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Just the other week, and on the heels of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's fact-finding visit to Bears Ears National Monument in remote southeast Utah, I had the good fortune to hike past Zinke's turn-around point at the nearly thousand-year-old Anasazi cliff-dwelling known as House on Fire in the Monument's south Mule Canyon, and experience several other of the area's hundred or so archaeological sites.

The setting is a vast, 7,000-plus foot elevation, wooded cedar forest mesa, deeply cut into by shelf-rock canyons, all peppered with cliff-dwellings, some littered with ancient stone metates and pottery chards, and 50-mile vistas to Arizona's Monument Valley to the south, Utah's Abajo mountains to the north, and Colorado's San Juan mountains to the east.

While obviously not receiving the media attention of the new administration's proposals on health care, tax reform, and the budget, Bear's Ears has gotten some notable public service announcement time on television. This has followed calls for "de-monumentizing" it, and 20 or so other national monuments established by Obama in the closing days of his administration, and, perhaps, by the broader push to place other federal lands under state and local authority.

Pressures on both fronts are consistent with efforts to reorient federalism so as to increase the role of government nearest the daily lives of the people; the pursuit of free markets which, in theory, better spur economic growth and job creation; the desire to placate staunchly self-reliant constituencies who resent government intrusion in matters of land utilization; and a political critique that aims to delegitimize the entire policy agenda of the previous administration.

Though not my intention to here assess such points of view, I appreciate that their proponents claim to seek a more finely tuned social and economic structure. Even accepting that, it seems no sentient person with nearly seven decades of exposure to our nation's wilderness areas could come away from a visit to Bear's Ears without having one thing absolutely reaffirmed: Those who urge encroachment on our national monuments, parks, recreation areas or public lands overlook a central truth about America and its big-hearted, industrious and creative people.

From the "hollers" of Appalachia, to the corn and wheat fields of the Great Plains, to the inter-mountain West and the Pacific coast, from the river deltas of the Gulf Coast, to the borderlands shared with our Canadian neighbors, the people who constitute the very character of this nation, its very heart and soul, prize liberty, opportunity, and free thought above all else.

Americans of all stripes, from economic elites and intellectuals, to salt-of-the-earth laborers without whom the wheels of industry, commerce and even chores of daily life would grind to a halt, will spill their blood and exhaust their treasure to protect those values. And, if one thinks about it at all deeply, a principal well-spring from which those values derive is the sense of liberation of the spirit — the unbounding of the constraints that limit human imagination — that accompanies nothing more than simply knowing remote, primitive, wild places exist.

Liberty, opportunity, and free thought are critical to spawning the ingenuity, determination, optimism, resilience and even the generosity exemplifying America. But they are not self-producing. They do not emerge merely from the mind of theoreticians. They grow, instead, out of a sense of complete openness, a sense of an absence of parameters, a sense of the immense scale of time, a sense of ancient and even primordial beginnings. These are the sources of the fundamental values that represent our great country.

Without channeling Thoreau, Muir or Stegner, it strikes me that it is in wildness, far more than in the size of our national purse or sophistication of our technological devices, that such senses can be found. Keeping that in mind, we need tread with the greatest caution when considering the treatment accorded all comprising our nation's natural patrimony. Anything less imperils what can make America and Americans exceptional.

Rex J. Zedalis is a 37-year faculty member at the University of Tulsa law school who has taught and lectured at various universities in the U.S., Spain, Ireland, Scotland, and Switzerland.