Word: utah
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These desert detours may not look like much, but they pass through the brand-new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah--a 1.7 million-acre tract that many consider the most beautiful spot in the U.S. The trails that crisscross it are scars from the latest tactic in one of the region's most bitter land wars...
...battle began in earnest during the fall presidential campaign, when Bill Clinton headed west and ceremonially conferred monument status on this huge stretch of Utah real estate. Tourists and locals could continue to use the area for hunting, camping and grazing, he said. But he wanted disfiguring activities like mining forbidden...
Thanks for nothing, say many people in Utah. "This is the most arrogant gesture I have seen in my life," says Bill Howell, executive director of the Utah Association of Local Governments. In the town of Kanab, just outside the monument, shops and schools closed in protest, and residents released black balloons into the air. Local artists were more blunt: a popular cartoon circulating for a time pictured the President mutely mooning the state of Utah...
...problem, as the people of Utah see it, is that the unspoiled land being placed under the federal bell jar is not just any unspoiled land. Locked in its rocks are as much as 62 billion tons of coal, 2 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas and 2 billion bbl. of oil--resources that could be worth billions of dollars and hundreds of jobs. So Utah, which has been scrapping with the Federal Government since statehood, is fighting back. Lawmakers are contemplating various legislative counterattacks, including enacting laws that guarantee continued access to the land, reducing the boundaries...
Despite the otherworldly beauty of the place, President Clinton's decision to single it out for protection fell like a hammer blow in Utah. Segments of the local economy were already faltering, and with the ranching and logging industries falling on hard times, mining always seemed like a promising alternative. The coal from just one site in the monument could earn the state $3 billion. An additional $1 billion would flow into Utah's education system under a century-old provision that requires the state to use a percentage of all revenue from public lands to build and maintain schools...