One of many ironies swirling around the whole Bears Ears flap is that while mitigation efforts that pay workers solid wages and boost rural economies are under way at former mining sites all over Utah under the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program, unrestrained poverty-wage tourism promoted by taxpayers to the tune of $20 million per year is beginning to take hold in southern Utah.
In its own way, tourism in an area stressed by long-term drought will be as devastating as the fantasy bogeys writer Ewert and like-minded “environmentalists” are afraid of — fossil fuels (oil and gas drilling has never been economically viable within Bears Ears), uranium (that era has come and gone in Utah) or cattle production (one of the largest historical cattle operations within Bears Ears, Dugout Ranch, is owned by the conservation nonprofit The Nature Conservancy).