The White House announced that President Joe Biden will establish two new national monuments to protect 848,000 acres of public lands in California. One of these sites holds cultural significance to a couple of neighboring Arizona tribes.
The 624,000-acre Chuckwalla National Monument is located just south of Joshua Tree National Park, where the Mojave and Colorado deserts meet. This arid landscape is also home to more than 50 rare plant and animal species, including the desert bighorn sheep, Agassiz’s desert tortoise and namesake Chuckwalla lizard.
The Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe and Colorado River Indian Tribes maintain ancestral ties to the area — west of the Arizona-California border — in addition to the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi and Serrano peoples.
This latest monument, now overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, completes the so-called Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor, which the White House claims to be the largest swath of protected lands in the Lower 48.
It stretches from Utah through Arizona and Nevada to California across some 600 miles, containing about 18 million acres.
Beyond Chuckwalla, Biden also set aside another 224,000 acres in northern California for the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, home to the dormant Medicine Lake Volcano.
The Karuk, Klamath, Modoc, Shasta, Siletz, Wintu and Yana peoples as well as the Pit River Tribe are all connected to these public lands under U.S. Forest Service management.
Using the Antiquities Act, Biden has created 10 new national monuments throughout his presidency, while expanding two designations and restoring protections for three others. In all, he has preserved more than 674 million acres of lands and waters, a record for any administration.
Biden was supposed to make the announcement during his Tuesday visit to Coachella Valley, but dangerous wildfires in the coastal Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles canceled those plans, delaying a White House ceremony until next week.
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