Conservation groups work to save Chuckwalla National Monument
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A judge is allowing local and statewide conservation groups to intervene in a lawsuit to defend Chuckwalla National Monument.
An off-road group based in Idaho and a miner from Michigan have sued the U.S. Department of the Interior, seeking to strip protections from the national monument, located in the desert mountains 80 miles east of Palm Springs.
Colin Barrows, cofounder of the CactustoCloud Institute in La Quinta, one of the intervenors in the lawsuit, said Chuckwalla is significant to 13 tribal nations.
"There's a lot of World War II and mining history in the area," Barrows pointed out. "There are species that are found nowhere else on earth. You've got endangered desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, hundreds of species of plants and animals."
President Joe Biden used the Antiquities Act to confer national monument status to Chuckwalla weeks before leaving office. The area includes the Orocopia Mountains, which means "plentiful gold." But locals said there is very little gold to be found there. The name was just a long-ago marketing ploy to attract residents and miners.
Barrows argued the Trump administration’s focus on extracting commercial value from public lands is misguided.
"Morally and financially, there's much more value in protecting public lands – for recreation access, for clean air and water, for tribal values – than there is in stripping whatever minerals might be there and then having it be a wasteland forever after," Barrows contended.
He added the off-highway vehicle paths crisscrossing the monument are maintained by staff when they wash out during periodic flash floods. Other groups intervening in the lawsuit include the Conservation Lands Foundation, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Sierra Club.
