Biden Moves To Seal Environmental Legacy With Major Conservation Announcement

Biden has protected more federal land and water than any president in history, the White House said.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday will travel to California to designate a pair of new national monuments, safeguarding nearly 850,000 acres of ecologically and culturally significant land in the Golden State from new drilling, mining and other development.

The new designations are part of the outgoing administration’s eleventh-hour push to protect sensitive lands and waters before President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House later this month. Trump has a record of chipping away at protected landscapes and is pledging to prioritize fossil fuel drilling and other industrial development across the country.

Chuckwalla National Monument will span more than 624,000 acres of desert south of Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California. The area is home to rugged mountain ranges and dozens of rare species, including the desert bighorn sheep and the chuckwalla lizard. The Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Mojave, Quechan and Serrano nations all have ancestral ties to the newly protected lands.

The monument will connect to a series of other federally protected lands running along the Colorado River from the Mojave Desert in California to the town of Moab, Utah.

The White House described the “Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor,” which also includes Grand Canyon National Park and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, as the largest contiguous stretch of federally protected lands in the Lower 48, running a length of 600 miles and encompassing nearly 18 million acres.