The Bears Ears
A Human History of America's Most Endangered Wilderness
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A personal and historical exploration of the Bears Ears country and the fight to save a national monument.
The Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, created by President Obama in 2016 and eviscerated by the Trump administration in 2017, contains more archaeological sites than any other region in the United States. It’s also a spectacularly beautiful landscape, a mosaic of sandstone canyons and bold mesas and buttes. This wilderness, now threatened by oil and gas drilling, unrestricted grazing, and invasion by Jeep and ATV, is at the center of the greatest environmental battle in America since the damming of the Colorado River to create Lake Powell in the 1950s.
In The Bears Ears, acclaimed adventure writer David Roberts takes readers on a tour of his favorite place on earth as he unfolds the rich and contradictory human history of the 1.35 million acres of the Bears Ears domain. Weaving personal memoir with archival research, Roberts sings the praises of the outback he’s explored for the last twenty-five years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Embedded in the land surrounding Utah's Bears Ears are "all kinds of poignant ironies and surprising contradictions," writes adventurer Roberts (Limits of the Known) in this engrossing history of an area that's become enveloped in controversy. Roberts's episodic "human history" ignores chronology to "jump around among the ages" and stretches back to the Ancestral Puebloans, who "flourished through all four seasons" on Cedar Mesa, near the two buttes called Bears Ears around 1250 CE. From there, he recounts the "first mention in print of any part of the greater Bears Ears domain" by a Franciscan priest and explorer in 1776; "British born aristocrats" who "exploited the fertile terrain" around Bears Ears with their team of Mormon ranchers in the 1880s; a 1970s county commissioner who "locked horns for decades with the writer Edward Abbey"; the campaign of Mark Maryboy, the "Navajo activist who got the snowball rolling that would become Obama's Bears Ears National Monument" in 2016; and the Trump administration's subsequent moves to greatly reduce the size of the Bears Ears protected area. Roberts intersperses his own exploration of the land as he surveys a place with great historical significance, physical beauty, and expansive cultural import. The result is a masterfully rendered portrait of Bears Ears as an endangered land worth celebrating and protecting.
