President Biden Took a Major Step Toward Designating Nevada's Avi Kwa Ame as a National Monument
There’s a quiet kind of magic on the southern tip of Nevada along the California border. It’s a place where some of the world's largest and oldest Joshua tree forests shine by day, giving way to canvasing dark skies by night, and where desert tortoises thrive alongside bighorn sheep, golden eagles, and Chuckwalla lizards. But above all, Spirit Mountain, better known by its Mojave name, Avi Kwa Ame, and the surrounding areas to its east are sacred to dozens of Native American tribes.
For nearly two decades, energy projects have threatened this stretch of land, but President Joe Biden made a declaration to protect it at the White House Tribal National Summit on Wednesday. “I’m committed to protecting this sacred place that is central to the creation story of so many Tribes that are here today,” he said. Biden acknowledged his own work in restoring Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante as national monuments last year and went on to thank Nevada's congressional delegates who have fought to preserve the lands, adding, “I look forward to being able to visit Spirit Mountain and experience it… as soon as I can.”
While the acknowledgement fell short of giving the 450,000-acre site a National Parks Service (NPS) designation as a national monument—which many were hoping would happen yesterday—it was a major step in a long-wrought fight toward protection for these lands on a national level. Though the area was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 as a traditional cultural property for its religious and cultural importance, that status deems it “worthy of preservation,” according to the NPS; while becoming the Avi Kwa Ame national monument would grant it permanent protection, as the National Parks Conservation Association describes. And though 33,000 acres of the area is already protected under the 1964 Wilderness Act, the new designation would expand the disjointed area providing cohesive preservation for the entire region.
“President Biden's announcement regarding his commitment to permanently protect Avi Kwa Ame in southern Nevada through the Antiquities Act this morning at the Tribal Nations Summit filled us with joy, as it brings us one step closer to seeing this worthy landscape in southern Nevada protected,” says Bertha Gutierrez, Conservation Lands Foundation’s Nevada-based program director. “The journey has involved a lot of conversations towards finding common ground in the love for the land and the desire to see it protected.”
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/avi-kwa-ame-national-monument