There is nothing that brings people together like our public lands. In an ugly era of political division, a retreat into nature reveals the absurdity of the current state of affairs.

Take a hike at any national park, national monument or federally managed wilderness area and the hostilities we feel sitting at home with screaming screens in front of our faces melt away. There are no voices telling us who to hate or what to fear. Race, religion, political affiliation, net worth and sexual orientation are essentially irrelevant. There are just people appreciating places, joined together in a search for a bit of peace on the fringes of a world of unrelenting noise.

A year after the National Park Service celebrated its centennial, America's best idea has found itself under assault by one of its worst.

Donald Trump, a man who delights in fueling the flames of enmity, has gouged out massive portions of two Utah national monuments and taken a hatchet to the budget of the Department of the Interior. Earlier this month, under the recommendation of Interior Secretary and fellow narcissist Ryan Zinke, Trump reduced the size of Bears Ears by roughly 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante almost 50 percent.

Bears Ears, established by President Barack Obama at the request of five Native American tribes before he left office in 2016, has been slashed from 1.3 million acres to 201,876 acres. This leaves thousands of ancient Native American archaeological sites more vulnerable to looting and defacing. Grand Staircase-Escalante, established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, has been reduced from nearly 1.9 million acres to just over 1 million acres.

It's the largest reduction of protected national public lands in United States history and the first time in a half century a president has reduced the size of a national monument. Other monuments sit precariously on the chopping block.

The rationale offered by Trump and Zinke has, unsurprisingly, been riddled with absurdities and lies. Take this statement from Trump's December 4 announcement of the monument reduction in Salt Lake City:

Add “public lands“ to the ever-growing list of elementary concepts the leader of the free world has shown an inability to grasp in his first year in office, a list that includes: who to classify as “very fine people,“ the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without proper eye protection, the value of a free press to a democracy, the difference between life insurance and health insurance, the capability of the human eye to work in tandem with the brain to recognize a drastic disparity in crowd sizes, how to back a winning Republican U.S. senatorial candidate in a deeply red state, how to construct a coherent sentence without the aid of a script, and the difference between real and fake, among many, many others.

It's really no surprise the notion of public land is so foreign to an egocentric real estate developer. Trump puts his name on everything he owns, and even puts his name on buildings he doesn't own (he has frequently licensed the Trump name to properties owned and operated by other companies/individuals). Since he and his rich friends are unable to personally purchase government-managed, publicly owned land, public land is not land that is accessible to the public Trump identifies with. It's not land he can make money off of, though these lands rake in money for local economies. In 2016, 331 million visitors spent an estimated $18.4 billion in local gateway regions while visiting NPS lands nationwide.

With Trump's decision to drastically scale back Bears Ears and Grand Staircase, it opens up the formerly protected lands to prospecting, corporate mining and other activities that could do irreparable damage to the areas. The Washington Post has reported a uranium company launched a lobbying campaign to shrink Bears Ears. There is also a huge, untapped coal seam in fossil-filled Grand Staircase-Escalante, which will undoubtedly be pursued. These are the real reasons for the monument reductions, not to give public land back to the public, however the hell that's supposed to work.

Short-sighted decisions like this have already spoiled lands across the country and the world. Environmentalist and author Wendell Berry said it best when he wrote, “There is no longer any honest way to deny that a way of living that our leaders continue to praise is destroying all that our country is and all the best that it means. We are living even now among punishments and ruins.“

Politicians who get their pockets lined by special interest groups and spokespeople for companies in extraction industries will argue that new mines will create new jobs in these regions. They won't talk about how it only takes a relatively small number of people to operate the machinery used in modern mining, how the mines will be abandoned in a handful of years, how mines frequently contaminate local water sources (Utah is one of the nation's top releasers of toxic materials due to its mines), and how they leave behind ghost towns and scarred land that will never be restored. The risks of land destruction are ever increased as Trump and Scott Pruitt work to gut the Environmental Protection Agency and loosen regulations on mining and oil industries.

These people, with Trump at the forefront, recognize wealth only in monetary form. They strive to accumulate large sums of it to bolster their status and to pass on to their progeny when they die. Most Americans will never amass such fortunes.

Our wealth lies in our lands, and there is no need to extract it. One must merely set eyes on or hike the trails of the Grand Canyon, Bears Ears or Grand Staircase-Escalante to be moved by these incredible landscapes. They fill us with awe, wonder and inspiration while they simultaneously ground us in a world that's losing its grip on reality.

It's imperative that we fight to protect our public lands so we can pass these treasures on to future generations. We must support the Native American tribes and other groups battling to regain the land, and elect politicians who are environmental advocates.

In the coming days, the GOP-led Congress is expected to pass an overwhelmingly unpopular tax reform bill containing an egregious provision that would allow commercial oil and gas production in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. While providing a temporary economic boom to local areas, drilling could ravage portions of this stunning, ecologically important habitat that's already being afflicted by climate change.

While many politicians, particularly from the GOP, don't seem to give a damn about preserving public lands, we the people still do. In a recent poll conducted by Colorado College, 80 percent of voters in Western states support keeping national monument designations in place and only 14 percent strongly support allowing more coal mining on public lands.

Author and environmentalist Edward Abbey, who spent years living in southern Utah's wilderness, would be mad as hell about Trump's monument reductions. He eloquently wrote about modern society's need for wilderness in “Desert Solitaire“:

When Trump Tower has been renamed, bulldozed and built over and the sea level creeps its way up the moldy gold walls of the decrepit remnants of Mar-a-Lago, there will be families hiking the same trails I hiked at Yosemite and Zion, seeing the same views I saw at Canyonlands and Yellowstone, feeling the same awe I felt at Glacier and Crater Lake. As long as human life hasn't been wiped out by a cataclysmic event and impotent leadership hasn't allowed Russia to invade the United States, these lands will still be owned and loved by the American people.

Time visiting our public lands puts life into perspective, letting us know we're a small part of a larger whole. The great outdoors provides lessons that can't be learned at private golf clubs. For the sake of our cherished natural treasures, for a semblance of sanity for everyday Americans, and for the good of the entire free world, Donald Trump quite literally needs to take a hike.