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I have mixed feelings on this. Obviously I'm in favor of preserving land for /out/ purposes, but we've already preserved a *lot* of desert in southern Utah. Large areas of both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase struck me as fairly typical Utah desert that was preserved mainly because it was empty, so there was relatively little political difficulty incurred in doing so. There are nice parts, definitely, but there are also parts that aren't exactly the crowning glory of the continent, and I'm not sure preserving all of it justifies slamming the door any sort of economic activity beyond the service """industry""" in that area. Preservation is wonderful, but you do have to strike a balance. Development isn't always evil.
On the other hand, preservation seems to be being traded not for the construction of farms, towns, and factories, but rather for strip mines and oilfields that will cease to be productive in 20 or 30 years anyway. Then we'll just be right back where we are, except the land will be more chewed up. This feels less like making America Great Again and more like making a handful of gigantic corporations GOP donors again.
Preserving some of the forests of Appalachia or the Northeast or the lakes of Minnesota should be given a higher priority than this particular patch of desert (from what I've seen of it, anyway), but that's getting off topic.
