<\/p>\n
On the eve of the new year, President Barack Obama designated the Bears Ears National Monument \u2014 culminating an eight-decade-long struggle to preserve this ecologically diverse, archaeologically rich landscape in southeastern Utah, the ancestral homeland of several Southwestern tribes.<\/p>\n
The Dec. 28 decision is being heralded as a victory not only for the conservation community, but also for the five tribes that proposed the monument and will play a role in managing it. Yet even its most ardent opponents \u2014 mostly Utahns who regard Obama\u2019s use of the Antiquities Act as federal overreach \u2014 got something in return: More than a half-million acres in the original proposal were excluded from the final boundaries.<\/p>\n
Bears Ears National Monument covers 1.35 million acres in San Juan County currently managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. The two agencies will jointly manage the new monument, with \u201cguidance and recommendations\u201d from a commission made up of elected officers from the Hopi Nation, Zuni Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah Ouray. The monument proclamation goes on to note: \u201cThe traditional ecological knowledge amassed by the Native Americans whose ancestors inhabited this region \u2026 is, itself, a resource to be protected and used in understanding and managing this landscape sustainably for generations to come.\u201d<\/p>\n
is home to tens of thousands of archaeological sites, mostly remnants of the ancestral Puebloan culture, who inhabited this landscape for at least 2,000 years. Many of them have suffered from illegal pothunting, vandalism and artifact collecting. Monument supporters hope that the designation will bring the resources needed to enforce existing laws, shore up regulations and educate the public about the importance of these cultural resources.<\/p>\n
Opponents often cite the controversial designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument west of here, created by then-President Bill Clinton in 1996. But a better comparison might involve the Canyon of the Ancients in southwestern Colorado, also given monument status by Clinton in 2000. \u201cCanyons of the Ancients was perhaps the first to -explicitly recognize that ruins do not tell the entire story \u2014 that ancients lived in, hunted, gathered and raised crops, and developed water and religious sites throughout the larger landscape,\u201d says Bruce Babbitt, Clinton\u2019s Interior secretary. \u201cBears Ears brings this concept to fruition in an even larger -landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response to stiff resistance from local politicians and citizens, Obama pared down the original 1.9 million-acre Bears Ears proposal by 550,000 acres, cutting out the Abajo Mountains, most of the Raplee Anticline and Lime Ridge, and a swath of land near the confluence of the San Juan and Colorado rivers where uranium is being mined. The final boundaries are closer to those in the Public Lands Initiative bill that Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop tried and failed to get through Congress in 2016. That bill would have put essentially the same lands into two national conservation areas and a wilderness area.<\/p>\n
The monument\u2019s proclamation preserves traditional Native American access to firewood, herbs and pi\u00f1on nuts \u2014 a major concern for those Navajos and Utes who resisted the designation. Existing mineral rights and grazing rights will be preserved, private lands will not be impacted, and the feds will work to swap state lands within monument boundaries for parcels elsewhere. Though the 1996 Grand Staircase-Escalante designation effectively killed a proposed coal mine, no such developments are on the table at Bears Ears.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the Utah Legislature\u2019s public lands committee denounced the designation as \u201cunilateral tyranny,\u201d and Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch called it an \u201cattack on an entire way of life.\u201d That\u2019s despite the fact that the only existing economic activity likely to be hindered by the monument is the pilfering and black-market sale of antiquities. \u201cSome of the Utah delegation don\u2019t care about the actual proclamation,\u201d says John Freemuth, executive director of the Cecil D. Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University. \u201cThey only care about confrontational politics and clich\u00e9d -symbolism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Utah lawmakers pledged to urge the president-elect to overturn the designation. Yet no president has ever tried to abolish a monument; it\u2019s not clear that it\u2019s even possible. \u201cExisting law tells us that Trump has little or no ability to alter this monument,\u201d says Wilkinson. Even if challenged, \u201cthere is an overwhelming likelihood that courts will hew to existing law that the Antiquities Act allows presidents to create monuments but not to overturn them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hatch wants Congress to ditch the Antiquities Act altogether, or follow Wyoming\u2019s example and exempt Utah from it. Since the law\u2019s 1906 passage, however, all but three presidents have used it, protecting tens of millions of acres in extraordinary landscapes like Death Valley, the Grand Canyon and Zion. It\u2019s hard to imagine any president willingly giving up so much power and legacy-building -potential.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, environmentalists, archaeologists, and tribes are prepared to fight to keep Bears Ears \u2014 and other monuments \u2014 intact. But for now, they\u2019re also celebrating. \u201cMormon history, the Constitution and laws, and white man\u2019s history are written on paper,\u201d said Octavius Seowtewa of Zuni. \u201cOur history \u2014 the Native history \u2014 is written in stone on canyon walls. We celebrate, knowing our history at Bears Ears will be protected for future generations, forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Cedar Mesa Citadel Ruins are one of thousands of archaeological sites in the 1.35 million acres of land now designated as Bears Ears National Monument that include rock art, cliff dwellings and ceremonial kivas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite compromise, the controversial monument\u2019s opposition is riled up<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":73140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[120,122],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-73139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-colorado","tag-monument-and-heritage-site"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73139"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=73139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}