Basin & Range Watch Celebrates the New Avi Kwa Ame National Monument

March 21, 2023 - SEARCHLIGHT, Nev.— Basin and Range Watch hailed the formation of a new national monument today, as President Biden signed the proclamation under his power using the Antiquities Act, designating Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. 

The new park unit protects a diversity of Mojave Desert lands in the southern tip of Nevada, including Joshua tree woodlands, unique desert grasslands, natural cactus gardens, and cultural landscapes important to the Fort Mojave Paiute, Chemehuevi, and other Tribes along the Colorado River in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah.
Desert bighorn sheep inhabit the rocky ridges and mountains, while Mojave desert tortoises, Gila monsters and diamondback rattlesnakes occupy desert basins. The Joshua tree woodlands hold several bird species that are found nowhere else in Nevada, including gilded flickers, Harris’s hawks, and occasional curve-billed thrashers. 

Basin and Range Watch petitioned the Bureau of Land Management to designate Avi Kwa Ame as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern in 2018, after multiple battles to fend off industrial-scale energy projects in the area. Western Watersheds Project and Basin and Range Watch also organized a Bioblitz in 2022 to help document the many species of desert plants and animals here.

The hills and broad valleys have come under threat of energy sprawl by both wind and solar project developers. A coalition of local residents and Basin and Range Watch sued the Bureau of Land Management to halt a giant wind project, and successfully prevented its construction on these sensitive habitats. In 2015 District Court Judge Miranda Du vacated the federal permits for construction of the Searchlight Wind Project in Southern Nevada. Judge Du found that environmental analyses prepared by the BLM and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service inadequately evaluated the dangers that the industrial-scale wind project would pose to golden eagles, desert tortoises, and bats.

In 2015 a Swedish company submitted an application to BLM to construct another wind facility, the Crescent Peak Wind Project, on 33,000 acres of the Castle Mountains along the California/Nevada boundary and up to the border of the Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness Area. This project would have been mostly within the National Monument boundary. A coalition of environmental groups, tribes, and hunters petitioned the Secretary of the Interior to protect these mountains for bighorn sheep, eagles, and visual resources. In 2018 the Interior Department issued a letter directing BLM to deny the application. 

Yet the same developer returned with a new wind application on the Castle Mountains, calling it Kulning Wind Project. Objections voiced by tribes and conservation groups about conflicts with land preservation convinced BLM to place this project on a “low priority” status.”

Recently, Avantus (formerly 8minute Energy) sought to adjust the monument boundary to accommodate their proposed Angora Solar Project on 2,500 acres, most of which overlaps the boundary of the Monument. 

In 2018, Basin and Range Watch wrote up a nomination to protect the area as the proposed Castle Mountains Area of Critical Environmental Concern, and gained a wide array of signatories to support the nomination to the Bureau of Land Management. We believe this helped to crystalize a new National Monument campaign in the area. 

“We have been working with tribal members across Nevada and California, from Ivanpah Valley to Chuckwalla Valley and along the lower Colorado River to support their push to protect important cultural landscapes in the region, including the Salt Song Trail, and the viewsheds around Spirit Mountain,” explained Kevin Emmerich, Co-Founder of Basin and Range Watch. “We were pleased to see this National Monument designated and are happy that our work to prevent industrial wind energy development on monument lands was so successful.”