legal alcohol limit, I cannot say I trust him and his fear of restrictions at all. You, Zinke, said having ‘access limited’ is a problem. But during your visit, it was you who were the one who denied access to an important resource to important people—that resource being your ears.
Most lawmakers do not listen to any religion other than their own, yet they do not listen to science, either. Do they listen to science fiction? Is their plan to colonize space stations, or other planets, à la the movies Star Wars and The Martian?
So, what do you who are threatened by the areas’ monument status really want?
Imagine our future, realizing that, like a bone not attached to a skeleton, we have not attached ourselves to a whole, to this planet and to each other. Fragmented and separated, we are no longer significant. I learned that from my dino-digging tour. Did you?
No matter what your hope, of fantasy, is of the future, I hope that you, and all our “leaders,” at least have the foresight to preserve and study the text “A Guide to Life After Catastrophe” etched in the National Monuments.
After all, with global warming and the extinction of humanity, this world will again look similar to how it did 75 million years ago. Perhaps, when we're looking for dinosaur fossils, we're not just looking at the past. Perhaps we're looking at the future.
I asked Titus my final question, "Do you think dinosaurs could come back?"
He thought about it and after a moment answered, "That's a good question.”
--
Dear Zinke, I hope you got to ask the same questions as you spent Wednesday with Dr Titus. I hope you were able to discover the same hadrosaur knucklebone I found on Saturday. I hope you listened to the 75 million year old voices that might give us a clue as to how to survive climate change, war, and other catastrophes.
Whether or not we learn from (pre)history, we are bound to repeat it. It’s inevitable, right? After all, “this last extinction,” Titus told me, “began 40 thousand years ago,” when humans came on the scene.
But listening to the rocks, millions of years old, I hear hope, because even in the face of possible extinction of the monuments, as we know them, there has got to be peace. Beauty and respect will always deserve my vote more than greed.
Sincerely,
Anna Zumwalt
