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President Joe Biden plans to designate Avi Kwa Ame as a national monument next week, according to multiple reports. At almost 450,000 acres, the designation will be the largest land conservation action of Biden's presidency so far and the second new national monument after the designation of Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado last October.
Designating Avi Kwa Ame as a national monument will make good on a commitment Biden made at the White House Tribal Nations Summit last November. Due in part to scheduling challenges, it has taken Biden over 100 days to fulfill this promise.
The proposed monument is of spiritual and cultural significance to multiple Indigenous Tribes in the area and contains thousands of petroglyphs which will be better protected from vandalism with the monument designation. It is also some of the most biologically diverse land in the Mojave Desert; conserving this area will help protect wildlife and their habitat from development impacts and will ensure future generations can experience and appreciate this unique and valuable ecosystem. To learn more about America's next national monument, watch this short film, part of the Center for Western Priorities' Road to 30 Postcards series.
The tangled fates of Arizona and Arabia
In the latest episode of The Landscape, Aaron and Kate are joined by author and professor Natalie Koch, whose new book—Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia—explores the ways in which Arizona and Saudi Arabia have worked together to promote desert agriculture, and how that work is connected to a global obsession with engineering our way out of ecosystem collapse. Koch is a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University.
Aaron and Kate also talk to Jenny Rowland-Shea, public lands director at the Center for American Progress, about three major Biden administration announcements affecting Alaska, including the Willow Project decision.
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We Yuchi people are still here and the buffalo are still here, and it's important to reconnect and restore those relationships with the land, with the animals and the plants.”
