Biden Moves To Seal Environmental Legacy With Major Conservation Announcement

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.

“The stunning canyons and winding paths of the Chuckwalla National Monument represent a true unmatched beauty,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. “President Biden’s action today will protect important spiritual and cultural values tied to the land and wildlife.”

Biden will also designate Sáttítla Highlands National Monument — a 224,000-acre swath of lands managed by the Modoc, Shasta-Trinity and Klamath National Forests in Northern California. The monument includes Medicine Lake, a dormant volcano that now serves as a major source of fresh water, feeding a network of springs whose total volume exceeds the combined capacity of California’s 200 largest manmade lakes, according to Hatch magazine.

While the two new monuments will boost Biden’s conservation legacy — he has protected more than 670 million acres of lands and waters, more than any president in history, according to the White House — they are likely to become targets of the incoming Trump administration.

During his first term, Trump turned national monuments and the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gives presidents broad authority to create protected sites on existing federal lands, into political lightning rods. He famously dismantled the boundaries of two large national monuments in Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — in what was the largest rollback of national monuments in U.S. history, only to have Biden restore them to their original boundaries.

Trump and other Republicans have accused recent administrations of abusing the nearly century-old Antiquities Act to “lock up” federal acres, conveniently ignoring that many early monument designations spanned hundreds of thousands of acres. Project 2025, the 920-page policy blueprint that GOP operatives created to guide a second Trump term, explicitly calls for repealing the 1906 law.

The new monuments will not impact existing rights, instead allowing for some resource exploitation to continue, including clean energy initiatives and efforts to reduce flammable vegetation to mitigate wildfires.

Upon signing the proclamations creating Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands, Biden will have created, expanded or restored a total of 15 national monuments, boosting protections for nearly 9 million federal acres.

Tuesday’s action comes a day after Biden permanently banned oil and gas drilling across 625 million acres of federal waters, including the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts.