SLC On Outdoors Show Exit: We Could Be Hawaii, Our Leaders Want Us To Be Oklahoma

[hatrack]

EDIT

Where once we were a peculiar backwater, we became known the world over. Were it not for those pioneering efforts, there would be no ski industry. No Olympics. No Sundance Film Festival. No Fat Tire Festival. No steady stream of tour buses climbing to Bryce Canyon. No $8.17 billion per year. Losing Outdoor Retailer over Bears Ears represents a reversal of a half century of progress in inviting the world to appreciate Utah. We could be Hawaii, and instead our leaders want us to be Oklahoma. Gov. Gary Herbert, who has made economic development his reason for living, couldn't get a very lucrative 20-year visitor to keep coming.

The seeds of that failure were sown in the rejection — first by Rep. Rob Bishop and later by the governor and the Legislature — of the unprecedented unity of five Indian nations coming together to protect their ancestral homeland. Instead of recognizing the significance, our leaders emboldened the local pioneer descendants, who were claiming their 150 years of ranching took precedent over centuries of Indian presence in the Bears Ears. The tribes had no choice but to go to the president.

That blindness can be sourced to Utah's one-party political system that has given us leaders who are out of touch with their constituents. Dismantling the Bears Ears was a slam dunk in the Utah Legislature last week, but it's an issue on which every poll has shown Utahns divided, a division encouraged by the false narrative that the monument was a trade-off between fat energy jobs and low-paying tourist jobs.

The Bears Ears monument may be with us forever, and there is no bucket of gold waiting if it does go away. The presidential proclamation bent far toward the same boundaries and shared management Bishop pursued with his Public Lands Initiative. In that context, Utah political leaders' vehemence looks to much of the nation like white rejection of the legitimacy of a black president listening to Native Americans.

EDIT

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4955043-155/editorial-the-world-is-not-so

[Wellstone ruled]

1. Once The Freedom Party

gained total Legislative control of Utah,this outcome was predictable.

Remember,the John Birch Society has it's roots in Utah.

Isra Taff Benson gets his wish of the recreation of the State of Dessert. If you ain't one of us,you don't belong here.