“The whole site was once covered with pot shards,” said Vaughn Hadenfeldt, a renowned wilderness guide of the area known as Bears Ears. Since federal protection was lifted from this land in 2018, tourists and “collectors” have picked up pieces of ancient Puebloan pottery, and otherwise desecrated this ancient religious place.
It would be as if someone decided to start digging in our church cemetery looking for coins or buttons of the Revolutionary war soldiers buried there. We have all heard of the stories of grave robbers at the Pyramids and other ancient sites. The fact that Bears’ Ears is a wide open place makes it no different.
The Wilderness Society is asking us to contact President Biden to have federal protection restored to Bears’ Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments. These are places that are part of our heritage just as much as Plymouth Rock.
Prayer for the Day
Creator and ever creating God, we bow before you in gratitude:
For mother earth, to her soil, rich, rare, and sweet-- may we treat her gently.
For plants, the sun-facing light changing leaf and fine root hairs,
Standing still through wind and rain, dancing in the flowing spiral grain;
Bestow on us, O God, the will to protect the earth you have given us,
So we see the rocks as well as the grass as part of your creation.
In the name of him who walked among us,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
Wallace Stegner, American novelist and environmentalist (1909-1993)
God has given us the Spirit of boldness, so that even in the wilderness, we can be dauntless.
Gift Gugu Mona, American religious writer
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
The moon and the stars that you have established;
What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God, crowned them with glory and honor,
Given them dominion over the works of your hands, put all things under their feet.
Psalm 8: 3-6