5th Annual Threatened And Endangered Parks | Monumental Challenges

At the high-elevation meadow at Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, dozens of species of grasses and wildflowers—bluestem, yarrow, verbena, horsetail, and many more—offer visitors a stunning vista that is framed by the ear-like buttes that give the park its name. At Bears Ears, the meadow has long been a place tied to the food gathering, medicine, and ceremonies of the region’s Indigenous peoples—the Navajo Nation, the Hopi tribe, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.

“At the monument, you can see incredible, particularly powerful cultural sites, just almost pristine in their condition,” says Jon Jarvis, director of the National Park Service during the Obama administration. “This isn't like an abandoned area. There's still a lot of deep, regular cultural practices associated with these lands. And so, in their appeal to the president they said, ‘We want to be able to keep this sacred site intact.’”

Co-managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management in collaboration with the five tribes, Bears Ears borders portions of three national park units—Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and Natural Bridges National Monument. The Park Service, which manages just under 90 national monuments outright, has long provided consultation and partnership with other agencies on Bears Ears. Many national monuments outside national park boundaries nonetheless support park missions in terms of protecting habitat corridors, scenic viewsheds, and unfragmented natural and cultural landscapes.

Despite its importance, however, Bears Ears—like several national monuments created in recent decades under the Antiquities Act of 1906—has become a political football. One of the first Trump administration’s major Interior Department actions was to shrink Bears Ears’ boundaries by 85 percent and those of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, designated by President Clinton, by 47 percent. Four years later, President Biden immediately restored the original boundaries. 

Now, efforts to decommission national monuments have continued in the second Trump administration, including legislation to nullify two Arizona national monuments, Ironwood Forest and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni–Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon. Park advocates and legal scholars alike say that the ongoing back-and-forth is detrimental to the future of these large public lands, opening them up for potential resource extraction and desecration.

‘Enormous Barriers’

This past December the Center for American Progress released a report that 31 national monuments that are potentially threatened by the Trump administration are essential for the supply of clean drinking water for more than 13 million Americans across the West, from Denver to Los Angeles.

These 31 monuments collectively contain about 21,000 miles of rivers and streams, the report continues—essential sources of drinking water, recreation, and wildlife habitat. Furthermore, the report finds that 83 percent of the rivers and streams within these monuments lack any other meaningful conservation protection besides national monument status.

What recent presidential actions have shown us, conservationists say, is that national monument status is a tissue-thin bulwark against an administration that has broken laws and norms with seeming impunity. Such efforts have led to increased scrutiny of the original intent of the Antiquities Act.

Since Theodore Roosevelt, presidents have used the act to create more than 150 national monuments, including Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908—an important precursor to its redesignation as a national park, one of the most beloved worldwide, in 1919.

Monuments are especially vulnerable to privatization and extraction, Jarvis says, which is difficult and costly to reverse. He describes this as a deliberate strategy, citing the administration’s policy guidance on public lands and extraction in Project 2025. Notably, the Project 2025 document calls for a repeal of the Antiquities Act, calling out Democratic presidents and making no mention of Republican presidents, from Roosevelt through George W. Bush, who have expanded or established monuments under the act as well.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum early last year issued a directive to “review” or “revise” public land boundaries, including national monuments.

“Once the boundaries are reduced and lands are opened up for extraction, and those leases are issued, it creates enormous barriers to ever getting that land back,” Jarvis explains. “When the government turns around and wants those lands back, they have to pay for the potential value of the resources—even though we owned the land to begin with. Those leases become valid existing rights, and it becomes cost-prohibitive to undo the damage.”

Early last year, U.S. Reps. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) and Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) introduced legislation, which they called the “Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act,” to reform the Antiquities Act.

“Congress trusted presidents with a narrow authority to declare national monuments in the Antiquities Act,” Maloy said when introducing the bill. “Unfortunately, presidents have continued to abuse that narrow authority to designate millions of acres of land in Utah and across the West without proper Congressional oversight.”

But legal scholars dispute that interpretation. “The Antiquities Act is an easy title to remember but it does a disservice to the legislation,” says Carla Chung Mattix, a former Department of the Interior attorney who counseled the NPS on legal matters and the author of a forthcoming book, National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles (August 2026). “It’s about so much more than antiquities.”

At the time of the act’s passage, Mattix adds, “different coalitions were forming to protect the Puebloan ruins and other Indigenous sites [from looting and other desecration], but the other big coalition was to be able to create things like Yellowstone National Park more easily. That’s what went into section two of the Antiquities Act. Under the original statute, section two is the one that deals with the national monuments. It never even uses the term antiquity because it was focused on other concepts that were more akin to national parks.”

It’s worth noting that courts have repeatedly upheld national monuments that were created under the act, but they have not ruled on whether a president has the power to reduce or eliminate one under the act, which is silent on this issue.

Building Relationships

Aside from the risks of leasing off public lands, the other threat to national monuments is the disruption to planning, management, and progress when they are reduced or decommissioned.

Jon Jarvis, for his part, says that inclusive consultation on Bears Ears ultimately led to stronger local support for the monument, recalling one memorable meeting with the five tribes—which organized as the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition in 2015—amid the flowers and grasses of Bears Ears Meadow. In January 2025, the Inter-Tribal Coalition released its resource management plan for the park with the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, calling it an example of "collaborative management, recognizing traditional knowledge and expertise, cultural preservation, ecological integrity, and responsible recreation."

“We can’t have this scenario of every administration undoing national monuments, because land managers can’t make management plans,” Mattix says. “Going forward, the most realistic option for existing and future national monuments would be to build relationships at the local level where these monuments exist.”

Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument near Las Cruces, New Mexico, is one example of how coalition-building can protect national monuments. Support for the monument comes from a broad spectrum of constituents, from environmentalists to business people.

At a press conference last year, Carrie Hamblen, CEO and president of the Las Cruces Green Chamber of Commerce and a New Mexico state legislator, talked about the value of the national monument and local connections to it.

“What we have really become known for is being able to connect the importance of protected public lands to local economies,” Hamblen said. “We have been instrumental in helping our local businesses become thoughtful stewards of our public lands.”

“You create a national monument around something truly extraordinary, and it can provide economic benefits forever,” Jarvis says. “But if you mine it, that’s economics for one period—and then it’s done. Somebody makes the money, and they leave town with it.”