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When President Trump signed his executive order directing a review of national monuments designated since 1996, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said, "The view from the Potomac is a lot different than the view from the Yellowstone or the Colorado. Too many times, you have people in D.C. who have never been to an area, never grazed the land, fished the river, driven the trails or looked locals in the eye, who are making the decisions, and they have zero accountability to the impacted communities. I'm interested in listening to those folks."

Well, I have lived along the Colorado River in southern Utah for over 40 years and fished the rivers and driven the trails countless times. I am president of a ranching corporation grazing 850,000 acres of public land. I am an employer with a large local payroll and have served as an elected county official. My complex story makes me a typical modern westerner, rather like Ryan Zinke himself. And yet, I doubt that he's interested in listening to people like me.

Instead, he signals that he will use a caricature of the Old West to claim that the monument designations were a government abuse foisted on local folks, whereas I'd tell him that the designation of Bears Ears National Monument was a thrilling highlight of what is best and truest about America.

Trump summarized the monument designations of the previous three presidents as "a massive land grab," so one has to start by noting that the president is wrong. The Antiquities Act only allows designation of a monument on federal land, meaning that every acre of the various monuments already belonged to all Americans. You can't grab land you already own.

Our shared inheritance of public lands began with the Declaration of Independence, in which the 13 colonies agreed that all of them shared equally in the investment of "blood and treasure" that secured the western territories. Setting that frontier aside as federal lands held in common was an essential part of recognizing the unity and sovereignty of the new country they were forming. When the Constitution was written, the Property Clause was a central feature, giving the federal government essentially unlimited authority to regulate the use and status of whatever territories and other public lands America might eventually own.

Over the intervening centuries, the public lands helped shape our character as a people united in a hopeful destiny. When you think of our common ground as not only great western national parks like Zion, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, but also as places like the Mall in Washington and the Statue of Liberty, you realize that these are not just places where we go to get away, but places where we come together as a people. What do we need more than that today?

The Antiquities Act was passed in 1906 specifically to protect the archaeological remains of indigenous cultures in the Southwest. But, despite the original impetus for the law, there had never been a Native American-led campaign for a monument until the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition united to protect a landscape archaeologists call the cradle of American civilization.

President Obama recognized the historic nature of this joining of sovereign tribal nations by initiating years of study and consultation with Utah leaders and tribal officials. Ultimately, he decided to use the Antiquities Act to apply additional protections to the management of the ancestral homelands of the native people. His action celebrated the place of these original Americans in our national story and invited them to share their wisdom in determining the management of these lands where they lived for thousands of years. Traditional uses of all kinds were carefully protected in his proclamation. In deference to the failed legislative effort of Utah politicians, the boundary of the Bears Ears monument closely mimics the area proposed for protections in the Utah delegation's Public Lands Initiative bill.

So, though Secretary Zinke is unlikely to consult me, he should celebrate Bears Ears as one of the finest and most just designations ever made under the venerable Antiquities Act.

Former Grand County Councilman Bill Hedden is the executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust. He lives in Castle Valley, Utah.