On Oct. 8, President Joe Biden righted two of the previous president’s many wrongs. In a pair of precise and eloquent proclamations, Biden restored the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — the Utah national monuments that Donald Trump had eviscerated four years earlier.
Conservation biology buttresses Biden’s fix. We know that big reserves connected by habitat corridors preserve land and life better than isolated islands of wildness. Large monuments like 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase and 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears do a much better job at protecting all the “objects” worth preserving — as required by the Antiquities Act, the 1906 law that allows presidents to establish national monuments.
There’s no telling which object might be the key to resilience. As Aldo Leopold famously observed, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
