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Throughout the history of American public lands, there has been a pattern of incredible landscapes being first designated as national monuments before later becoming beloved, world-renowned national parks.
Arizona's Chiricahua National Monument is the latest to potentially follow in that tradition, with a bill moving through Congress that would establish the area as a national park. The change in designation has broad support, including from the National Park Service and Arizona Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly. Four members of the Arizona Congressional delegation are also pushing bills to expand the boundaries of Sunset Crater and Casa Grande Ruins National Monuments.
National monuments across the country have continued to grow in popularity as public lands visitation rates skyrocket. Indeed, 77% of Westerners support restoring national monument protections to lands in the West (including 74% of Utahns), and 84% of Westerners support creating new protected areas such as national parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, and tribal protected areas. National monuments are also economic drivers in rural communities, with substantial economic growth following designation.
It makes sense that national monuments are becoming so popular and have so much public support: the landscapes and culture protected by national monuments are foundational American heritage. In the early 1990s, Congress granted presidents the power to designate national monuments to conserve important natural and cultural sites through the Antiquities Act of 1906. Since then, 17 presidents from both parties have used the landmark law to conserve these sites as national monuments.
Many national monuments have later become some of the country's most popular national parks. If Chiricahua National Monument were to follow that path, it would join the ranks of national parks such as the Grand Canyon, Olympic, and Glacier Bay. But Chiricahua had to be protected in the first place, demonstrating the importance of continuing to protect worthy landscapes across the country as national monuments—who knows, some of those unprotected special places could be the national parks of the future.
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The incentive to actually cultivate local entrepreneurs, the incentive to have a really strong downtown that can attract tourists or that can that can serve as a platform for local businesses that people want to patronize, as opposed to non locally owned businesses — all of those incentives are dulled when your budget is predominantly dependent on the extraction of some natural resource."
