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President Joe Biden introduced Americans to our new Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni National Monument in early August.
The move by the White House will severely curtail mining and development on nearly one million acres -- or more than 1,500 square miles -- of public land.
While existing mining permits and grazing rights for ranchers will be grandfathered in, the region's rich uranium deposits now appear off-limits.
"We need uranium for the security of our country," Buster Johnson, a Mohave County supervisor, told Fortune magazine. "We're out of the game."
Ancillary businesses in rural Arizona are fearful that freezing out mining operations will leave their restaurants and stores struggling for customers and their towns in decline. Ranchers in the region also are concerned the monument status will impede hunters from keeping the populations of predators in check.
We understand and value our national monuments and national parks -- but we also recognize that we need energy and agriculture to thrive and must question if a significantly smaller footprint for this more-than-1,500-square-mile monument would have been a better compromise for all the communities with a stake in this region.
And we remain concerned that this is yet another signal of the inability of the White House to understand the immediate needs of the American people for energy -- not the future needs of our children when renewable energy is more practical but the needs of their parents to provide for them today.
As Stephanie Catarino Wissman told the Sun-Gazette, reported on in an article in Friday's edition, the oil and gas industries are finding this administration to be too slow and perhaps too indifferent on necessary permitting reform and pipeline infrastructure.
That indifference, that slow pace and this new national monument will unfortunately do nothing to reduce the climbing utility bills and prices at the gas pump we've all been facing.