BY WILLIAM YARDLEY
Further burnishing his environmental legacy, President Obama on Wednesday designated two new national monuments in rugged areas of Utah and Nevada — places that have deep cultural importance for Native Americans but that have become flashpoints in the debate over control of public land in the West.
The larger and perhaps more controversial of the two, the Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, encompasses 1.35 million acres of desert and canyons that are ancestral lands of several Indian tribes, including the Navajo Nation, whose reservation is just to the south.