Last updated: January 16, 2024
Article
Podcast 146: Voices from Bears Ears
Focusing on Bears Ears National Monument
Photo by Steve Strom
Rebecca Robinson: Hello I am Rebecca Robinson. I am a writer and journalist based in Southwest Washington state.
Steve Strom: And I'm Steve Strom, a retired astronomer who has been working for the last seven or eight years on conservation related books.
Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. You've recently published a book called Voices from Bears Ears. Could you talk about what first drew your attention to the conversation around the proposed National Monument?
Rebecca Robinson: This project began it seems like a lifetime ago. In early 2015, at the time, conservation organizations, in particular the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, were leading a campaign to ask the Obama administration to establish a greater Canyon Lands national monument, which is a large swath of land red rock country in southeast Utah, the areas, ecologically and culturally significant to many people and Native American tribes, indigenous peoples in the region and like Bears ears, had natural resources that drilling and mining companies were ready to exploit. So the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or SUWA and its partners were asking, as I mentioned, then-President Obama, to establish this National Monument using something called the Antiquities Act, which was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt back in 1906 to quote, “authorize the president to create historic landmarks. Historic and prehistoric structures and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the government of the United States.” It's a mouthful, but it ends up being very significant in the battle over Bears Ears. So in 1908, Teddy Roosevelt ended up using it to protect the Grand Canyon. At that point, as a National Monument because Congress was failing to act. And again, this becomes very significant in the Bears Ears issue as well, so our initial interviews focused on the Greater Canyonlands proposal, but by the summer of 2015, our initial sources, some of whom were part of the same Greater Canyonlands, were really shifting their focus to another conservation movement in Southeast Utah, centered in the Four Corners region where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet, and it was led by a just-formed coalition of five Native American tribal nations. The Hopi, the Navajo, The Ute Indian tribe, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni tribe. They were petitioning the Obama administration to establish a Bears Ears National Monument that would protect ancestral lands from drilling, mining and the impacts of motorized recreation very similar to Greater Canyonlands, just in a slightly different region. And the Bears Ears is so-called named after a pair of two very large buttes that look to many people like ears of bears poking out of the earth. They really are key landmark in a wild landscape that can be seen for many miles in every direction, and they're sacred to the indigenous peoples of the region and what was unique about the Bears Ears campaign was that while conservation organizations played a key role in promoting and lobbying for protection and establishment of a monument, the true leaders were the tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, it was an indigenous led effort, the likes of which the US hadn't really seen before. It also wasn't a straightforward conservation proposal. The coalition emphasized the cultural and spiritual significance of the landscape, which their ancestors had called home since time immemorial and, most significantly, the coalition proposed a co-management agreement with the federal government in which a representative from each tribe, tribes being sovereign nations who have a government-to-government relationship with the federal government would co-manage. the lands of the monument in a way that was consistent with their cultural values and also conservation values more generally. Actually, we also heard that there was fierce opposition to this proposal from some locals, though not all, critically, and elected leaders who saw the establishment of a National Monument as a, quote-uN-quote land grab by the federal government that by setting aside some of this land for protection could rob them of their livelihood. And access to some of their treasured places. [It was] a compelling story, we wanted to learn more. So we headed to the Four Corners region and started interviewing people. As tends to happen when following a story, one interview led to another and another and another until we knew that we had to spend some serious time on the ground in the region to truly understand the issues at play.
Steve Strom: The notion of a land grab, often used to oppose the Bears ears is a little bit deceptive in that the land that putatively was being grabbed was in fact public land, like for example a National Forest. So it's important to note that these are public lands that, like national forests ,belong to us all.
Themes in the Conversations
Rebecca Robinson: We found three themes that emerged that connected people on all sides of the issue. One was that they all had a cultural and spiritual connection to the landscape. Many of them in the local area, felt that their voices hadn't been heard by people who were deciding the fate of landscapes that they called home. And that they lived in a rural area with a lot of poverty and a lot of industries that had come and gone over the years, such as uranium mining, things that had gone boom and bust, and they faced an uncertain economic future, and that also informed their very passionate views on this. And it's also informed by ancient history, as well as more recent. And there's an intersection of religious beliefs and different visions for economic future and the meaning of the word sacred, as well.
Catherine Cooper: It sounds like such a huge scope just around this one National Monument. How did you begin to formulate the project and then put together these interviews?
Rebecca Robinson: What drew us to the story was the seemingly epic nature of it and really encompassing so many different intersecting issues that at the time and still inform a lot of political and cultural debates in the West in particular, but also the country at large. So I mentioned before that we started with a couple of initial interviews and one interview led to another and to another and another. And everyone had someone to recommend. And we happened to have the luxury of time in certain parts of this project and we were able to invest the time in going to southeast Utah and other places in the Four Corners region and spend significant time on the ground in the communities we were reporting on and so that made it easier to identify people to interview.
Steve Strom: I think a crucial decision was made by Rebecca relatively early on in the process and that is to allow the story to be told by the individuals involved in the conflict, rather than doing as I had originally imagined, a book which would follow a more academic form description of the geography to a description of the indigenous history, Anglo history and so on, and I feel that to the extent that the book has real power, it derives from the decision to let people talk.
Catherine Cooper: It sounds like such a huge scope just around this one National Monument. How did you begin to formulate the project and then put together these interviews?
Rebecca Robinson: What drew us to the story was the seemingly epic nature of it and really encompassing so many different intersecting issues that at the time and still inform a lot of political and cultural debates in the West in particular, but also the country at large. So I mentioned before that we started with a couple of initial interviews and one interview led to another and to another and another. And everyone had someone to recommend. And we happened to have the luxury of time in certain parts of this project and we were able to invest the time in going to southeast Utah and other places in the Four Corners region and spend significant time on the ground in the communities we were reporting on and so that made it easier to identify people to interview.
Steve Strom: I think a crucial decision was made by Rebecca relatively early on in the process and that is to allow the story to be told by the individuals involved in the conflict, rather than doing as I had originally imagined, a book which would follow a more academic form description of the geography to a description of the indigenous history, Anglo history and so on, and I feel that to the extent that the book has real power, it derives from the decision to let people talk.
Interviewing People who are Invested
Photo by Cynthia Lunine
Steve Strom: My recollection is that we adjusted to each of the sources and tried to meet them. Where they were, I think that to the extent possible, we tried to engage them first on a personal level before going too deeply into the weeds of the Bears Ears discussion. And I think in the end, we followed pretty much the same themes in asking the questions. But I think that each of the interviews usually from my perspective were tailored to the individual.
Rebecca Robinson: I think that for some interviews we did get into the weeds because we knew that some politicians or some leaders of advocacy organizations were very much involved in the policy, which was a crucial part of understanding the story especially. One thing I didn't mention is that at the time that the Bears Ears proposal was taking shape, there were conversations led by a Republican congressman in Utah, representative Rob Bishop, that involved many different stakeholders. You had ranchers. You had business owners. You had rock climbers. You had representatives of Native American tribes all trying to come together to find a compromise on these thorny public lands issues. And there were reasons why it went off the rails that had to do with politics and cultural differences, but I think that when we spoke to some of the folks that had been involved with the policy aspect of things, we would tailor our questions more to policy and getting into the weeds of legislation and land boundaries and whatnot. But then we took a different approach with some respected elders in the Mormon community. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is hugely influential in the part of Southeast Utah where we were conducting our interviews. And so we very much focused on the spiritual connection to the land and how that very much informs views on how land should be managed and stewarded, and so I do think to Steve's point that we in some ways took the same approach, but approached the interviews from a different standpoint, based on who we were talking to.
Catherine Cooper: Steve mentioned this very unique structure to the book. How did you decide which interviews would become chapters and which places you would pull quotes and those interleaving pages that you created?
Rebecca Robinson: We had the opportunity to spend a great amount of time with some of the folks who ended up being the focus of their own chapters, folks, we were able to meet with again and again and again and really develop a sense of their role in this greater political and cultural story. Others were not necessarily key players, but people who were behind the scenes helping to make things happen to bring different people together in this larger movement on all sides to determine what the future of this wild landscape was going to be. And I think that some of our choices were sort of surprising to us in the end that they weren't necessarily people who had been quoted in. Newspapers or media pieces, but they were people who, behind the scenes actually ended up playing significant roles and or people who had been involved in the issues for a very long time.
Steve Strom: It was a combination of close interactions over a long period of time, the desire to include voices from a wide range of stakeholder interests than to select individuals whose stories were particularly powerful, whether from a spiritual standpoint or from an institutional standpoint.
Meaningful Interactions
Catherine Cooper: Could you each share a favorite story about working on the book or a meaningful interaction that happened afterward?
Rebecca Robinson: I do think one that has stuck with me over the years is the afternoon we spent with Mark Maryboy, who is the focus of one of the chapters in our book. Just as context for Mark, he is the first Native American elected official in the state of Utah. He was elected in 1986. He served for many years on the county commission in San Juan County, which is where Bears Ears National Monument ended up being established, and he led the initial effort to document some of the cultural resources and sacred sites that became really foundational to the eventual Bears Ears monument proposal, really documenting sites where objects of archaeological significance, places that were central to creation stories, places that were significant. He took us on an afternoon when a classic desert southwest thunderstorm came in and rolled out fiercely and quickly, and we happened to be in the place where he took us just as the storm was clearing and the sun came out and bathed the field in golden light and really kind of set the scene. And Mark took us to this place that was very significant for him and he told us the story about how in 1968, Robert Kennedy came to the Navajo reservation and visited with some members of the Navajo Nation, elders in particular. And Mark was very young. And he was just kind of running around and playing with friends. Then his father stopped him and said, you know, listen to what these elders have to say. And he said he listened and they were talking about the land and all of these sacred places on the landscape that they wanted to communicate to Bobby Kennedy were very significant and why they merited protection. This really became a driving force in Mark's life and it really led to some of the work that he did that ended up not just informing the content of the Bears Ears proposal, but really helping to bring the five tribes together to advocate for protection of this shared culturally significant landscape. It was a remarkable afternoon and very central to the story that we ended up telling in the book. And I will just never forget the time we spent with him.
Steve Strom: I was there as well and I was listening raptly, but also as a photographer I was overwhelmed by the light at the time, but also the wind blowing through the trees and the droplets of water coming. Down and the magical sense of the desert. It was an overwhelming experience for every sense feeling rain on your face, anyway. Every sense was excited at that moment, and I think it probably stands out among the many, many fantastic experiences that we had. It turns out that I'm Rebecca's grandfather. And we came to this place in very, very different ways. And perhaps Rebecca would like to at least provide her perspective on how we managed to join this particular enterprise.
Rebecca Robinson: We have been traveling together as a family to this country for decades, and so this was a landscape with which we both were very familiar and deeply invested in its future. And so I think that we never had the opportunity to collaborate professionally and when an opportunity presented itself, we jumped at the chance to work together.
Steve Strom: I didn't know whether Rebecca would want to confess to this because working with me carries certain burdens.
I'm not an easy person to work with, even though I perhaps come across as somewhat gentle and unassuming, I do have pretty strong views. And the thing that gives me great pride is that Rebecca matches them and then some.
Rebecca Robinson: On simultaneously a lighter and more adventuresome note, we also had the opportunity to travel with a group of Mormons who were embarking on an annual pilgrimage along what is known as the Hole in the Rock Trail, which is a trail that was taken by some of their ancestors who were directed by leadership in the Mormon Church to travel from southwest Utah. Across absurdly rugged and punishing terrain to establish the first Mormon mission in San Juan County, Utah, and so every year they recreate that route in parts by gathering in a bunch of ATV's and traversing this crazy trail of Red rock and sandstone and things that one cannot imagine non motorized recreation tackling. But we had the opportunity to join them on this trek and it was very fun and a little bit hair raising like nothing we've ever done before. What really struck me during our book tour. We've really fortunate to get an in person tour in just before COVID, for which I'm eternally grateful. I think it was really meaningful. To speak with people at book readings and signings, people who either knew bears year's country so well that they could identify particular landscapes we had talked about or tell us about fun and slightly harrowing story they had on some rafting trip. For that reason, we're deeply invested in the future of the landscape and then people who never heard of the area before, but. Who came to the talk out of curiosity and then really wanted to know what the literal and figurative next chapter would be and how they could get involved in efforts to protect the region and connecting with people on that level was? Really meaningful and we still to this day will get emails from people saying. Saying I read your book, are you writing a sequel? I'm using this in my class and so it's been pretty rewarding to see that there's continued interest and part of that is thanks to politics that has kept bears ears very much part of the national conversation for years. Since we published our book.
Steve Strom: One of the more meaningful interactions I had was with Humanities professor at Brigham Young University, who came to one of our meetings and provided entry. Way into many folks in the LDS community, folks who in the future from that point led me to folks who became sources for the next book I did, which is called the Greater San Rafael Swell, which describes another effort at land protection. The work on the Bears ears. Book and the follow up meetings really provided entree into the next phase of my investigations of how people actually can find ways of compromising about land use issues which have long, long been highly controversial.
Rebecca Robinson: I do think one that has stuck with me over the years is the afternoon we spent with Mark Maryboy, who is the focus of one of the chapters in our book. Just as context for Mark, he is the first Native American elected official in the state of Utah. He was elected in 1986. He served for many years on the county commission in San Juan County, which is where Bears Ears National Monument ended up being established, and he led the initial effort to document some of the cultural resources and sacred sites that became really foundational to the eventual Bears Ears monument proposal, really documenting sites where objects of archaeological significance, places that were central to creation stories, places that were significant. He took us on an afternoon when a classic desert southwest thunderstorm came in and rolled out fiercely and quickly, and we happened to be in the place where he took us just as the storm was clearing and the sun came out and bathed the field in golden light and really kind of set the scene. And Mark took us to this place that was very significant for him and he told us the story about how in 1968, Robert Kennedy came to the Navajo reservation and visited with some members of the Navajo Nation, elders in particular. And Mark was very young. And he was just kind of running around and playing with friends. Then his father stopped him and said, you know, listen to what these elders have to say. And he said he listened and they were talking about the land and all of these sacred places on the landscape that they wanted to communicate to Bobby Kennedy were very significant and why they merited protection. This really became a driving force in Mark's life and it really led to some of the work that he did that ended up not just informing the content of the Bears Ears proposal, but really helping to bring the five tribes together to advocate for protection of this shared culturally significant landscape. It was a remarkable afternoon and very central to the story that we ended up telling in the book. And I will just never forget the time we spent with him.
Steve Strom: I was there as well and I was listening raptly, but also as a photographer I was overwhelmed by the light at the time, but also the wind blowing through the trees and the droplets of water coming. Down and the magical sense of the desert. It was an overwhelming experience for every sense feeling rain on your face, anyway. Every sense was excited at that moment, and I think it probably stands out among the many, many fantastic experiences that we had. It turns out that I'm Rebecca's grandfather. And we came to this place in very, very different ways. And perhaps Rebecca would like to at least provide her perspective on how we managed to join this particular enterprise.
Rebecca Robinson: We have been traveling together as a family to this country for decades, and so this was a landscape with which we both were very familiar and deeply invested in its future. And so I think that we never had the opportunity to collaborate professionally and when an opportunity presented itself, we jumped at the chance to work together.
Steve Strom: I didn't know whether Rebecca would want to confess to this because working with me carries certain burdens.
I'm not an easy person to work with, even though I perhaps come across as somewhat gentle and unassuming, I do have pretty strong views. And the thing that gives me great pride is that Rebecca matches them and then some.
Rebecca Robinson: On simultaneously a lighter and more adventuresome note, we also had the opportunity to travel with a group of Mormons who were embarking on an annual pilgrimage along what is known as the Hole in the Rock Trail, which is a trail that was taken by some of their ancestors who were directed by leadership in the Mormon Church to travel from southwest Utah. Across absurdly rugged and punishing terrain to establish the first Mormon mission in San Juan County, Utah, and so every year they recreate that route in parts by gathering in a bunch of ATV's and traversing this crazy trail of Red rock and sandstone and things that one cannot imagine non motorized recreation tackling. But we had the opportunity to join them on this trek and it was very fun and a little bit hair raising like nothing we've ever done before. What really struck me during our book tour. We've really fortunate to get an in person tour in just before COVID, for which I'm eternally grateful. I think it was really meaningful. To speak with people at book readings and signings, people who either knew bears year's country so well that they could identify particular landscapes we had talked about or tell us about fun and slightly harrowing story they had on some rafting trip. For that reason, we're deeply invested in the future of the landscape and then people who never heard of the area before, but. Who came to the talk out of curiosity and then really wanted to know what the literal and figurative next chapter would be and how they could get involved in efforts to protect the region and connecting with people on that level was? Really meaningful and we still to this day will get emails from people saying. Saying I read your book, are you writing a sequel? I'm using this in my class and so it's been pretty rewarding to see that there's continued interest and part of that is thanks to politics that has kept bears ears very much part of the national conversation for years. Since we published our book.
Steve Strom: One of the more meaningful interactions I had was with Humanities professor at Brigham Young University, who came to one of our meetings and provided entry. Way into many folks in the LDS community, folks who in the future from that point led me to folks who became sources for the next book I did, which is called the Greater San Rafael Swell, which describes another effort at land protection. The work on the Bears ears. Book and the follow up meetings really provided entree into the next phase of my investigations of how people actually can find ways of compromising about land use issues which have long, long been highly controversial.
A Changing Landscape
Catherine Cooper: So the book came out in 2018. What has changed since then?
Rebecca Robinson: Oh my. In some ways it's sort of the more things change, the more they stay the same. But it's important to note in 2017, then President Trump actually took the monument that Obama had created a year prior and reduced its boundaries by 85% from 1.35 million acres that was created by President Obama. The impetus for this came from pressure by Utah Republican politicians to really appease the desires of some of their constituents to reverse the, quote-un-quote “land grab” that in their view, had been orchestrated by the federal government. And that was huge. Predictably, many people sued, I should say, the coalition of tribes and conservation organizations, recreation, advocacy groups, many different people as a coalition filed suit. That is ongoing. But in October 2021 President Biden restored the boundaries of Bears Ears to the delight of many constituents, including, of course, the tribes and their allies, who had been in this fight for quite some time. Additionally, last summer, I believe, the Bears Ears tribes signed an official co-management agreement with the federal government, which is incredibly significant. Having sovereign tribal nations and agencies of the federal government, such as the Forest Service and other federal land management agency Steve mentioned managed together, it's a really unique partnership and it incorporates many of the elements of the Bears Ears Proposal, which could be viewed as combining what we might call Western science with traditional indigenous ecological knowledge that will inform land stewardship. It's a really unique approach and it's quite amazing to see that eight years later, the vision that the tribes had as part of their initial proposal in many ways has come to pass. So that's very significant.
Speaking of lawsuits, the state of Utah has sued the federal government, alleging abuse of the Antiquities Act, which again, as we mentioned, Obama used to establish the National Monument, which has been around for over a century. Specifically, the state is citing the language in the Antiquities Act that specifies that the areas protected are, essentially, to paraphrase, no larger than they need to be to protect very specific resources. So, they're alleging that by establishing these huge monuments. [the federal government is] in essence abusing the law and not using it in the way it was intended to be used. The suit is basically aiming to get the Supreme Court to weigh in on this. Should the Supreme Court rule in their favor, that could raise real questions about how future presidents can use the Antiquities Act to set aside areas for protection. So that's significant and that's something to keep an eye on for sure.
And then I would say finally, this is not something that's necessarily associated with Bears Ears alone. It has much broader implications. But in 2021, Deb Haaland, a former US representative from New Mexico, was appointed the first-ever Indigenous Secretary of the Interior. And she's placed great emphasis on honoring tribal sovereignty and increasing indigenous representation in the federal government, particularly in land management agencies and also recognizing traditional ecological knowledge in government land management practices. This has both practical and symbolic implications.
There is, from the view of many different people, a need for healing between tribes and the federal government. Whether it's for broken treaties or trauma inflicted by the system of Native American boarding schools run by the federal government, there are many different reasons why the relationship between tribes and the federal government has been fraught over time, and so I think Secretary Haalland, along with other people in the Biden administration, have placed a great priority on furthering that healing process. I think the significance of that cannot be overstated and it will be really interesting to see how her leadership continues to advance some of those priorities.
Rebecca Robinson: Oh my. In some ways it's sort of the more things change, the more they stay the same. But it's important to note in 2017, then President Trump actually took the monument that Obama had created a year prior and reduced its boundaries by 85% from 1.35 million acres that was created by President Obama. The impetus for this came from pressure by Utah Republican politicians to really appease the desires of some of their constituents to reverse the, quote-un-quote “land grab” that in their view, had been orchestrated by the federal government. And that was huge. Predictably, many people sued, I should say, the coalition of tribes and conservation organizations, recreation, advocacy groups, many different people as a coalition filed suit. That is ongoing. But in October 2021 President Biden restored the boundaries of Bears Ears to the delight of many constituents, including, of course, the tribes and their allies, who had been in this fight for quite some time. Additionally, last summer, I believe, the Bears Ears tribes signed an official co-management agreement with the federal government, which is incredibly significant. Having sovereign tribal nations and agencies of the federal government, such as the Forest Service and other federal land management agency Steve mentioned managed together, it's a really unique partnership and it incorporates many of the elements of the Bears Ears Proposal, which could be viewed as combining what we might call Western science with traditional indigenous ecological knowledge that will inform land stewardship. It's a really unique approach and it's quite amazing to see that eight years later, the vision that the tribes had as part of their initial proposal in many ways has come to pass. So that's very significant.
Speaking of lawsuits, the state of Utah has sued the federal government, alleging abuse of the Antiquities Act, which again, as we mentioned, Obama used to establish the National Monument, which has been around for over a century. Specifically, the state is citing the language in the Antiquities Act that specifies that the areas protected are, essentially, to paraphrase, no larger than they need to be to protect very specific resources. So, they're alleging that by establishing these huge monuments. [the federal government is] in essence abusing the law and not using it in the way it was intended to be used. The suit is basically aiming to get the Supreme Court to weigh in on this. Should the Supreme Court rule in their favor, that could raise real questions about how future presidents can use the Antiquities Act to set aside areas for protection. So that's significant and that's something to keep an eye on for sure.
And then I would say finally, this is not something that's necessarily associated with Bears Ears alone. It has much broader implications. But in 2021, Deb Haaland, a former US representative from New Mexico, was appointed the first-ever Indigenous Secretary of the Interior. And she's placed great emphasis on honoring tribal sovereignty and increasing indigenous representation in the federal government, particularly in land management agencies and also recognizing traditional ecological knowledge in government land management practices. This has both practical and symbolic implications.
There is, from the view of many different people, a need for healing between tribes and the federal government. Whether it's for broken treaties or trauma inflicted by the system of Native American boarding schools run by the federal government, there are many different reasons why the relationship between tribes and the federal government has been fraught over time, and so I think Secretary Haalland, along with other people in the Biden administration, have placed a great priority on furthering that healing process. I think the significance of that cannot be overstated and it will be really interesting to see how her leadership continues to advance some of those priorities.
Work Carries Forward
Catherine Cooper: So Steve, you mentioned that a second book came out of your original work on Bears Ears. Could you talk about other ways in which your work at Bears Ears has impacted what you have decided to do next or current projects you have on your plates?
Steve Strom: I think that the most important lesson I learned from Rebecca is that allowing voices to speak and to express their own stories is truly a powerful way of informing folks about challenging issues. And as I mentioned before, I have this rather academic way of thinking about issues and I'm trying to parse them and arrange things in logical order. Well, that's not necessarily how people interact with one another. For example, in the book I mentioned earlier, the Greater San Rafael Swell, I was able to talk to folks ranging from miners to county commissioners to representatives of ATV groups and so on, and to capture their story and to describe how with a lot of time, a lot of trust building, political leadership it's really possible to come to some compromise that allows peoples’ spiritual and economic connection with the land to be incorporated into larger landscape conservation. So that book came out again by the University of Arizona Press in 2020. And I was going to do a follow up book centered in Utah around the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. But COVID intervened.
I decided instead to look at a conservation issue around an area in Arizona where I had lived for 22 years, specifically the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, and I was interested once again in trying to understand how it's possible to do large landscape conservation in a way that incorporates the views and needs of a very broad range of stakeholders. I've just submitted that manuscript for review to the University of Arizona Press. It's called Adapting to a Changing World, and describes four conservation efforts in Arizona and New Mexico. And again, the common themes to reaching consensus on challenging issues is a lot of time building a lot of trust and being willing to work together. The shortest time it took to reach consensus on any of these agreements, I looked at five years and the typical was 10 and the extreme value was 25 years. It's that kind of time that's needed.
The thing that most concerns me and perhaps vexes me at this point is that on the one hand, it's possible to reach these agreements [if] you allow enough time, which wasn't available in the case of Bears Ears. On the other hand, we're facing really urgent needs to protect large landscape in service of providing habitat for a wide range of species, allowing them to room to move and migrate. It's also going to be necessary to protect watersheds, which are typically huge, and trying to figure out how to do that for a mosaic of tribal, private and publicly held lands is an incredible challenge, and we have to meet it quickly. And yet. It takes a long time to incentivize conversation and to build the trust necessary in order to reach some sort of satisfactory agreement. So I don't know how it's going to be possible to meet the conservation challenges that we face on the time scales that are important given the fact that the pace of human interactions and trust building is just a very, very slow one.
Rebecca Robinson: I am also working on a book in the early stages about another indigenous-led conservation movement. This one is centered in the Pacific Northwest [where I live] and it also involves an intertribal coalition, although this one is much larger. It’s a coalition of nearly 60 Native American Tribes in the Northwest supported, as was true in Bears Ears, by their allies in the conservation recreation community, among others. [The coalition] is advocating for the removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Lower Snake River in Eastern Washington state. They're doing that in order to save several species of salmon from extinction. This is one [issue] with plenty of data to back it up, that decades ‘worth of scientific data show that these dams have contributed to a catastrophic decline in the salmon population, and advocates say that removing the dams will help to restore a free-flowing river, in which salmon can thrive and not face many of the threats that come with trying to navigate dams and the reservoirs behind them on this rather epic journey they make to the Pacific Ocean and then back to their natal streams to spawn the next generation.
Similar to the Bears Ears proposal, the [tribes emphasize] the need to protect physical landscapes and natural resources, but also that by not doing so, their cultural and spiritual identity is under threat.. as self- identified salmon people, salmon are central to their culture and physical and spiritual sustenance. For that reason, they and many others view this issue as about more than conservation and. ecological restoration. It is, at its core, a social and environmental justice issue, and, as was true with Bears Ears, there are many who oppose this movement and this plan, among them farmers who rely on the dams, reservoirs to irrigate the crops, public utilities who sell the power generated by those dams to their customers, barge transportation companies, which would no longer be able to transport grain and fertilizer and other goods as far as they can with these particular dams in place and then others who question the wisdom of removing infrastructure that generates clean energy at a time when some Northwest states have set really ambitious goals for cutting carbon emissions in the era of climate change. Dam removal advocates note that this energy can be replaced by other renewable sources, but some of that infrastructure has yet to be built.
This is one of these debates that's been raging for decades between different stakeholder groups in the courts and at the grassroots with little movement. But today, for several different reasons, the campaign to breach the dams has really been gaining momentum, and there are even signs that leaders in the Biden administration are open to the idea, not outright supportive but open to considering it among the suite of other options to help restore salmon populations. The issues speak to a lot of the same things that concern the Biden administration and administrations past, namely renewable energy, social and environmental justice, climate change, and, very similar to Bears Ears, they're strengthening relationships with tribal nations.
Steve Strom: I think that the most important lesson I learned from Rebecca is that allowing voices to speak and to express their own stories is truly a powerful way of informing folks about challenging issues. And as I mentioned before, I have this rather academic way of thinking about issues and I'm trying to parse them and arrange things in logical order. Well, that's not necessarily how people interact with one another. For example, in the book I mentioned earlier, the Greater San Rafael Swell, I was able to talk to folks ranging from miners to county commissioners to representatives of ATV groups and so on, and to capture their story and to describe how with a lot of time, a lot of trust building, political leadership it's really possible to come to some compromise that allows peoples’ spiritual and economic connection with the land to be incorporated into larger landscape conservation. So that book came out again by the University of Arizona Press in 2020. And I was going to do a follow up book centered in Utah around the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. But COVID intervened.
I decided instead to look at a conservation issue around an area in Arizona where I had lived for 22 years, specifically the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, and I was interested once again in trying to understand how it's possible to do large landscape conservation in a way that incorporates the views and needs of a very broad range of stakeholders. I've just submitted that manuscript for review to the University of Arizona Press. It's called Adapting to a Changing World, and describes four conservation efforts in Arizona and New Mexico. And again, the common themes to reaching consensus on challenging issues is a lot of time building a lot of trust and being willing to work together. The shortest time it took to reach consensus on any of these agreements, I looked at five years and the typical was 10 and the extreme value was 25 years. It's that kind of time that's needed.
The thing that most concerns me and perhaps vexes me at this point is that on the one hand, it's possible to reach these agreements [if] you allow enough time, which wasn't available in the case of Bears Ears. On the other hand, we're facing really urgent needs to protect large landscape in service of providing habitat for a wide range of species, allowing them to room to move and migrate. It's also going to be necessary to protect watersheds, which are typically huge, and trying to figure out how to do that for a mosaic of tribal, private and publicly held lands is an incredible challenge, and we have to meet it quickly. And yet. It takes a long time to incentivize conversation and to build the trust necessary in order to reach some sort of satisfactory agreement. So I don't know how it's going to be possible to meet the conservation challenges that we face on the time scales that are important given the fact that the pace of human interactions and trust building is just a very, very slow one.
Rebecca Robinson: I am also working on a book in the early stages about another indigenous-led conservation movement. This one is centered in the Pacific Northwest [where I live] and it also involves an intertribal coalition, although this one is much larger. It’s a coalition of nearly 60 Native American Tribes in the Northwest supported, as was true in Bears Ears, by their allies in the conservation recreation community, among others. [The coalition] is advocating for the removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Lower Snake River in Eastern Washington state. They're doing that in order to save several species of salmon from extinction. This is one [issue] with plenty of data to back it up, that decades ‘worth of scientific data show that these dams have contributed to a catastrophic decline in the salmon population, and advocates say that removing the dams will help to restore a free-flowing river, in which salmon can thrive and not face many of the threats that come with trying to navigate dams and the reservoirs behind them on this rather epic journey they make to the Pacific Ocean and then back to their natal streams to spawn the next generation.
Similar to the Bears Ears proposal, the [tribes emphasize] the need to protect physical landscapes and natural resources, but also that by not doing so, their cultural and spiritual identity is under threat.. as self- identified salmon people, salmon are central to their culture and physical and spiritual sustenance. For that reason, they and many others view this issue as about more than conservation and. ecological restoration. It is, at its core, a social and environmental justice issue, and, as was true with Bears Ears, there are many who oppose this movement and this plan, among them farmers who rely on the dams, reservoirs to irrigate the crops, public utilities who sell the power generated by those dams to their customers, barge transportation companies, which would no longer be able to transport grain and fertilizer and other goods as far as they can with these particular dams in place and then others who question the wisdom of removing infrastructure that generates clean energy at a time when some Northwest states have set really ambitious goals for cutting carbon emissions in the era of climate change. Dam removal advocates note that this energy can be replaced by other renewable sources, but some of that infrastructure has yet to be built.
This is one of these debates that's been raging for decades between different stakeholder groups in the courts and at the grassroots with little movement. But today, for several different reasons, the campaign to breach the dams has really been gaining momentum, and there are even signs that leaders in the Biden administration are open to the idea, not outright supportive but open to considering it among the suite of other options to help restore salmon populations. The issues speak to a lot of the same things that concern the Biden administration and administrations past, namely renewable energy, social and environmental justice, climate change, and, very similar to Bears Ears, they're strengthening relationships with tribal nations.
Compromise
Catherine Cooper: I'll admit that I want to read all of your books. So what would you like readers to take away from your book, and who have you found is your audience?
Rebecca Robinson: I think that our audience has proven to be surprisingly diverse. [Voices from Bears Ears] was released by an academic press, so naturally we assumed that some of our audience would hail from the academic community. But it seems to have had enough broad appeal that we've discovered that everyone from grassroots environmental advocates to people who, as I said, have never engaged with these issues or know the landscape well at all, have really engaged with the book. And really, I think the themes in the book are broad enough and relevant enough to a large swath of people in the United States, that there's really something for almost everyone to connect to in the book, whether it's the future of rural America, what it takes to achieve political compromise, the future of conservation and just a host of other issues that I think make it relevant and compelling to a large number of people.
I would like people to take away, especially in such a polarized era, that achieving compromise, whether it's on public lands issues or other thorny cultural and political debates requires all parties to come to the table in good faith [and] with open minds, and with an acknowledgement that no one's going to get everything. As one of our sources, the legendary rancher Heidi Redd said, you know, the dinner plate must be split. Everyone's gotta be a little bit unhappy and willing to sacrifice something in order to come together around a shared understanding of what is most important to protect. I think also behind every contentious policy debate are real people, and it would behoove policymakers, especially at the national level, to listen to the voices of all their constituents, not just the loudest ones, the ones with access to a megaphone, but people who historically have been overlooked and/or excluded from these conversations. Connected to that is that planning for the future requires acknowledging the past. Whether that's acknowledging people who, as I was just saying, may have been excluded and/or overlooked by decision makers [in] these critical conversations, or in the case of Bear Ears, there's a lot of painful history there between different groups. And I think part of moving forward on these issues, in a respectful and amicable way, is [acknowledging] some of that painful history and figuring out how to move forward in a way to heal old wounds, but also build new relationships based on a foundation of mutual understanding and respect.
Steve Strom: [For] most conservation efforts to succeed, one, they ought to start locally and when you have national or statewide conservation groups on the one hand and state and county government on the other hand, getting involved at the very beginning, it's more likely that you wind up with polarized discussions. Whereas if conversation starts slowly on a local level and people can come up with a shared vision, you're much more likely to build up from the grassroots to a solution and it's at that point that I think that political leadership becomes important. But until you get to that point, if conversation starts at too high a level too soon and proceeds too quickly, the chances of success are not very high. So I agree with everything that Rebecca said. But again, meeting on the land among people who belong to that land and vice versa, is really the key to conservation success. And conservation and success that includes not only land protection but protection of the cultural values of people and their economic future.
Rebecca Robinson: As we saw with Bears ears, the future of conservation will almost certainly involve finding a way to combine Western science, very data-driven science with indigenous traditional ecological knowledge. I think we're really seeing that begin to be integrated in an official [federal] government capacity and I think that may well be the way of the future in terms of decision makers trying to find ways of addressing and mitigating the adverse effects of climate change. They’re looking to indigenous leaders who successfully stewarded landscapes for many thousands of years for ideas and approaches to helping with approaches to wildfires and water protection and things of that nature. And so I think we're starting to see that happen in an official capacity at the government policy level. And I would expect that to continue. Obviously so much depends on leadership and other circumstances. There's no way we could predict at present, but I do think that's going to be a key component of conservation initiatives in the future.
Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much.
Rebecca Robinson: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Steve Strom: I hope you get a sense that enjoy one another's company and there's often a lot of verbal sparring because we each have our own way of looking at the world. But nevertheless, I've had an enormous amount of fun, and as I said, I've learned a lot, not just from the folks with whom we talk, but certainly from. OK, didn't think that way when we started to work together.
Rebecca Robinson: It's been a tremendous gift to get to work with Steve, especially at this point in our lives. It's been really special and I have learned a tremendous amount as well, including different ways of viewing a landscape that at first blush is just - the scale is so vast. And yet there are so many subtleties to see at the ground level. So getting to see that landscape through Steve's eyes, I think, gave me a more nuanced appreciation of it.
Rebecca Robinson: I think that our audience has proven to be surprisingly diverse. [Voices from Bears Ears] was released by an academic press, so naturally we assumed that some of our audience would hail from the academic community. But it seems to have had enough broad appeal that we've discovered that everyone from grassroots environmental advocates to people who, as I said, have never engaged with these issues or know the landscape well at all, have really engaged with the book. And really, I think the themes in the book are broad enough and relevant enough to a large swath of people in the United States, that there's really something for almost everyone to connect to in the book, whether it's the future of rural America, what it takes to achieve political compromise, the future of conservation and just a host of other issues that I think make it relevant and compelling to a large number of people.
I would like people to take away, especially in such a polarized era, that achieving compromise, whether it's on public lands issues or other thorny cultural and political debates requires all parties to come to the table in good faith [and] with open minds, and with an acknowledgement that no one's going to get everything. As one of our sources, the legendary rancher Heidi Redd said, you know, the dinner plate must be split. Everyone's gotta be a little bit unhappy and willing to sacrifice something in order to come together around a shared understanding of what is most important to protect. I think also behind every contentious policy debate are real people, and it would behoove policymakers, especially at the national level, to listen to the voices of all their constituents, not just the loudest ones, the ones with access to a megaphone, but people who historically have been overlooked and/or excluded from these conversations. Connected to that is that planning for the future requires acknowledging the past. Whether that's acknowledging people who, as I was just saying, may have been excluded and/or overlooked by decision makers [in] these critical conversations, or in the case of Bear Ears, there's a lot of painful history there between different groups. And I think part of moving forward on these issues, in a respectful and amicable way, is [acknowledging] some of that painful history and figuring out how to move forward in a way to heal old wounds, but also build new relationships based on a foundation of mutual understanding and respect.
Steve Strom: [For] most conservation efforts to succeed, one, they ought to start locally and when you have national or statewide conservation groups on the one hand and state and county government on the other hand, getting involved at the very beginning, it's more likely that you wind up with polarized discussions. Whereas if conversation starts slowly on a local level and people can come up with a shared vision, you're much more likely to build up from the grassroots to a solution and it's at that point that I think that political leadership becomes important. But until you get to that point, if conversation starts at too high a level too soon and proceeds too quickly, the chances of success are not very high. So I agree with everything that Rebecca said. But again, meeting on the land among people who belong to that land and vice versa, is really the key to conservation success. And conservation and success that includes not only land protection but protection of the cultural values of people and their economic future.
Rebecca Robinson: As we saw with Bears ears, the future of conservation will almost certainly involve finding a way to combine Western science, very data-driven science with indigenous traditional ecological knowledge. I think we're really seeing that begin to be integrated in an official [federal] government capacity and I think that may well be the way of the future in terms of decision makers trying to find ways of addressing and mitigating the adverse effects of climate change. They’re looking to indigenous leaders who successfully stewarded landscapes for many thousands of years for ideas and approaches to helping with approaches to wildfires and water protection and things of that nature. And so I think we're starting to see that happen in an official capacity at the government policy level. And I would expect that to continue. Obviously so much depends on leadership and other circumstances. There's no way we could predict at present, but I do think that's going to be a key component of conservation initiatives in the future.
Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much.
Rebecca Robinson: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Steve Strom: I hope you get a sense that enjoy one another's company and there's often a lot of verbal sparring because we each have our own way of looking at the world. But nevertheless, I've had an enormous amount of fun, and as I said, I've learned a lot, not just from the folks with whom we talk, but certainly from. OK, didn't think that way when we started to work together.
Rebecca Robinson: It's been a tremendous gift to get to work with Steve, especially at this point in our lives. It's been really special and I have learned a tremendous amount as well, including different ways of viewing a landscape that at first blush is just - the scale is so vast. And yet there are so many subtleties to see at the ground level. So getting to see that landscape through Steve's eyes, I think, gave me a more nuanced appreciation of it.
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