A MONUMENTAL FIGHT
Liza Doran walks past a rusty, bug-eyed Buick Super that sits in front of her trading post in southern Utah and reads from a sign erected by people in her tiny town of Bluff.
The proclamation—PROUD GATEWAY TO BEARS EARS—seems fitting given its location amid red rocks soaring toward the sky. Yet just up the road in the same corner of the state, people in the not-quite-as-tiny town of Blanding put up a billboard with the opposite message: RESCIND BEARS EARS.
“They feel like they’re being told what to do by the feds—that’s the mentality of the folks in Blanding,” Doran says, summing up years of dispute over a vast patch of land that Barack Obama proclaimed a national monument during his final weeks in office. “But this kind of place doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
Activists at Utah’s state capitol oppose making any changes to national monuments in the state
Bears Ears, an expanse of more than 1.3 million acres named for two buttes that rise above a ruddy plateau long sacred to Native American tribes, is one of 27 national monuments that Donald Trump has put under review, which may result in some of them being shrunk or abolished altogether. That means the unprecedented audit, which is being overseen by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, could lead Trump to undo the handiwork of his predecessors in a way that no President has since they began designating national monuments more than a century ago.
