Bears Ears on the 2020 World Monuments Watch
The World Monuments Fund’s 2020 Watch list of vulnerable cultural sites included Bears Ears National Monument — placing the southeastern Utah landscape on a roster more typically occupied by named buildings and archaeological cities.
What the Watch is
The World Monuments Fund is an international preservation organization that has, since 1996, published a biennial Watch list naming a small selection of cultural and heritage sites considered to be at significant risk. The list is not a designation in itself; it has no legal force. What it does is concentrate international attention, and historically it has been a useful tool for marshaling support — financial and political — for the listed places.
Typical Watch listings have been individual sites: a damaged cathedral in Yemen, a mosque complex in Mali, a colonial-era urban center in Latin America. The inclusion of a 1.35-million-acre cultural landscape, encompassing tens of thousands of distinct sites, was unusual.
Why Bears Ears was listed
The Fund’s listing cited multiple factors: the partial rescission of the monument’s boundaries in 2017, the resulting uncertainty over which lands would receive what level of protection, the growth in visitation, and the continuing absence of a finalized management plan that would address those pressures together with tribal co-management responsibilities. Bears Ears was named alongside the broader category of “Traditional Lands of Native Americans” and was the first U.S. national monument to appear on the Watch.
What the listing accomplished
The listing did not directly change the management or legal status of the monument. What it did was provide a focal point for international preservation attention during a period when domestic preservation arguments were politically polarized. Coverage in the international press, partnerships with non-governmental organizations, and grant programs followed.
By the next biennial cycle, the political situation had shifted significantly — the 2021 restoration of the original boundary changed the immediate context — but the underlying preservation challenges (visitor pressure, climate, the need for an active management plan, the slow work of tribal co-management) remained, and remain.
Why this matters as historical context
For visitors and supporters, the 2020 listing is worth knowing about as part of the longer story of how Bears Ears has been understood internationally. The site is not simply a Utah place; it is, by the World Monuments Fund’s assessment, a place of global cultural significance. That framing influences how academic institutions, foundation funders, and international preservation bodies relate to ongoing work in the region.