"After four years of Trump, protected places such as national monuments and wildlife refuges have opened to oil drilling, new maps show – with more on the way "

"Clark Tenakhongva resides on the Hopi reservation in north-eastern Arizona, but his true home is a five-hour drive north in Utah, amid the rust-colored canyons and jutting buttes of Bears Ears, a beloved ancestral site of the Hopi people.

“For me, when I go there, it’s got its own place in my heart,” said Tenakhongva, the vice-chairman of the Hopi tribal council. “I feel like I’m back home.”

But after Donald Trump took office in 2017, Bears Ears was the focus of a sophisticated, pro-development pressure campaign. ...

What has happened at Bears Ears is not an exception. Under Donald Trump, the government has auctioned off millions of acres of public lands to the fossil fuel industry, the Guardian can reveal, in the most comprehensive accounting to date of how much public land the administration has handed over to oil and gas drillers over the past four years."

Emily Holden, Jimmy Tobias, and Alvin Chang report for the Guardian October 26, 2020. [2]