Josh Ewing: Saving one of America’s most sacred cultural landscapes

Pinnacle is dedicated to developing courageous leadership and sustainability models to help change people’s lives, create stronger communities, and save the earth we share.

We also know a great deal about leading through times of turbulence. Just ask our founders, Alan and Harriet Lewis, about leading an international travel company through terrorist hijackings, the 9-11 attacks, major recessions and now a worldwide pandemic.

Josh Ewing is another leader who knows how to face a crisis.

Alnoba’s strategic partner Josh Ewing is executive director of Friends of Cedar Mesa, which works to ensure that public lands in San Juan County, with all their cultural and natural values, are respected and protected.

To do this, the organization partners with a coalition of Hopi, Navajo, Zuni and Ute tribal leaders, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, and the Glen Canyon National Recreation area to create local, regional, and national support for greater protection of Cedar Mesa through education, advocating for national designations, supporting smart local policy-making, and organizing research and volunteer service activities. (Work for which the coalition won the 2019 Alnoba Moral Courage in Leadership Award.)

Josh holds a huge vision for a vast new, large, culturally rich landscape conservation vision and played a key role in nurturing the vision and broad support to establish Bears Ears National Monument.  And, he has spent the past two years fighting the Administration’s attempts to radically reduce its scope and size.

In the midst of this fight, he had the conviction to create an education center to welcome visitors to a monument that no longer existed in the eyes of the government. He has been 110% committed to a positive vision for this embattled region, teaching respectful visitation of the landscape.

Facing a time of turbulence with courage

Now he’s battling federal efforts to drastically reduce the size of the Bears Ears National Monument while also tackling an overwhelming threat to the indigenous communities for Cedar Mesa: the COVID-19 pandemic.

As coronavirus spread through the region, Josh identified a key area of need – a shortage of EMTs – and stepped up to serve. He has also been galvanizing support for tribal areas in Arizona and New Mexico that have been hard-hit by the pandemic.

Recently, we asked Josh to share the biggest lessons he’s learned about leadership during this unprecedented time. Josh cited one of our 10 Keys to Leadership in Crisis: “Crisis is a gift”.

“One of the gifts of difficulty, if you are willing, is to rethink what you are doing.   For us at Bears Ears, we opened an education center.  Our focus was myopic – get tasks done, run it well and make it great.   With the center closed we’ve realized that we can also to meet our mission online.

“A lot of folks just want to get out onto the land without stopping at the Center, but they are checking websites.   Unfortunately, there is a LOT of bad information out there, such as directing people to very sensitive areas.  This ‘gift’ to get out of day-to-day logistics allowed us to be more robust to help people visit with much more respect.  Our goal is to outrank the bad info out there.  I’ve often said Bears Ears is not managed by land management agencies; it is managed by Google.  So now we reach not only a larger audience, but a new audience of folks that don’t naturally educate themselves.

“I am a passionate go getter.  I hire good people and then trust them to get stuff done.   For my personal leadership, this crisis has taught me that way beyond the mission and the work are the people.   It shouldn’t have taken a pandemic to make me realize that I need to be vulnerable, transparent and honest, especially when people are worried.   I check in way more with each member of the team.  I listen more and that will make me a better leader.”