Maps show new reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante boundaries 

After President Donald Trump signed orders to dramatically shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, environmentalists are out with new maps showing the extent of the 3 million acres that were slashed.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmental nonprofit, which called Trump’s orders “reckless and unlawful,” drew the new monument specific maps, showing the 90% smaller and scattered areas that now fit the national monument designation. 

“These two landscapes deserve to be protected for current and future generations of Utahns and Americans, not opened to exploitation,” Scott Braden, executive director for SUWA said in a prepared statement. “The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is committed to defending the monuments and will challenge this unlawful decision in federal court. We are confident that President Trump’s reckless and unlawful acts will be rejected and the Monuments restored.”

The new Bears Ears is about 121,000 acres, and Grand Staircase-Escalante covers about 182,000 acres, according to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s office. 

Cox, who stood behind Trump while he signed the orders, applauded the actions, arguing that their reduced size would allow agencies “to better provide management, preservation, and public access to both monuments.”

“The question has never been whether to protect them, but how to protect them best,” Cox said in a statement on Monday. “The historic landmarks and other nationally significant resources remain under federal protection, while allowing agencies to direct limited resources toward caring for these specific sites rather than millions of surrounding acres.”

Trump’s executive orders follow a tug-of-war game between multiple presidential administrations in recent years. The maps display previous monument boundaries, including the updates Trump ordered in 2017, which shrunk Bears Ears from 1.35 million acres to about 228,000 acres, and reduced Grand Staircase-Escalante from about 1.87 million acres to roughly  million acres.

The maps also show the boundaries that the Biden administration restored to their original size for both monuments in 2021.