|
116 years ago today, Teddy Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act, a landmark conservation law that gives the president authority to protect landscapes and historic sites from the threat of development. Nearly halfway into his first term, President Biden has yet to use the Antiquities Act to create a new national monument, even as land protection measures stall in a gridlocked Congress.
Ahead of today's anniversary, a coalition of 92 national and local organizations called on the president to invoke the Antiquities Act to protect the Castner Range, a former military testing site near El Paso. The groups urging Biden to act include The League of Conservation Voters and El Paso-based Frontera Land Alliance.
Janaé Field, Frontera's executive director, told HuffPost that West Texas has few outdoor spaces for hiking and recreation, compared to neighboring New Mexico. “There’s just so many people trying to access public spaces, and there’s just not enough room to accommodate all the footprints,” she said.
Learn more about Castner Range in the Center for Western Priorities' Road to 30 Postcard from Texas.
Can a marine sanctuary save a small Alaska Native community?
The latest postcard in our Road to 30 series takes us to St. Paul Island, Alaska, 200 miles north of the Aleutian Islands. The Aleut community is calling on the federal government to protect the Pribilof Islands, which include St. Paul, as a national marine sanctuary. The proposal would establish a co-governance model to manage the area with a combination of traditional knowledge and Western science.
The ecosystem is an important breeding and feeding ground for over half the world’s population of fur seals and is an overwintering habitat for sea birds including king, spectacled, and common eiders.
“The positioning of the Pribilofs, the oceanography of the area, all of these different things come together to create a little sub-ecosystem within the Bering Sea that makes it very productive,” explained Lauren Divine, director for the Ecosystem Conservation Office in St. Paul. “Because of how high it is in the world between the sub-Arctic and Arctic, it is experiencing really rapid and dramatic climate change. What used to be a very cold ecosystem is now warming.”
The economy of the Pribilof Islands and its 500 residents are almost entirely dependent on tax revenue from fisheries. The marine sanctuary proposal aims to ensure a sustainable economy in the face of climate change.
“We can’t get to that breaking point where our community just breaks apart and falls into oblivion,” said Amos Philemonoff, the president of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, and a commercial fisherman of 42 years. “Which is I think where we’re heading if we don’t get something that will help control the declines of the species we rely on in the Bering Sea.”
|
This is a five-alarm crisis for the American West. When hurricanes and other natural disasters strike the East Coast, or the Gulf states, Washington springs into action to protect those communities. But we haven’t seen anything like that kind of response to the Western water crisis, even though its consequences are far more wide-reaching and sustained than any one natural disaster.”
