|
In the final weeks of President Joe Biden's term, Tribes and many organizations are calling for him to designate more new national monuments before he leaves office. Biden has already used his authority under the Antiquities Act to designate six new national monuments, including Camp Hale-Continental Divide in Colorado, Avi Kwa Ame in Nevada, and Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
With just seven weeks to go, advocates are hoping to see more proposed national monuments make it over the finish line. "There are still several national monument campaigns that are ready to go and awaiting the president’s signature, and those are the sorts of things that could cement President Biden’s legacy as one of the great conservation presidents of all time — if he takes those steps here in the last few weeks," Center for Western Priorities Deputy Director Aaron Weiss told Heatmap.
As CWP Policy and Creative Content Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein explains in a Westwise blog post, Biden is less than 100,000 acres away from protecting the most public land using the Antiquities Act of any recent president in their first term. There are a multitude of proposals for new national monuments that would accomplish this goal, including 660,000 acres of the proposed Chuckwalla National Monument in California and the million-acre Owyhee Canyonlands proposal in eastern Oregon.
|
Almost everything the president does gets forgotten. But the land that a president protects is forever.”
