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Show 21 extension of the effort begun by the Sagebrush Rebels."51 Key to Cawley's exploration of the conservation movement is that it was not necessarily a linear or coherent process. Throughout the history of the movement, and in current land debates, "conservation is a tcm1 with multiple, and not necessarily consistent, meanings," he conctudcd.52 In 1996, President Bill Clinton used his authority under the Antiquities Act to declare 1.9 million acres of Southern Utah as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The executive order provoked outrage and protests, particularly from farmers, ranchers, and miners in Southern Utah who made a living in and around the monument. Comparing this monument designation to a 1930s proposal for a similarlynamed Escalante National Monument gives a valuable perspective for the history or attitudes toward conservation in Utah. The 1935 proposal, which through several incarnations and modifications was also known as the Wayne County National Park proposal, at one point targeted national park designation for 8 percent of the state in southeastern Utah. The 1935 proposal can claim endless parallels to the 1996 designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The fear of many Utahns during the 1930s and '40s was that the federal government would simply create the monument by presidential decree rather than allowing debate. One statement by then-Utah Governor Henry H. Blood was a fairly accurate prediction of what happened more than 55 years later: "Some morning we may wake up and find that ... the Escalante Monument has been created by Presidential proclamation, and then it will be too late to forestall what we in Utah think would be a ' 1 Ibid., 166. ' 2 lbid., 162. |
