The next monument on the block
Bears Ears National Monument
The administration has filed to shrink Bears Ears, the 1.36-million-acre monument five tribes fought for a decade to protect. The order reopens Cedar Mesa's canyon country, and the Ancestral Puebloan sites woven through it, to mining claims and energy leasing.
Bears Ears was the first national monument shaped by a coalition of sovereign tribes. Five nations, the Navajo, Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe, and Zuni, spent years mapping the country that needed protection: cliff dwellings, kivas, rock art, and burial grounds, more than 100,000 archaeological sites in all. President Obama designated 1.35 million acres in 2016. In 2017 the first Trump administration cut it by 85 percent, the largest rollback of public-land protection in the nation's history. President Biden restored it in 2021. Now the administration has moved to shrink it again.
Stripping the monument designation reopens the land to uranium and vanadium mining claims and to oil and gas leasing. The uranium belt runs straight through the country the last reduction carved out, and the same interests that pushed for that cut are still there.
The proclamation itself takes no public comment. But the Bureau of Land Management has to write a new management plan for the land it removes, and that process runs on public comment, the kind an agency is legally required to read and answer. That is the window. Leave your email and we send you to the comment page the day it opens.
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