New Plan for Bears Ears: Comment by June 11, 2024

 by Tim Peterson, Cultural Landscapes Director

Bears Ears is beautiful. Bears Ears is irreplaceable. Bears Ears is home to countless cultural sites that work together to form a living cultural landscape bound across hundreds of generations to contemporary Native American peoples and cultures. 

It’s fitting that a place so important to so many people from differing traditions is also the crucible for another historic first — America’s first national monument management plan written in collaboration with Native nations, the five tribes of the Bears Ears Commission (Hopi, Navajo, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni). 

Yes, I'm ready to speak up for Bears Ears. Take me to the comment form now ›

Landmark collaboration

Since the Bears Ears National Monument boundaries were restored in 2021, federal land managers and the Bears Ears Commission have been working on a draft alternative for the new management plan and now is your chance to add your voice to the chorus in support of the five tribes’ vision for protecting Bears Ears. You have until June 11, 2024 to submit your comments. 

Since the more than 1,200-page draft was released in early March 2024, we’ve been digging into the details, and there’s a lot to like. Some areas of the plan need improvement though, and as you can probably guess, anti-monument and anti-public lands campaigners who oppose protection are making noise too, so we need your help to preserve potential gains that they’re mobilizing to roll back. 

What should your comments say?

Comments aren’t counted like votes for one thing or another, and the overall tally doesn’t carry much weight. To be most effective, your comments must address substantive issues that have already been analyzed in the draft plan, and they should say why you favor the action for which you’re advocating. 

The most important points to make in your comments:

1. Adopt Alternative E with improvements

Let public lands managers know that you support the five tribal nations of the Bears Ears Commission in their efforts to strengthen Indigenous-led conservation and decision-making for Bears Ears’ future. Overall, urge land managers to adopt their preferred alternative written with the Bears Ears Commission (Alternative E) with improvements, and ask them not to weaken the preferred alternative.

• Alternative E best honors the monument proclamations and maximizes the use of traditional Indigenous knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge by elevating Indigenous peoples’ cultural, traditional, and personal connections to Bears Ears. Please uphold important agreements, like banning target shooting and closing Arch Canyon to off-road vehicles, reached between land managers and tribes. Make the final plan better by improving livestock grazing and better managing the monument’s vegetation. 

2. Improve how the monument manages livestock grazing under Alternative E 

• In the final plan, please improve livestock grazing management by setting utilization levels at 30%, at least until land managers determine if a higher level of grazing can still be appropriate to protect monument objects and values. This will help ensure that monument objects and values are protected from overgrazing.

3. Improve how the monument manages plants, trees, and vegetation under Alternative E

• Many places in Bears Ears have been altered by heavy-handed clearcuts of pinyon and juniper forests and the wholesale replacement of native plants with exotic pasture grasses, mostly for the benefit of livestock at the expense of the environment. These destructive mechanical treatments represent a bygone era where extensive damage to cultural sites, soils, and native plants was the norm. After decades of these destructive treatments, now’s the time to take a new approach. Restoring native plants based on traditional Indigenous knowledge should be the future for Bears Ears.  In the final plan, please prohibit what the Bureau of Land Management calls “mechanical vegetation treatments,” allow only native seed in restoration projects, and immediately protect old-growth trees. 

4. Enact a zoned approach to recreation management in the final plan 

• Recreation is a vital part of how people enjoy and experience Bears Ears, but recreation shouldn’t be a free-for-all that crowds out traditional uses, plants, and wildlife. Adopting a zoned approach for recreation has worked at Grand Staircase-Escalante, and land managers should do it at Bears Ears too. Zoning will help concentrate visitors and recreation infrastructure in areas where it is most appropriate to protect the monument for future generations.   

5. Close Arch Canyon to off-road vehicles

• A motorized route in Arch Canyon currently crosses a rare perennial desert stream dozens of times, damaging an important water source and habitat for plants and animals. The whine of two-stroke motors echoes for miles beyond the canyon as vehicles spew oil and petrochemicals into the creek. Closing Arch Canyon to off-road vehicles will better protect water quality in the canyon’s rare desert stream, and better safeguard the canyon’s abundant and irreplaceable cultural sites while promoting quiet, contemplative, and respectful visitation.

6. Ban target shooting in the monument

• Bears Ears isn’t a gun range, and it’s too important to be treated like one. Millions of acres of multiple-use public lands are open to recreational shooting in Utah, but Bears Ears is different. Target shooting is incompatible with the area’s status as a national monument and it threatens birds and wildlife, water quality, cultural resources, natural quiet, and the environment.  Banning target shooting in Bears Ears will still allow for hunting while keeping the environment mostly lead-free.

Okay, now I know what I want to say. Take me to the comment form now ›

What’s next? 

After this comment period, federal officials will review and incorporate public input and release a final plan later this year. Your comments are needed now to ensure that federal land managers from the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service honor their commitments to the five tribes. 

Honoring those commitments means safeguarding the Bears Ears cultural landscape by harmonizing protection for ancestral tribal lands with biodiversity and responsible recreation at Bears Ears. If federal land managers cave to the anti-monument voices, we won’t have another chance to fix Bears Ears’ management plan for a generation. Please add your voice in favor of a brighter future for Bears Ears today.