Last updated: March 20, 2024
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Podcast 150: National Monuments and Contested Land
A Growing Interest in National Monuments
Portrait by Jack Cramer, Image courtesy of McKenzie Long
McKenzie Long: Hi, I'm McKenzie Long. I'm the author of “This Contested Land”, and I'm a writer and graphic designer who lives in Mammoth Lakes, California.
Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today.
McKenzie Long: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Catherine Cooper: So could you tell me what the impetus was for writing “This Contested Land”?
McKenzie Long: I spent quite a bit of time climbing in Indian Creek, which is an area in Utah that became part of Bears Ears National Monument when President Barack Obama designated it. And I was just madly in love with this place. Well, I still am, and I had spent about seven years of climbing there every spring and fall, and it was my favorite place in the world. It felt like my home place. When the monument became designated and there was a lot of uproar about it, some people were angry, other people were really happy. I was like, what does that even mean for this place that I really care about?
And I started to look into it out of casual curiosity, and I realized that there isn't really that much written about national monuments, especially modern ones. There's tons of stuff out there about national parks, but I couldn't really find a whole lot about monuments. And so I started looking into them a little bit more. And for me, the topic just got more and more interesting because these places are public land that's part of our national fabric that people aren't very aware of. And I think there's a lot of really interesting stories in all of these places.
Catherine Cooper: I completely agree. How did you choose which national monuments to explore both physically, and culturally, and historically?
McKenzie Long: One of the very fascinating things about national monuments is that they're so controversial. I feel like national parks are fairly universally beloved, and national monuments, especially ones that have been designated in the last 20 years, almost always cause an argument between certain groups of people. I think that's really interesting because people are so passionate about these places or different uses of the land that they get really fired up about it. I was looking for the most controversial ones to talk about because I thought that those might have some of the most interesting stories. And I don't want to give Trump credit for the inspiration in this book, but in 2017, he issued an executive order to review 27 national monuments that had been designated since 1996 and on. I started looking at that list to see what monuments were included, and a lot of the most controversial ones were included in that list. I ended up writing about a couple others, but those ones were where I got started in finding out which monuments had some more interesting things to say about them.
How People Relate to the Land
Photo by Veronica Palmer, Image courtesy of McKenzie Long
McKenzie Long: Most of the connections I made were actually through cold calling. I hadn't written a book before, but I was still really interested in talking to people. And so I started looking for people who were either passionate about these places or involved in these places. So sometimes that was people that were advocates for the monuments getting established or people that were really strongly opposed to a monument designation. And I spoke to several biologists that do work in national monuments that I visited, and I spoke to people like ranchers, indigenous people that have ancestral ties to these places as well as current ties that are very important to them. I just would reach out to people and talk to whoever would talk to me. And in terms of weaving them into the chapters, it was really important to me to write this book in a way that expressed a tangible experience of being in these places.
I wrote it from my personal point of view so I could talk about what it's like to be there and give people maybe a little tiny sense of what it could be like to be in these deserts or forests. But I didn't really want the book to be about me because I'm not the most important part of the story. So including the voices of the people that I spoke to was important because everyone I spoke to has a really intense connection to the land. And those stories, I think, become the most important part of the book.
Catherine Cooper: One thing I noticed in each chapter is you ask a lot of questions of how people relate to the land. What is preservation? What is conservation? How do we handle this? How do we negotiate it? Are there one or two that you're continuing to think about and work with since writing the book? And do you have any new perspectives or stories to share?
McKenzie Long: I would say that probably the one that is echoing in my mind the most is the question of how do we as a nation create a new legacy for public land that includes and respects more people. National parks got their start as a pretty exclusionary thing. Indigenous people were pushed out of places so there could be an illusion of uninhabited wilderness in parks. But even though that's how public land got its start, that doesn’t have to be how it continues forward. I think there's already a sea change happening. Bears Ears was a very indigenous-led movement that was promoted and advocated for primarily by indigenous groups. And so if we look for what legacy public land can have in the future, including the interests and priorities of many groups of people is very important. And I think that there's actually quite a few monuments that are being proposed right now that are being advocated for by specific communities, such as Castner Range, which is outside El Paso. [Note: Castner Range was designated as a national monument by President Biden in May 2023.]
It's a predominantly Hispanic community, and there's a very community-led movement to get that mountain range designated as a monument. Since a president can designate a monument by proclamation and it doesn't need to legislatively move through Congress, monuments are easy to create. Monuments, I think, can be a really powerful way to include interests of different people.You're asking about new perspectives, I finished writing this book right around the time that Biden took office, and he reinstated the boundaries of a couple monuments that President Trump reduced. I thought that was really interesting, and it was somewhat expected, but it was also exciting. And after that, I expected him to designate more monuments, actually. And he has designated one, which is Camp Hale in Colorado, and he's promised to designate another one, but he hasn't actually done it yet.
And that one is Avi Kwa Ame, I think is how you pronounce it, in Nevada. So I hope that he actually does designate that one, and then I'm hoping that he will designate a few more, especially as he reaches the end of his term. There's Castner Range in New Mexico. There's Range of Light in California outside Yosemite National Park, and I think those would be pretty interesting, and especially since Biden has promoted this concept of 30 by 30, where he wants to protect 30% of American land and waters by 2030, monuments could be a really interesting tool and a way for him to push that forward. [Note: as of February 2024 Biden has designated 5 new national monuments.]
The Antiquities Act, which is the law that allows monuments to be created by presidential proclamation, it came about because of archaeological developments. It was a time in American history where indigenous people were being forced out of their places; they were being killed; but at the same time, people started looking at some of the dwellings, and petroglyphs, and ruins left behind and finding that interesting.
And so there was this strange parallel that people were being removed, but then there was an appreciation of their history. When the Antiquities Act was created, it was with the goal of protecting some of that history and not letting it get looted or destroyed, though the law did not give rights to the indigenous people who those ruins and history really belonged to, unfortunately. The Antiquities Act started as a way to just protect certain cultural resources in our country. Since the law has slightly vague language, it has actually been used a lot more broadly than that. There's many national monuments that are created that don't have a specific cultural or archaeological resource to protect. Now, it's used to protect things like biodiversity, and wildlife corridors, and things like that, which wasn’t necessarily the original intention of the act. So it's flexible. It allows presidents to do things that they think are important and that reflect the ideals of society of that day rather than from 1906, when the Antiquities Act was written.
The Breadth of Public Lands
Photo by Veronica Palmer, image courtesy of McKenzie Long
McKenzie Long: My book could reach a pretty broad audience because I think there's the public land lovers, the people that already love parks and monuments, and I think there's the people that are interested in politics in why national monuments are so controversial. I wrote this from the perspective of a recreationist, I'm a climber, a mountain biker, a backcountry skier. That's how I have made really close bonds with land, and I don't think that's the only way you can make close bonds with places, but I think there are a lot of people out there that for them, that is their way. And so some recreationists are more about their activity and not paying as much attention to the place around them. And so this could also perhaps broaden the horizons of recreationists, and that's a generalization. I understand that's not everyone, but that's who I would assume would be interested in reading this book.
The main takeaway is I want more people to recognize that there's more public land in this country than just national parks and state parks, and the public land serves a purpose that goes beyond just scenic beauty or recreation. There's a lot of uses that take place on public land, such as ranching. There's even mining on public land, and a lot of cultural uses of land. I think that as people understand that there's a lot more of that in our country. I also hope that that extends to appreciation for things that are a little more subtle and that extend beyond the obvious, because places like Yosemite have a lot of grandeur and they're very special, but even walking into a sagebrush desert in the middle of eastern Washington, it doesn't necessarily have really charismatic features or a lot of drama, it is still just as intricate and incredible.
I hope that more people will come to appreciate those kinds of things. And as I was already talking about, personal connection to land is extremely important and really powerful. I do think that should be recognized. In terms of policy, I think that goes back to making sure that everyone, and a lot of different communities, are included, different priorities are respected, and that there's compromises in place for different types of uses of land that could be very important to different people.
Catherine Cooper: And that's part of where the controversy comes from, because there's even the debate of whether or not a president should be able to undo another president's monument declaration.
McKenzie Long: Yeah, the Antiquities Act only says how they can be made. It doesn't say how they can be taken down. There's a lot of back and forth between legal scholars about what that means and if presidents are allowed to remove a monument by a previous president.
Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your words with us. This is phenomenal.
McKenzie Long: Yeah, thank you, and thanks for reading my book. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
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