President Joe Biden on Tuesday will journey to California to designate a pair of latest nationwide monuments, safeguarding practically 850,000 acres of ecologically and culturally vital land within the Golden State from new drilling, mining and different improvement.
The brand new designations are a part of the outgoing administration’s eleventh-hour push to guard delicate lands and waters earlier than President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White Home later this month. Trump has a document of chipping away at protected landscapes and is pledging to prioritize fossil gasoline drilling and different industrial improvement throughout the nation.
Chuckwalla Nationwide Monument will span greater than 624,000 acres of desert south of Joshua Tree Nationwide Park in Southern California. The realm is dwelling to rugged mountain ranges and dozens of uncommon species, together with the desert bighorn sheep and the chuckwalla lizard. The Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Mojave, Quechan and Serrano nations all have ancestral ties to the newly protected lands.
The monument will connect with a collection of different federally protected lands operating alongside the Colorado River from the Mojave Desert in California to the city of Moab, Utah.
The White Home described the “Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor,” which additionally contains Grand Canyon Nationwide Park and Grand Staircase-Escalante Nationwide Monument, as the most important contiguous stretch of federally protected lands within the Decrease 48, operating a size of 600 miles and encompassing practically 18 million acres.
“The stunning canyons and winding paths of the Chuckwalla National Monument represent a true unmatched beauty,” Inside Secretary Deb Haaland stated in an announcement. “President Biden’s action today will protect important spiritual and cultural values tied to the land and wildlife.”
David McNew through Getty Photos
Biden will even designate Sáttítla Highlands Nationwide Monument — a 224,000-acre swath of lands managed by the Modoc, Shasta-Trinity and Klamath Nationwide Forests in Northern California. The monument contains Medication Lake, a dormant volcano that now serves as a serious supply of recent water, feeding a community of springs whose whole quantity exceeds the mixed capability of California’s 200 largest artifical lakes, in response to Hatch journal.
Whereas the 2 new monuments will increase Biden’s conservation legacy — he has protected greater than 670 million acres of lands and waters, greater than any president in historical past, in response to the White Home — they’re prone to turn out to be targets of the incoming Trump administration.
Throughout his first time period, Trump turned nationwide monuments and the Antiquities Act of 1906, which supplies presidents broad authority to create protected websites on present federal lands, into political lightning rods. He famously dismantled the boundaries of two giant nationwide monuments in Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — in what was the most important rollback of nationwide monuments in U.S. historical past, solely to have Biden restore them to their authentic boundaries.
Trump and different Republicans have accused current administrations of abusing the practically century-old Antiquities Act to “lock up” federal acres, conveniently ignoring that many early monument designations spanned a whole bunch of hundreds of acres. Challenge 2025, the 920-page coverage blueprint that GOP operatives created to information a second Trump time period, explicitly requires repealing the 1906 regulation.
The brand new monuments is not going to influence present rights, as a substitute permitting for some useful resource exploitation to proceed, together with clear vitality initiatives and efforts to scale back flammable vegetation to mitigate wildfires.
Upon signing the proclamations creating Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands, Biden may have created, expanded or restored a complete of 15 nationwide monuments, boosting protections for practically 9 million federal acres.
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Tuesday’s motion comes a day after Biden completely banned oil and gasoline drilling throughout 625 million acres of federal waters, together with the whole Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
