By WILL WEISSERT
WASHINGTON — In an announcement postponed by the Los Angeles wildfires, President Joe Biden on Tuesday designated two sites in California as national monuments that will honor Native American tribes while shielding picturesque mountains and deserts from mining and energy development.
Biden made the designations at an event at the White House, a week after — and on the other side of the country from — how he’d originally planned to do so, with a speech in California’s Eastern Coachella Valley.
The president landed in California on Jan. 6, but made it as far as Los Angeles before high winds — that helped spark the Los Angeles blazes — forced officials to scrap the event. It was a stark reminder that, even as Biden uses the last days of his administration to attempt to safeguard the environment, climate change is already helping to exacerbate natural disasters.
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Instead, Biden spoke next to screens featuring towering peaks, desert vistas and an array of plant and animal life.
“I was hoping we were going to do this in place,” the president said. “This is as close as we could get.”
Biden formally created the Chuckwalla National Monument, in Southern California near Joshua Tree National Park, and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, in Northern California.
The declarations bar oil and natural gas drilling, as well as mining and other exploration and production initiatives, on the 624,000-acre Chuckwalla site, and roughly 225,000 acres near the California-Oregon border.
The protected area encompasses natural wonders including the Painted Canyon of Mecca Hills and Alligator Rock, and is home to 50-plus rare species of plants and animals like the desert bighorn sheep and the Chuckwalla lizard — which the monument is named for, the White House said in a statement.
At the event, Biden talked about taking his children to national monuments around the country yearly when they were young to “witness the majesty, the beauty.”
“Our national wonders are the heart and soul of this nation,” he said. “It’s a birthright we pass on from generation to generation. ”
The monuments becoming realities honor past tribal requests. Many Native American tribes and environmental groups have pushed for designation of the Chuckwalla National Monument, while the Pit River Tribe has worked to get the federal government to designate the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument.
Biden joked about being careful not to mispronounce Sáttítla, then still struggled to pronounce it. When he sat down to sign the formal acts, he simply referred to it as the “highlands” monument — meaning he didn’t have to give it another try.
The designations are part of a larger Biden administration effort to conserve at least 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. They follow Biden’s recent move banning new offshore oil and gas drilling in most U.S. coastal waters, including in California.
That was an attempt to thwart possible efforts by the incoming Republican administration to expand offshore drilling, but is also an order President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to quickly reverse.
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