We're out here in Bears Ears, in Utah, looking for a tiny bit of uranium-rich
land. And if we find it, we're gonna stake it
as our very own NBC Left Field claim. President Trump recently reopened the
Bears Ears National Monument to new mining claims. "Public lands will once
again be for public use." That means that land that was protected, kind of like a
national park, is now open to new claims for valuable minerals. "Outrageous gold
rush-style grab of public lands to begin on Friday." And valuable minerals,
historically, they lead to land rushes. The U.S. has had a lot of them, especially
since all the land was American-Indian land in the first place, before the
God-given idea of manifest destiny swept American settlers westward. Famously,
you have the Oklahoma land rush, where 50,000 people rushed for desirable
farmland, and the California Gold Rush, which did you know the claim system that
came out of the Gold Rush is still the basis for our mining claims today?
Meaning any company or U.S. individual can literally put stakes in the ground and
prospect—all for the low cost of $212 per 20-acre
claim, with a little field work and a lot of paperwork.
So yeah, we thought there's gonna be like, a flurry of mining claims, as was heavily
reported. We should maybe get a literal stake in this story because it might
just help explain what's going on with mining and America's public lands in 2018.
Except there was no land rush. The land rush was supposed to start on
February 2, and I got to town a few days after. I had to go pick up brochures
from the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM, on how to prospect. Find your
discovery site, and that's generally where you put your discovery marker, and
then you'll mark your claim corners. I bought a lot of maps. I had to pick a
square on this 1.3 million-acre area that I wanted to prospect in. Visit the
county recorder's office to see what else had been staked in my area. But since the
county doesn't track if claims are still active, I spent a very long night trying
to cross-reference it to a BLM database called LR 2000, and was just trying to do
all this as fast as possible to get in on the land rush. However, I was the only
person in town. And really the first clue that there was no land rush was the
local newspaper. "Mineral restrictions continue in Bears Ears country." It's a
headline that's frankly so boring that I didn't even notice it was the same story
right away. So I immediately went around the corner to meet Bill. "I'm the publisher,
editor, and janitor at the San Juan Record in Monticello, Utah. It's not a
bunch of people in Levi Strauss jeans panning for gold. About 95 percent of the
initial land designated by President Obama in 2016 continues to have
significant restrictions on the development of minerals." OK, have a look.
So Obama created the Bears Ears National Monument as one of his final
executive actions, protecting 1.3 million acres of federal land that,
yeah, actually already had some mining restrictions on it. Only a year later,
Trump shrunk it by 85 percent, creating instead two smaller national monuments.
And much of the acreage he took out just returned to being, say, National Forest
Service land or wilderness study, which has its own special mining rules.
More than that, the Utah Geological Survey says there's
very little energy potential inside the original boundaries—meaning there aren't
any commercially valuable minerals. The oil and gas wells have all been plugged,
and there's just not that much to rush for. The on-the-ground reality here is
that there's very little change, there's very little opportunity for change.
So while Bill's reporting explains why there wasn't a
rush of new mining claims, there's something a bit bigger at play here.
See, Obama protected more federal land from development than any other president, and
he did that through something called the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents
or Congress to protect the land of cultural or historic importance and turn it into
something like a national park. Like, for instance, Bears Ears was protected
because five tribes have historical claims to the land. The history of land
rushes is actually pretty dark, when considered from the perspective of the
American Indian. In the 1800s, when American settlers believed that they and their
institutions were destined to expand westwards,
they steamrolled over the very briefly proposed permanent Indian frontier.
The idea that Native Americans could have all the land west of Arkansas, Missouri,
and Iowa in exchange for, you know, white settlers getting the east. And briefly,
guard towers were even set up to stop settlers from trading in Indian
Territory without permits. The frontier never really took effect, as settlers
rushed for gold in California or to stake farmland in the Midwest.
Today, there's a couple dozen sites that are integral to Native-American history,
preserved in national monuments or national parks.
But Bears Ears was one of the largest designations of land based on their
cultural history. Public land in America, all the federal
land, is managed through a multiple-use policy, meaning that you have to weigh
competing interests. When Obama protected 1.3 million acres for Native-American
history, ranching families felt like he'd overstepped. From this day forward, a new
vision will govern our land. It's going to be only America first, America first.
At the recommendation of his interior minister, Sec. Ryan Zinke, Trump's shrinking
of national monuments is kind of an America-first policy, through the dual
mission of energy security, like producing more of America's energy
domestically, and a return to what the Trump administration calls traditional
activities on the land. We're going to get a wonderful announcement coming up
on Monday. We will put our nation's treasures to great and wonderful use.
Together, we will usher in a bright new future of wonder and wealth, liberty and
law, patriotism and pride. In addition to shrinking Bears Ears and Grand
Staircase-Escalante, the Trump administration is reviewing 25 other
national monuments for reduction. And because the Antiquities Act doesn't
specify if you can shrink national monuments, tribe,s environmental advocacy
groups, and even Patagonia, an outdoor retailer, are suing the federal
government. That litigation is pending in Washington.
But, as of February 2, the land out in Bears Ears became fair game.
We're just out here in like, millions and millions of unmarked acres, trying to
figure out which 20 of them we should claim. So the land was only protected for
a year, and anyone could have made a claim in the, like, 100 years
leading up to Obama's decision. So hopefully this stays up. But if you actually want
to find the miners, look a little outside the boundaries. So right outside Obama's
original designation, is the Daneros Uranium Mine owned by Energy Fuels
International. They haven't mined uranium since 2012 because the market price of
uranium is so low.
Uranium prices surged in 2007, and I saw that actually
when I was at the county recorder's office, where there were dozens and
dozens of mining claims filed in the years leading up to that. It's not that
hard to file a mining claim. These claims could lead to future mines, but it will
be years and years of paperwork.
There were in fact two claims filed the week I was out
there. And one of those claims came from a pair of activists and bloggers for REI,
another American outdoors company. And they decided to stake land to see if it
would actually prevent others from mining it. But that turned out to be
optimistic. There is quite a bit of evidence to say that this is not a useful way of
preserving an area. Because someone can just put a claim on top of your claim.
In fact, President Trump's decision to shrink Bears Ears impacts the Daneros
Mine's plan of operation, which was always outside the boundaries. In late February
2018, the BLM approved the Daneros Mine for a five-fold expansion over the next
20 years, which means if and when they get back
into uranium production, they could be transporting up to nine truckloads a day
of uranium ore on roads that cut through the national monument. And in the BLM's
rationale for this decision, they mentioned that the smaller monument area
means a lesser environmental effect. So even though there was limited potential
for our project in pretty much every sense, we wanted to see it through.
NBC Left Field is gonna stake some land. What do you make of this plan? Good luck
finding some land that doesn't already have significant mineral restrictions.
For you to make a valuable discovery, you're gonna have to go get some
permits, which is probably at least a two-year process. So in Part 2, I'm
gonna take you down the rabbit hole. So you go down, and down, and down.
Northeast corridor in the southeast corridor, section 23, township 36. And show
you how you actually file a mining claim, and what you can do with that—although
maybe by the end of it you'll decide it isn't really worth your while. Anyway, you
can decide. Click here to watch