FOURTH PART: THE 21ST CENTURY CREATES A NEW, GREATER CONCEPTION

NEW LEADERS, NEW INITIATIVES, A NEW MONUMENT

For the 21st Century, southern Arizona has produced another Grand Canyon champion In the environmental tradition of Morris Udall: Raul Grijalva. (One who was never a dreamer of dams.) He appeared on the Grand Canyon scene in 2009 as he chaired a Flagstaff hearing about the dangers from quickening uranium-mining activity in the area. There was mutual support with the residents, the Havasupai, Navajo, Hualapai, Hopi, Kaibab band of the Southern Paiute — indeed with the several peoples who make up the Grand Canyon’s Associated Tribes. Their concern arose from the many destructive human and natural impacts shown by earlier uranium exploitation, especially what uranium might do to the water supply. This concern, widened to protection of the WATERSHED, not just the drainage, shaped the concern of this alliance. 

Over the past 15 years, the advantage in this struggle has gone back and forth with national partisan changes in Washington. Monuments and moratoriums have been pursued and blocked. Lets skip, then, to August 8, 2023, and what is clearly a new, bright, moment; a re-setting of the Grand Canyon’s political framework, the Antiquities Act proclamation (Grand Canyon’s fifth) of new protection, bringing the public national recognition of the Greater Grand Canyon. 

President Biden, with Congressman Grijalva and the Associated Tribes in attendance and support, brought 150 years of history to a culmination point that is in truth another hinge to open a new door. The proclamation of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument selects and designates three pieces of federal land, as outlined in red:

Even more, clear on the map below, this Greater Grand Canyon completes an embrace of the topographic Canyon using the Associated Tribes' hands from time immemorial to wrap about, raising a physical, topographic wonder into a global entity celebrating and defending the peoples and the place of the Greater Grand Canyon. 

Here is another view of the Associated Tribes of the Greater Grand Canyon that constitute a cloud of knowingness, experience, and concern encompassing the physical feature now enlarged not just beyond the Powell concept and a "complete" Park, but outward toward this world treasure's natural boundaries.

 

Some —the Hualapai, the Havasupai, the Navajo, the Southern Paiute, the Hopi — are physical protectors and even residents. What brings the Greater Grand Canyon into being, however, is the synergy and cooperation generated by the topographic Grand Canyon nestling within the protections offered by the American polity and the knowledge of the Associated Tribes: their long extension — their footprints — into the past; their possession in many forms of these lands they have roamed now and into the future.

For above all, the coming into existence of the Greater Grand Canyon, is the promise of bringing that future cooperatively into being, based on the past of the many peoples who revere the Canyon as the global environmental icon it is, the reminder and provoker for us to redouble, and again, our efforts to shape our future actions so as to protect our world, our environment, our earth, and our coming generations’ future.