This week, President Donald Trump shrunk Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments by about 3 million acres, roughly 90%. It is the largest reduction of protected public land in U.S. history.

At the signing, surrounded by Utah’s congressional delegation, House Speaker Mike Schultz, and Gov. Spencer Cox, an Interior official claimed those acres had been locked up for nobody to use. Trump said you cannot hunt, you cannot fish and you can virtually not even walk on it. A deputy secretary agreed: “That’s exactly right, sir.”

I know that is not true, because I have adventured on this land for 20 years. Nobody ever stopped me. I ran my first 50-mile ultramarathon through Bears Ears. I have hiked Peekaboo and Spooky in Grand Staircase and camped under some of the darkest skies in this country. Out there I have passed hunters, cattle grazing and people fishing. Nobody was ever locked out. Hunting, fishing and grazing were written into the original protections from the start.

This is shared American history. These lands hold more than 100,000 cultural sites, Native homelands since time immemorial and fossil beds in Grand Staircase that scientists have not even begun studying. If we lose Bears Ears, we lose part of ourselves.

What happened here can happen to your favorite public land next.

It is an assault on tribes. Bears Ears was the first monument created at the request of sovereign Native nations, and it was co-managed with them. I have met with tribal members who want this land protected forever. Nobody consulted them before the signing. They learned the news the way the rest of us did.

The monument status protected the land from mining and drilling. That is the part they are removing. This land does not go back to Utah. It stays federal. The proclamation just strips the protection and opens it to mining.

Gov. Cox griped that “there are no resources that come with” these monuments. But look who was standing next to him. Public lands are funded by Congress. They could pay to care for it. Instead, they have gone along with gutting the budgets and staff. They starved these lands, then called the monuments too big to manage. That is not a reason. It is a choice. Do your jobs.

Cox said the antiquities would be protected. But if you read Trump’s proclamation, it calls petroglyphs and pictographs too common to protect, then it reserves acres to protect a 1926 oil well. They are cutting the rock art and keeping the drill site. The Grand Staircase order spells out 15 minerals they are after, including uranium, copper and cobalt.

Let’s be honest about the places in Utah that really are closed to hunting, fishing and walking. They are mines. You cannot walk the Oquirrh mountains that have been removed for Kennecott mine. You cannot fish in Poison Creek in Park City, named for what a century of silver mining left behind. You can now walk across much of what was once the Great Salt Lake, and that is not a good thing. We let it shrink to a record low and now the exposed lakebed sends arsenic and heavy metal dust into the air that 2.5 million people breathe.

I love Utah. I grew up here. My family is here. It’s my roots and wings. But I am not going to pretend our track record is good management. We have some of the worst air in the country, and we rank second in the nation for toxic air pollutants. Saying otherwise does not make it true.

Rep. John Curtis argues these lands should be managed by Utah instead of people 2,000 miles away. But look at what Utah manages. That same Kennecott pit is owned by a foreign company, Rio Tinto. Foreign companies profit, Utahns pay the price with our health. Utah trades long-term health for short-term profit, again and again. Handing these lands to the state is how we lose them.

None of this is what people want. 71% of Utahns want Bears Ears kept whole, and 74% say the same for Grand Staircase. Across the West, 91% want existing monuments left in place, and 4 out of 5 of Trump’s own supporters agree.

I am tired of politicians playing games with our land. Shrink it, restore it, shrink it again, every time the White House changes hands. That is no way to protect anything, and the people who live down there deserve better than whiplash.

We want the full monuments back. And we want them protected permanently, by Congress, so no president of any party can ever do this again. Protect these lands, and fund them. They belong to all of us.

Caroline Gleich is a professional athlete, environmental advocate and former U.S. Senate candidate who has worked on Utah environmental issues for nearly two decades.

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