Public Lands

June 13, 2025 - Southern Nevada Mojave Desert - Public lands are the target of several Republican congressional sell-off plans, including the most recent scheme of Senator Mike Lee of Utah. He introduced language in the Energy and Natural Resources section of the Big Beautiful Bill that would direct the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture to sell off between 2-3 million acres of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and U. S. Forest Service. Ostensibly this would be for "affordable housing" and sold off to the highest bidder. But southern Nevada public lands are wild habitat and far from cities--the real reason for the sell-offs would be to short-change wildlife and the public to benefit private developers and help pay for tax cuts for billionaires.

Basin and Range Watch opposes this. 

In the bullseye is southern Clark County, Nevada, including public lands which we fought to protect as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern for tortoises and rare white-margined penstemon.

Basin and Range Watch nominated a large chunk of tortoise habitat in Ivanpah Valley to be considered as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern. This would be an alternative to building Stateline and Silver State South, and instead protecting these lands from development. 

The ACEC nomination not only recognized the high density of desert tortoises, but also included the diversity of rare plant species growing in the proposed development areas, and the cultural values of the valley to representatives of the Chemehuevi Tribe. ACEC nominations can be written for many different resources.

The petition nominates the public lands in the Ivanpah Valley for status as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC). These lands are primarily located in Clark County, Nevada and San Bernardino County, California and are roughly 202 square miles (129,379 acres) in extent. About 50 square miles would be on the California side and 152 square miles would be on the Nevada side. The acreage for the nomination in the Las Vegas Resource Area is: 98,300 acres. This nomination describes the significant environmental resources and values of these lands, and the need for special management attention. The Ivanpah Valley contains an important habitat that supports a variety of rare and important species as well as important visual and cultural resources. The Ivanpah Valley is also undergoing pressure to develop various land uses. 

Ivanpah Valley is a core area of the biologically rich eastern Mojave Desert where plant diversity rivals that of the primeval coastal redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest. It lies at the heart of the Mojave Desert, an area treasured by scientists throughout the world for its unparalleled pristine quality among deserts, and recognized as one of the world’s last functional ecosystems. Ivanpah Valley lies at the hub of a floristic frontier where botanists continue to discover new species to science, and it harbors high concentrations of rare plant species. 

White-Margined Penstemon (Penstemon albomarginatus), a rare plant, is protected here.

Desert Tortoise (Gopherus agassizii):

The Ivanpah Valley area is considered excellent quality desert tortoise habitat with some of the highest population densities in the East Mojave Desert.

As defined in the original Desert Tortoise (Mojave Population) Recovery Plan (1994), the region was within the Northeastern Mojave Recovery Unit for the desert tortoise, one of six designated evolutionary significant units. This population was understood to be genetically the most distinctive unit of the desert tortoise in the Mojave Desert. Northeastern Mojave desert tortoises were recognized as the most genetically distinct population of California’s desert tortoises. The range of this population is limited in California and Ivanpah Valley contains a significant portion of this range. When the Recovery Plan was issued, some of the highest known tortoise densities were in southern Ivanpah Valley, with 200 to 250 adults per square mile. 

The Revised Desert Tortoise Recovery Plan (2011) reduced the number of recovery units from six to five and changed some of the boundaries of the 1994 recovery units, with the result that the Ivanpah Valley population is now classified as part of the Eastern Mojave Recovery Unit. Nonetheless, this population and its high quality habitat remain important for connectivity among desert tortoise populations. 

Connectivity: 

Based on analysis of genetic data, Hagerty, in her thesis Ecological Genetics of the Mojave Desert Tortoise (2008), identifies the Ivanpah Valley population of desert tortoises as part of the South Las Vegas unit, a genetically distinct subpopulation (see Figure 3, p. 205; see also Hagerty and Tracy 2010). This subpopulation is important in maintaining for genetic flow with other core populations to the north and west in Nevada, and to the south and west into California. Maintaining connectivity within the subpopulation in the Ivanpah Valley and north and east into Nevada is equally important, something only an ACEC in the Valley can achieve. 

Animals and plants often do not exist evenly across the landscape, but in spotty patches of preferred or good quality habitat. In the past, biologists looked at the size and quality of habitat patches, but now there is more interest in the areas between the patches, the "matrix." The size and quality of habitat patches has been shown in studies to be a poor predictor of occupancy. The matrix may be more important as the areas between that provide connectivity. 

This important connectivity function provided by Ivanpah Valley for desert tortoises cannot be replaced by mitigation measures. The habitat needs to be avoided, and protected. The several proposed projects in Ivanpah Valley would block this connectivity, and severely impact gene flow between Recovery Units and within Recovery Units. 

The 1994 Desert Tortoise Recovery Plan states that “Large blocks of habitat, containing large populations of the target species, are superior to small blocks of habitat containing small populations.”

See more at: https://basinandrangewatch.org/Ivanpah-ACEC.html

We won our ACEC protection for this area, as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) found our nomination to meet criteria. Southern Nevada BLM designated the ACEC in the Nevada portion of Ivanpah valley in 2013, and BLM California followed up a few years later with a designation in the adjacent California portion of Ivanpah Valley.

Yet now the Clark County, Nevada, side of our ACEC is under threat of being revoked and these high-value public lands disposed and auctioned off to urban sprawl developers.

Contact your Congresspeople and tell them NO! to selling off our public lands.