This is what greed sounds like: Meet Utah’s own wannabe Once-ler, Republican Mike Noel

“When you turn the man­age­ment over to the tree-hug­gers, the bird and bun­ny lovers and the rock lick­ers, you turn your her­itage over.”

– Repub­li­can State Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mike Noel

Ever since Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma used his pow­ers under the Antiq­ui­ties Act to cre­ate Bears Ears Nation­al Mon­u­ment, the pro-greed, anti-con­ser­va­tion fac­tion of the Utah Repub­li­can Par­ty has been agi­tat­ing for the mon­u­men­t’s evisceration.

Though Don­ald Trump and his Inte­ri­or Sec­re­tary Ryan Zinke have not pro­posed doing away with Bears Ears entire­ly, Zinke has hint­ed he wants to remove a lot of lot of land from the mon­u­ment (over a mil­lion acres) which many envi­ron­men­tal groups con­tend sim­ply isn’t some­thing that can be done through exec­u­tive action.

But Zinke has yet to try to set any evis­cer­a­tion of the mon­u­ment in motion. He has deliv­ered a report to his boss as of today, but has not pub­licly dis­closed what’s in it.

“The peo­ple briefed on the plans said that along with Bears Ears, Mr. Zinke had pro­posed reduc­ing the size of Grand Stair­case-Escalante Nation­al Mon­u­ment, also in south­ern Utah, and two oth­ers,” accord­ing to The New York Times.

Grand Stair­case-Escalante Nation­al Mon­u­ment was cre­at­ed by Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton in the 1990s, and has been around much longer than Bears Ears. Of course, that’s not stop­ping the Trump regime from try­ing to mess with it.

Zinke is being egged on by Repub­li­cans like Mike Noel (a ranch­er and leg­is­la­tor), who bare­ly attempt­ed to dis­guise his glut­tony when he spoke to The NYT.

Mike Noel, a Repub­li­can state rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Utah, said that shrink­ing Bears Ears would be “a vic­to­ry for our state.” Fed­er­al man­age­ment of land in his state had con­strained drilling, min­ing and graz­ing, he said, adding that Wash­ing­ton had no busi­ness set­ting aside so much land.

“When you turn the man­age­ment over to the tree-hug­gers, the bird and bun­ny lovers and the rock lick­ers, you turn your her­itage over,” Mr. Noel said.

One deroga­to­ry phrase would not do for Mike Noel. No, he had to use a grand total of three: Tree-hug­gers, bird and bun­ny lovers, and rock lick­ers.

And this isn’t the first time he’s trot­ted out that stu­pid line, either:

“When we turned the for­est ser­vice over to the bird and bun­ny-lovers and the tree­hug­gers and the rock-lick­ers, we turned our his­to­ry over,” Noel said at a press con­fer­ence this week.

“And the fire is going to do more dam­age because we’re going to lose our water­shed, we’re going to lose our soils, we’re going to lose our wildlife and we’re going to lose our scenery.”

Earth to Mike Noel: You’ve got it back­wards. It’s you and your pro-devel­op­ment bud­dies who want to turn Utah’s her­itage over to the forces of greed for exploita­tion. When Pres­i­dent Oba­ma cre­at­ed Bears Ears, he was act­ing to pro­tect Utah’s her­itage from being scarred and pol­lut­ed, not scrap it.

Your speech reeks of thin­ly-veiled greed and con­tempt for those who want to pre­serve what’s left of Amer­i­ca’s wild places for future generations.

Activ­i­ties like graz­ing, drilling, and min­ing are already per­mit­ted on a sub­stan­tial per­cent­age of pub­lic lands in the West. It’s there­fore extreme­ly impor­tant that we set aside areas like Bears Ears for pro­tec­tion, preser­va­tion, and recreation.

Native Amer­i­can tribes in the South­west are strong­ly opposed to any attempt to evis­cer­ate Bears Ears. So are com­pa­nies and non­prof­its that are in the busi­ness of tourism and recre­ation. And so are a great many indi­vid­u­als — includ­ing con­ser­v­a­tive out­doors­men — who still believe in the prin­ci­ple of conservation.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Mike Noel and his bud­dies see only dol­lar signs when they look at majes­tic places like Bears Ears, or Grand Stair­case, or the Arc­tic Refuge. The lack of roads, machines, and domes­ti­cat­ed ani­mals bugs them. Their mind­set boils down to why aren’t those lands being used up like there’s no tomor­row?

If they get their way, we as a soci­ety will have failed to learn the very basic les­son that Dr. Seuss tried to teach us all in The Lorax back in the 1970s:

“But now,” says the Once-ler,
“Now that you’re here,
the word of the Lorax seems per­fect­ly clear.
UNLESS some­one like you
cares a whole awful lot,
noth­ing is going to get better.
It’s not.

We are the ones we’ve been wait­ing for, and it’s up to us to care a whole awful lot. Because if we don’t, noth­ing is going to get bet­ter. It’s not.

(The Lorax, inci­den­tal­ly, was Theodor Seuss Geisel’s favorite book.)