This Saturday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell will travel to Utah to hold a public meeting on the proposal to protect 1.9 million acres of land in a new Bears Ears National Monument. Faced with ongoing looting, grave robbing, and other threats to the estimated 100,000 cultural sites in the region, five Native American tribes have asked President Obama to use his authority under the Antiquities Act to give the Bears Ears area the recognition and protection that are long overdue.
Thanks to this unprecedented proposal, the latest effort to protect Bears Ears may finally succeed after eight decades of failed attempts.
The first major proposal to protect Bears Ears dates all the way back to the 1930s, when Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes proposed a 4-million acre “Escalante National Monument” across Southern Utah:
