Welcome to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. The land on and around Cedar Mesa, the Bears Ears, is almost all federal land, managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.

It was federal land before President Obama declared a big national monument,

and it's still federal land now that President Trump reduced the size by 85%.

Normally, the BLM and the Forest Service managed their land according to a practice called

multiple use, which means the land can be used for anything

from coal mines to wilderness areas, from oil wells to ski resorts.

But when an area is declared a national monument, multiple use no

longer applies. The management practice on national monuments is to protect the natural

environment.

So in this way, the argument over the size of the monuments

in southern Utah is mainly an argument

about how much land will be open for commercial development.

Trump's reduction reopens about 800,000 acres

to multiple use management.

The fear of the environmentalist is, well, I'll let my friend Ken Sanders describe it.

In a nutshell, they're giving it away to corporations that are going to exploit it for oil, gas, uranium, and every natural energy source or natural

resource that they can possibly extract at it and the only reason they're doing it is for greed and power and money.

And taking our land and destroying the earth, the air, and the water to put profits in the handfuls of corporations that are going to

take those profits far away from here is in my mind obscene.

This is the way the story is told, at least by the environmentalists,

but the reality of the situation is that there are no coal, oil, or gas reserves on Cedar Mesa.

There are oil and gas fields on the perimeter of the Mesa,

...