Sweet....President Obama designates three new national monuments in the California Desert
If you follow me, or read my posts, you know I’ve been hammering on the designation of three new national monuments in the deserts of Southern California for months and months. Well, it happened today, February 12. President Obama designated three areas of the Southern California desert, consisting of a total of 1.8 million acres, as new national monuments. They are called the Mojave Trails National Monument (1.6 million acres), the Sand to Snow National Monument (154,000 acres), and the Castle Mountains National Monument (21,000 acres). Castle Mountains may be small, but it’s very special to the desert community.
Here’s a link to the White House press release for the designation.
I’m the President of the Mojave Desert Land Trust. Along with several other organizations that have roots in the California desert, including the Wildlands Conservancy, and national organizations, such as the National Parks Conservation Association, we’ve been working with Senator Feinstein for years to continue to preserve the desert landscape. A lot of people have been working on this for years and years, much longer and with more effort than I have, spending an incredible amount of energy and personal time. When the local community supports conservation and preservation, it happens, as it did here.
What makes me particularly thrilled about this is the contradiction between the optimism and joy of designating new areas for conservation and preservation and recreation by all of us, versus the negative, selfish, only-me attitudes exhibited by those who attempted to take over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.
Here’s a map showing the new monuments. You can see that a corridor is being created between Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave National Preserve, and another between Joshua Tree National Park and the San Gorgonio Wilderness. These corridors are critical as our climate changes and plants and animals (broadly defined to include mammals, birds, insects, reptiles and amphibians) need to move to more hospitable environments, or to higher ground. Our organization (the Land Trust) is acquiring non-governmental parcels, some of which we eventually transfer to the federal government, to fill in the blank spaces to create integrated corridors. As you look at the map, keep in mind that land used by the military (Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base and Fort Irwin) is also critical to preservation and conservation, and is part of the corridors.
Can’t close out this post without some photos. The first three are photos taken by me of various views within the Sand to Snow National Monument:
Photos of the Mojave Trails National Monument. These were photos taken by my friend, Jack Thompson (that’s him in the first photo), who is the Manager of the Whitewater Preserve, which abuts the Sand to Snow Monument, or by me (the last two photos in this batch of three).
Then there’s Castle Mountains. These photos were taken by the staff of the Mojave Desert Land Trust during a fly-over the Monument last week.
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