Imagine spending years showing up. You attend meetings. You give input. You sit through presentations that go on too long. You speak anyway. You bring your family. You tell your story. You do exactly what you’re told democracy is supposed to look like. And then, after all of that, someone in Washington decides none of it mattered.
That is exactly what’s happening right now.
Nevada Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei has signed on to a congressional effort to overturn the management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Let’s be clear about what that means.
Years of public input, gone. Tribal consultation, gone. A finalized plan shaped by the people who showed up, wiped out. Not because the process failed, but because some politicians didn’t like the outcome.
This isn’t a fix. It isn’t an improvement. It’s government overreach. And it raises a question that should bother every Nevadan. Why is a Nevada congressman spending his time trying to manage Utah’s public lands?
He doesn’t have a single national monument in his district. Not one. And yet, he’s helping dismantle one somewhere else. That’s not leadership. That’s interference. This isn’t new either. It’s the same pattern. Different place, same playbook.
Because here in Nevada, public lands aren’t background. They’re the reason people stay, the reason people come back, and for many of us, the reason we’re still here at all.
From the high desert outside Reno to the mountains and valleys that hold our histories, these places aren’t empty.
They aren’t excessive. For Indigenous communities, they’re not just places we visit. They’re places we belong to, and places that carry our responsibility forward.
And just as important, Nevadans understand the process. When decisions are made about public lands, people expect to be part of them. That’s why Resource Management Plans exist in the first place. They require public input. They require people to show up and be heard. That already happened here. The public already spoke. This is what it looks like when their voices are ignored because they were inconvenient.
Supporters of this effort will say it’s about policy. About management. About getting things right. But if that were true, they’d go through the same process everyone else had to. They didn’t. They chose a shortcut, and shortcuts like this abuse of power come with dangerous consequences for the generations that shaped this work.
If Congress can erase one monument’s plan like this, they can erase any of them because a politician doesn’t like the outcome.
Today it’s Utah. Tomorrow, it could be Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. That isn’t hypothetical. That’s the precedent being set in real time. That’s how you end up trying to Utah our Nevada.
No one asked for this. Nevadans didn’t ask for this. Nevadans are strong supporters of public lands protections.
We don’t talk about public lands this way. We don’t treat them like problems to be undone after the fact. We don’t ignore the people who showed up and did the work.
And we shouldn’t have to take our lead from politicians in another state, especially when it means pretending our voices were never part of the process to begin with.
