President Joe Biden will designate two new monuments on Tuesday, establishing the largest swath of land in the continental United States by expanding a corridor through the West, the White House said.
But Thermal, Calif.’s scheduled announcements Wednesday afternoon to announce the designation of two new monuments were canceled due to “weather concerns,” according to the White House, with California facing “life-threatening” fire risks amid a windstorm. They are rescheduling for next week at the White House.
The proclamations that Biden wants to sign would create Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands National Monuments, the former in southern California and the latter in the northern highlands of the state.
The two new monuments total almost 850,000 hectares, according to the administration.
Chuckwalla National Monument, which will be located south of Joshua Tree National Park, creates the new Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor, a protected land of nearly 18 million acres that spans about 600 miles from southern California to Utah, the largest in the lowlands. 48 states, according to the White House.
President Joe Biden speaks about the death of former US President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, at the Company House Hotel in Christiansted, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, on December 29, 2024.
Ken Cedeno/Reuters
The Chuckwalla will protect 624,000 acres of land, “preserving critical habitat for endangered and rare species, and perpetuating the ancestral homelands and sacred cultural heritage of the region’s Tribal Nations,” the White House said.
The monument will protect the ancestral homelands of the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Mojave, Quechan and Serrano Nations.
The monument’s habitat includes 50 rare plant and animal species, the White House notes, including the desert bighorn sheep and its namesake, the Chuckwalla lizard.
The Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, meanwhile, will protect 224,000 acres, including parts of the Modoc, Shasta-Trinity and Klamath National Forests, the White House said, and include the dormant Medicine Lake volcano, which is 10 times larger. than Mount Washington. Saint Helena
CHIRIACO SUMMIT, CALIFORNIA – APRIL 26: In an aerial view, multicolored layers of the earth are distorted by the movement of tectonic plates along the San Andreas Fault in Painted Canyon at the proposed Chuckwalla Mountains National Monument on April 26, 2024 in Chiriaco Summit, California. .
David McNew/Getty Images
The lands protected by this monument are also home to rare and vulnerable plants and animals, including the Cascades frog, long-toed salamander, and northern owl.
The Departments of Interior and Agriculture said Biden used the authority of the Antiquities Act to designate those monuments.
Trump, in 2017, denounced previous uses of the 1906 law to protect the land and dramatically reduced the size of several national monuments during his first term.
The White House said Biden’s new appointment serves as a “four-year foundation of historic preservation progress.”
The move comes a day after Biden issued a ban on all future oil and natural gas drilling on 625 million acres of US coastlines, including the entire East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington, Oregon. and California, and parts of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska.
