Bears Ears named to the 2020 World Monuments Watch

The World Monuments Fund, a private preservation organization based in New York, announced its 2020 World Monuments Watch on October 29, 2019. The list names 25 sites in 21 countries, and Bears Ears National Monument in Utah is among them. The fund describes Bears Ears as sacred land and sites of North American Indigenous peoples now at risk.

What the Watch is

The fund has published the World Monuments Watch every two years since 1996. Nominations can come from anywhere and often come from local groups or agencies. An independent panel of heritage specialists then chooses a short list, weighing a site’s significance, how urgent the threat is and whether attention could make a difference. Since the first Watch more than 800 sites in over 135 countries have been listed, and the fund reports more than $110 million of its own money spent on them over that time, with partners adding far more.

The panel favors places where outside attention could change what happens next, which is why little-known sites often appear beside famous ones.

Why Bears Ears

The fund’s reason is the December 2017 proclamation that reduced the monument from about 1.35 million acres to two units of about 201,876 acres. In the fund’s view, the reduction left a large archaeological landscape, valued by the tribes whose ancestors built and used it, with less federal protection than before, at a time when visitor numbers in southeast Utah are rising.

The listing comes while lawsuits brought by five tribes and by conservation and archaeology groups against the 2017 reduction are still pending in federal court, and a few months after the Bureau of Land Management released proposed management plans for the two remaining units in July.

What a listing does and does not do

A place on the Watch carries no legal weight. It does not change monument boundaries, management plans, permits or any law. The fund has no authority over federal land, and the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service continue to manage the area under their existing plans. The BLM’s Bears Ears page remains the place for current rules.

What a listing does is draw attention, and sometimes money. Watch sites become eligible for the fund’s grants and technical help, and earlier listings have helped local groups raise support from governments and foundations. For Bears Ears that could mean projects on the ground such as site assessment, stabilization or visitor education, decided with land managers and tribes.

The other places on the list

The 2020 Watch ranges widely in age and type. It includes Notre-Dame de Paris, damaged by fire in April; Rapa Nui National Park in Chile; the Sacred Valley of the Incas in Peru; Koutammakou, the land of the Batammariba in Benin and Togo; and Ontario Place in Toronto. The other two American sites are the Central Aguirre Historic District in Puerto Rico and the San Antonio Woolworth Building in Texas, where lunch counters were desegregated in 1960.