Inside the mammoth building at the newly designated Waco Mammoth National Monument.
In a
move certain to irk right wingers who have made no secret of
their opposition to the federal protection of more public land, the Obama administration announced Friday that it has
designated more than a million acres in Nevada, California and Texas as national monuments:
Using his authority under the Antiquities Act, the president created a protected area spanning roughly 704,000 acres in central Nevada’s Basin and Range, as well as smaller ones in California’s Berryessa Snow Mountain and Texas’ Waco Mammoth.
With the new designations, Obama has established or expanded 19 national monuments for a total of more than 260 million acres of public lands and waters, more than any previous president. The Basin and Range monument alone, at more than 1,000 square miles, is nearly the size of Rhode Island.
The move pleased environmental advocates. “By creating these three new national monuments, President Obama is continuing his commitment to preserving America’s treasured places and cementing his well-deserved place in conservation history,”
said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters.
After two decades of congressional inaction against the looting and desecration of American Indian sites in the Southwest, the Act for the Preservation of Antiquities was signed into law in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt. It gave the president broad authority to set aside public land as a national monument, protecting historic or ecologically significant sites without congressional approval from new development like mining, oil wells and grazing. Roosevelt wasn't stingy in that department. By the time his second term of office ended in 1909, he had designated 18 sites as national monuments. These included Devil's Tower in Wyoming, Muir Woods in California, Natural Bridges in Utah and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, which was named a national park in 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson.
Since Roosevelt, 16 other presidents have designated public land as national monuments.
Below the orange hiking-trail loop are some details about the three new designations.
The Basin and Range contains 4,000 year-old Native petroglyphs and abstract sculptures that artist Michael Heizer has been working on for 40 years. Its designation as a monument was a personal goal of desert-loving Sen. Harry Reid and wouldn't have happened without him. When Reid came into office in 1982, there were only 67,000 acres of federally protected wilderness in Nevada. Now that has been increased to nearly 3.4 million acres, all of which wouldn't have happened without Reid's push.
North Folk of Stony Creek in the
Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument.
There has been plenty of pushback. Most recently, Republican Rep. Cresent Hardy of Nevada, a foe of designating the Basin and Range as a monument, managed this week to
get an amendment requiring more local input on national monument designations attached to a spending bill for the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency:
“The sheer size of the proposed monument is staggering — as large as many Eastern states,” he said. “This is about empowering local communities and local stakeholders most affected by monument designations, and will increase transparency, allow for local input, and provide for improved management of our public lands.”
The 331,000 acres of the 100-mile-long Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument is a recreational paradise, rich in biodiversity and scenery, making it a favorite of hikers, campers, fishers and hunters. It also contains 5,000-year-old archaeological sites and
is on the Archeological District on the National Register of Historic Places. Dating back as far as 11,000 years, it was home to at least four different American Indian tribes.
The Texas designation turns a 105-acre public park into Waco Mammoth National Monument. There, starting in 1978, scientists found the remains of 24 65,000-year-old Columbian Mammoths, the largest of the mammoth species. It's the only site in the United States where a nursery herd of mammoths has been discovered. Other species preserved at Waco include saber-toothed cats, dwarf antelopes and western camels, all of them extinct.