We're out here in Bears Ears, in Utah,
looking for a tiny bit of uranium-rich land. And if we find it, we're gonna stake it as our very own NBC Left Field claim.
President Trump recently reopened the Bears Ears National Monument to new
mining claims. "Public lands will once again be for public use." That means that
land that was protected, kind of like a national park, is now open to new claims
for valuable minerals. "Outrageous gold rush-style grab of public lands to begin
on Friday." And valuable minerals, historically, they lead to land rushes.
The U.S.
Has had a lot of them, especially since all the land was American-Indian
land in the first place, before the God-given idea of manifest destiny swept
American settlers westward. Famously, you have the Oklahoma land rush, where
50,000 people rushed for desirable farmland, and the California Gold Rush,
which did you know the claim system that came out of the Gold Rush is still the
basis for our mining claims today? Meaning any company or U.S. Individual can
literally put stakes in the ground and prospectall for the low cost of $212 per 20-acre claim, with a little field work and
a lot of paperwork. So yeah, we thought there's gonna be like,
a flurry of mining claims, as was heavily reported.
We should maybe get a literal
stake in this story because it might just help explain what's going on with
mining and America's public lands in 2018. Except there was no land rush.
The land rush was supposed to start on February 2, and I got to town a few
days after. I had to go pick up brochures from the Bureau of Land Management, the
BLM, on how to prospect. Find your discovery site, and that's generally
where you put your discovery marker, and then you'll mark your claim corners.
I bought a lot of maps. I had to pick a square on this 1.3 Million-acre area
that I wanted to prospect in. Visit the county recorder's office to see what else
had been staked in my area. But since the county doesn't track if claims are still
active, I spent a very long night trying to cross-reference it to a BLM database
called LR 2000, and was just trying to do all this as fast as possible to get
in on the land rush.
However, I was the only person in town. And really the first clue
that there was no land rush was the local newspaper. "Mineral restrictions
continue in Bears Ears country." It's a headline that's frankly so boring that I
didn't even notice it was the same story right away. So I immediately went around
the corner to meet Bill.
"I'm the publisher, editor, and janitor at the San Juan
Record in Monticello, Utah. It's not a bunch of people in Levi Strauss jeans
panning for gold. About 95 percent of the initial land designated by President
Obama in 2016 continues to have significant restrictions on the
development of minerals." OK, have a look. So Obama created the Bears Ears
National Monument as one of his final executive actions, protecting 1.3 Million
acres of federal land that, yeah, actually already had some mining
restrictions on it.
Only a year later, Trump shrunk it by 85 percent, creating
instead two smaller national monuments. And much of the acreage he took out just
returned to being, say, National Forest Service land or wilderness study, which
has its own special mining rules. More than that,
the Utah Geological Survey says there's very little energy potential inside the
original boundariesmeaning there aren't any commercially valuable minerals.
The oil and gas wells have all been plugged, and there's just not that much to rush for.
The on-the-ground reality here is that there's very little change, there's
very little opportunity for change. So while Bill's
reporting explains why there wasn't a rush of new mining claims, there's
something a bit bigger at play here.
See, Obama protected more federal land from
development than any other president, and he did that through something called the
Antiquities Act, which allows presidents or Congress to protect the land of
cultural or historic importance and turn it into something like a national park. Like, for
instance, Bears Ears was protected because five tribes have historical
claims to the land. The history of land rushes is actually pretty dark, when
considered from the perspective of the American Indian. In the 1800s, when American
settlers believed that they and their institutions were destined to expand
westwards, they steamrolled over the very briefly
proposed permanent Indian frontier.
The idea that Native Americans could have
all the land west of Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa in exchange for, you know, white
settlers getting the east. And briefly, guard towers were even set up to stop
settlers from trading in Indian Territory without permits. The frontier
never really took effect, as settlers rushed for gold in California or to
stake farmland in the Midwest. Today, there's a couple dozen sites that are
integral to Native-American history, preserved in national monuments or
national parks.
But Bears Ears was one of the largest
designations of land based on their cultural history.
Public land in America, all the federal land, is managed through a multiple-use
policy, meaning that you have to weigh competing interests. When Obama protected
1.3 Million acres for Native-American history, ranching families felt like he'd
overstepped. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. It's going
to be only America first, America first.
At the recommendation of his interior
minister, Sec. Ryan Zinke, Trump's shrinking of national monuments is kind of an
America-first policy, through the dual mission of energy security, like
producing more of America's energy domestically, and a return to what the
Trump administration calls traditional activities on the land. We're going to
get a wonderful announcement coming up on Monday. We will put our nation's
treasures to great and wonderful use.
Together, we will usher in a bright new
future of wonder and wealth, liberty and law, patriotism and pride. In addition to
shrinking Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, the Trump
administration is reviewing 25 other national monuments for reduction. And
because the Antiquities Act doesn't specify if you can shrink national
monuments, tribe,s environmental advocacy groups, and even Patagonia, an outdoor
retailer, are suing the federal government.
That litigation is pending in Washington. But, as of February 2, the land out in
Bears Ears became fair game.
We're just out here in like, millions and
millions of unmarked acres, trying to figure out which 20 of them we should
claim. So the land was only protected for a year, and anyone could have made a
claim in the, like, 100 years leading up to Obama's decision. So
hopefully this stays up. But if you actually want to find the miners, look a little outside
the boundaries.
So right outside Obama's original designation, is the Daneros
Uranium Mine owned by Energy Fuels International. They haven't mined uranium
since 2012 because the market price of uranium is so low. Uranium prices surged in 2007, and I saw that actually when I was at the county recorder's
office, where there were dozens and dozens of mining claims filed in the
years leading up to that. It's not that hard to file a mining claim.
These claims
could lead to future mines, but it will be years and years of paperwork. There were in fact
two claims filed the week I was out there. And one of those claims came from
a pair of activists and bloggers for REI, another American outdoors company. And
they decided to stake land to see if it would actually prevent others from
mining it.
But that turned out to be optimistic. There is quite a bit of evidence to say
that this is not a useful way of preserving an area. Because someone can
just put a claim on top of your claim. In fact, President Trump's decision to
shrink Bears Ears impacts the Daneros Mine's plan of operation, which was always
outside the boundaries.
In late February 2018, the BLM approved the Daneros Mine
for a five-fold expansion over the next 20 years,
which means if and when they get back into uranium production, they could be
transporting up to nine truckloads a day of uranium ore on roads that cut through
the national monument. And in the BLM's rationale for this decision, they
mentioned that the smaller monument area means a lesser environmental effect. So
even though there was limited potential for our project in pretty much every
sense, we wanted to see it through. NBC Left Field is gonna stake some land.
What
do you make of this plan? Good luck finding some land that doesn't already
have significant mineral restrictions. For you to make a valuable
discovery, you're gonna have to go get some permits, which is probably at least a two-year process. So in Part 2, I'm gonna take you down the rabbit hole. So
you go down, and down, and down.
Northeast corridor in the southeast
corridor, section 23, township 36. And show you how you actually file a mining claim,
and what you can do with thatalthough maybe by the end of it you'll decide it
isn't really worth your while. Anyway, you can decide. Click here to watch.
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