Biden Creates Two National Monuments in the Southwest

Biden Creates Two National Monuments in the Southwest - The New York Times
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Biden Creates Two National Monuments in the Southwest

The Spirit Mountain area in Nevada and Castner Range in Texas will be off limits to development.

WASHINGTON — President Biden on Tuesday designated two new national monuments in the Southwest, insulating from development a half million acres in Nevada that are revered by Native Americans and 6,600 acres in Texas that were once admired by the writer Jack Kerouac.

In southern Nevada, Mr. Biden protected a large portion of the Spirit Mountain area, encompassing some of the most biologically diverse and culturally significant lands in the Mojave Desert. Near El Paso, he established the Castner Range National Monument on a former artillery range along rugged canyons and arroyos that rise out of the desert near the Franklin Mountains.

“When we conserve our country’s natural gifts, we’re not just protecting the livelihoods of people who depend on them,” Mr. Biden told a conservation meeting at the Interior Department headquarters in Washington. “We’re protecting the heart and the soul of our national pride. We’re protecting pieces of history, telling our story that will be told for generations upon generations to come.”

The Spirit Mountain area, also known by the Mojave name Avi Kwa Ame, is the largest monument that Mr. Biden has designated to date and only the second national monument created to protect Native history.

Avi Kwa Ame is considered the creation site for Yuman-speaking tribes like the Fort Mojave, the Cocopah, the Quechan‌‌ and the Hopi. Native tribes, environmental groups and local and state leaders have been seeking the designation for more than a decade.

“Breathtaking deserts, valleys, mountain ranges, rich in biodiversity, sacred lands that are central to the creation story of so many tribes who have been here since time immemorial,” Mr. Biden said as advocates cheered. “Look, you know, it’s a place of reverence, it’s a place of spirituality, it’s a place of healing and now it will be recognized for its significance as a whole and will be preserved forever.”

Native groups celebrated the moment and its meaning for preservation of their heritage. “This is truly a historic day as it signifies a change in posture toward Indigenous people from the federal government than that which we are unfortunately used to by now,” said Taylor Patterson, executive director of Native Voters Alliance Nevada.

The Biden Administration’s Environmental Agenda

A Stern Warning: Administration economists warned in an annual report that a warming planet posed severe economic challenges for the United States, which would require the federal government to reassess its spending priorities and how it influenced behavior.
Smog-Causing Pollution: The Biden administration finalized a rule forcing factories and power plants in 23 Western and Midwestern states to cut pollution from power plants and factories.
Willow Oil Project: President Biden gave formal approval for the huge oil drilling project in Alaska, despite widespread opposition because of its likely climate impacts.
Izembek National Wildlife Refuge: The Biden administration said that it was withdrawing a Trump-era land swap deal that would have allowed road construction in the wildlife refuge in Alaska.

Castner Range, located at the Army base Fort Bliss, served as a training and testing site for the U.S. Army during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War until it closed in 1966. The range includes archaeological sites, some prehistoric, that feature cave etchings made by Native Americans and stone shelters built by ranchers more than a century ago. The terrain is filled with Mexican yellow poppies and is home to the checkered whiptail lizard, desert cottontail and Western desert tarantula.

It is also littered with thousands of rounds of unexploded ordnance. Once the area is made safe for the public, Castner Range will provide access to nature for the historically underserved communities bordering the range, according to a White House statement. In the 1950s, the novelist Jack Kerouac extolled the view from the range in “The Dharma Bums,” writing of seeing “all of Mexico, all of Chihuahua, the entire sand-glittering desert of it, under a late sinking moon that was huge and bright.”

Mr. Biden noted that this area has been the focus of earlier conservation efforts. “The people of El Paso have fought to protect this for 50 years,” he said. “Their work has finally paid off.”

He used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish the monuments. The move comes a week after Mr. Biden was excoriated by environmentalists for approving the huge Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, in pristine wilderness about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

“The Willow project greenlight devastated the American conservation community,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “There is more anger at Biden for that than anything else he’s done on the environment. So it only makes sense that Biden would try to do something to return to the good graces of the green wing of the Democratic Party.”

About 33,000 acres of the Spirit Mountain area were already protected under the Wilderness Act of 1964. The newly expanded monument will create a corridor that links the Mojave National Preserve and the Castle Mountains National Monument in California to the Sloan Canyon and Lake Mead national recreation areas in Nevada and Arizona.
That would ensure a migratory path for desert bighorn sheep and mule deer, and protect critical habitat for the desert tortoises, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, western screech owls and Gila monsters that are native to the region. Some 28 species of native grasses, a number of them rare, also grow there, as well as some of the oldest and largest Joshua trees in the United States.

Mr. Biden has also used the Antiquities Act to create a national monument at Camp Hale, Colo., and to restore three monuments that were reduced in size by President Donald J. Trump: Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

To date, the Bears Ears National Monument in eastern Utah is the only national monument created specifically to preserve Indigenous land and culture. (Today, the monument is jointly managed by a council of delegates from five tribes.) The designation of a second one appears designed by the Biden administration to send a message to Indigenous communities that have long fought for a meaningful say in the management of their ancestral lands.

The creation of the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument could spur pushback from renewable energy companies seeking to gain a foothold in one of the nation’s best regions for wind and solar power at a time when Mr. Biden has promised to speed up the country’s transition to clean energy.

But there is currently no wind or solar development within the proposed monument area, and much of the land was excluded from energy development under a federal conservation designation, said Melissa Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department.

There is one pending application for a 700-megawatt solar project on part of the designated land that has been identified as an exception from the conservation designation, Ms. Schwartz said.

And a California-based solar company, Avantus, has sought access to part of the land that will be included in the expanded Spirit Mountain monument in order to use existing transmission lines and access roads from a shuttered coal-burning power plant in nearby Laughlin, Nev. But the Interior Department has not yet begun processing the company’s application.

Outside the boundaries for the proposed national monument, the federal government has identified nine million acres of public lands in Nevada for large-scale solar development and nearly 16.8 million acres of public lands for potential wind development.

Peter Baker contributed reporting.