Biden Creates Two National Monuments in the Southwest

WASHINGTON — President Joe 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 writer Jack Kerouac.

In southern Nevada, 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, Texas, 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.

“This matters, because when we conserve our country’s natural gifts, we’re not just protecting the livelihoods of people who depend on them,” Biden told a conservation summit 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 Biden has designated, and only the second national monument created to protect Native history.

Avi Kwa Ame is considered the creation site for Yuman-speaking tribes such as 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,” 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 towards 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.

But Gov. Joe Lombardo of Nevada, a Republican, complained that the White House had not consulted him before the decision and ignored his concerns, including on the disruption of rare earth mineral mining projects and economic development efforts.

“The federal confiscation of 506,814 acres of Nevada land is a historic mistake that will cost Nevadans for generations to come,” he said in a statement.

Questioned about his statement at a briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said she could not discuss any communications with the governor.

Castner Range, located at the Army base Fort Bliss, served as a training and testing site for the 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 serves as a habitat for the checkered whiptail lizard, desert cottontail and Western desert tarantula.

It has also been littered with thousands of rounds of unexploded ordnance. Once the area is made safe for public access, Castner Range is intended to expand access to nature for the historically underserved communities bordering the range, according to a White House statement. In the 1950s, 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.”

Biden noted that this area has been the subject of efforts to guard it for a long time. “The people of El Paso have fought to protect this for 50 years,” he said. “Their work has finally paid off.”

Biden relied on the authority of the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish the monuments. The move comes about a week after the president was excoriated by environmentalists after approving the massive 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.

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

To date, the Bears Ears National Monument in eastern Utah has been the only national monument to explicitly address its Indigenous roots. (Today, the monument is jointly managed by a council made up 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 bring 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 Biden has promised to speed up the country’s transition to clean energy.

But there is 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 spokesperson 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, 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, Nevada. 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 9 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.