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I'm Gail Straub and you're listening to She Explorers.

Why I feel so strongly about it is, I mean it literally is my backyard and I use it as my backyard.

So I feel like I am a steward of the land. So I want to protect it.

This is Bridget Mein-Hold, a landscape painter, and the backyard that she mentions is Bonanza flats

1,350 acres of what is currently privately held land near Park City Utah.

With 22 national monuments near Park City, Utah.

With 22 national monuments currently under review by the Secretary of the Interior, there's been a lot of talk about what we can do to protect land in the United States.

Several episodes ago, we talked with Katie Bouet

about how you can be an advocate online for public land

and also by calling your representatives.

But this is about land at a local level.

Of those 22 national monuments,

Bears Ears Monument in Utah has become the complicated poster child for that conversation.

And it is complicated.

Over 1.3 million acres and important Native American artifacts make it a very different

conversation from the one that Bridget and I had. But as a recent New York Times

article on Bears ears by Terry Tempest William stated,

...