Patagonia joins lawsuit challenging Trump's Utah monument reductions

Trump reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by 90 percent in July

Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company, has joined a federal lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s decision to reduce the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, removing protections from nearly 3 million acres of land sacred to Indigenous American tribes. The Natural Resources Defense Council filed the lawsuit Wednesday, calling the reductions “one of the largest rollbacks of public land protections in US history.”

The lawsuit targets Trump’s July proclamation shrinking the two monuments by 90 percent. According to the Guardian, the proclamation cleared the way to open the land to oil and gas companies. In his proclamations, Trump argued the lands could be “put to a higher-priority use” and that they contained critical minerals important to “resource independence … [and] national security.”

Patagonia Chief Executive Ryan Gellert said the company would not tolerate what he described as illegal orders that “betray Tribal sovereignty.”

“We will not stand idly by while anti-public lands crusaders attempt to exploit these lands for their extractive-industry friends or disrespect tribal nations,” Gellert said in a statement.

Gellert argued that the Antiquities Act allows presidents to establish national monuments but does not give the executive authority to undo them. He characterized Trump’s move as an effort to “force secession of federal land to the state and allow private companies to extract natural resources from that land,” and pointed to mining claims that have already been filed in areas that are no longer part of the monuments.

“Protecting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante is worth more than any amount of money. The vast majority of Americans agree,” Gellert said.

Patagonia sued Trump in 2017 when he first sought to downsize the Utah monuments during his first term. President Joe Biden ultimately overturned that earlier reduction. According to the Guardian, Trump’s proclamations this year represent “an even more dramatic reduction of the monuments than he sought in his first term.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council’s executive director, Christy Goldfuss, said the monuments “protect places that took millions of years to form” and accused Trump of trying to destroy them “with a stroke of a pen.”

“That cannot stand,” Goldfuss said.

“Once you open these lands to mining and drilling, what gets lost is not coming back – ancient cliff dwellings, dinosaur fossils found nowhere else on Earth and sacred sites tied to the tribal nations,” Goldfuss added.

Bears Ears National Monument was established by President Barack Obama in 2016, during his final weeks in office, following years of advocacy by Indigenous American tribes. Grand Staircase-Escalante was established by President Bill Clinton.