President Joe Biden on Tuesday will designate two landscapes – Nevada’s Spirit Mountain, an area sacred to dozens of Native American tribes, and the Castner Range, a former military weapons testing facility in West Texas – as America’s newest national monuments.
The move would bring more than half a million federal acres under new protections that bar new mining, drilling and other development. That’s because Biden remains under fire over last week’s decision to approve a large and controversial fossil fuel drilling project on federal land in Arctic Alaska.
White House officials called Biden’s action Tuesday the “boldest step yet to protect the power and promise of America’s extraordinary national miracle.” Along with establishing the two monuments, Biden will direct Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to consider creating a new marine sanctuary that protects all US waters around the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, southwest of the Hawaiian Islands.
The president will highlight these and other new conservation actions during a summit Tuesday at the Interior Department, according to the White House.
Located in the southernmost corner of Nevada, Avi Kwa Ame – meaning “Spirit Mountain” in the Mojave language – is the highest peak in the Spirit Mountain Wilderness. Tribes, environmentalists and public land advocates have aggressively lobbied the Biden administration to grant Spirit Mountain monument status, and Biden signaled that he plans to in November. The region is rich in cultural, natural and historical resources.
Avi Kwa Ame National Monument will cover about 506,000 hectares, more than 450,000 hectares of which are claimed by tribes and environmental organizations. The White House said the monument designation “creates one of the largest areas of protected wildlife habitat in the United States, combining protected lands in California’s Mojave Desert in the southwest with the Lake Mead National Recreation Area and other protected areas. east near the Colorado River.”
“This designation will honor our Tribal and Indigenous Nations by protecting this sacred Nevada landscape and its historically and scientifically significant features, while preserving our common lands and growing America.
outdoor recreation economy,” according to a White House fact sheet on the decision.
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The new Castner Range National Monument will consist of approximately 6,600 acres. The landscape is home to archaeological sites and a variety of rare and endangered wildlife, but is off limits to the public due to unexploded ordnance from years of military testing.
“Once the area is sufficiently restored to be safe for public access, the Castner Range will provide a unique opportunity for the El Paso community to experience, explore, and learn from nature,” the White House wrote in a fact sheet.
These will be the second and third monument designations of the Biden presidency. In October, they created the 50,000-acre Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado, which includes historic Camp Hale, a World War II-era military training site, and the nearby Tenmile Range.
Biden previously reversed former President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from three national monuments, two in Utah and the third on the East Coast.
Signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, the Antiquities Act authorized the president to “declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other historical or scientific objects located on land owned or controlled by the United States Government . The country becomes a national monument.”
Seventeen presidents, both Republicans and Democrats, have used it to create more than 150 monuments since 1906, including many sites that later became national parks.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.