Question of the Day - 29 December 2022

This is a big story that we’ll just sketch out here due to space and time limitations.

The gist is that Spirit Mountain, known in the Yuman language as Avi Kwa’ Ame, is sacred to the relatively large Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and a dozen other smaller tribes in the “tristate” area centered on the triangular-shaped wedge of far southern Nevada between California and Arizona.

At 5,643 feet, Avi Kwa’ Ame is the highest peak in the Newberry Mountains that sit due north of Laughlin, visible from all over far southern Nevada. It's considered the center of creation for all Yuman-speaking tribes, who live along the lower Colorado River from Arizona to Baja California. These include names familiar to most residents of the area: Maricopa, Mohave, Havasupai, Hualapai, and Yavapai (pai meaning water).

Spirit Mountain was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property in September 1999. In 2002, Congress designated the mountain, along with 33,000 acres surrounding it, as a wilderness area. Most of that lies within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

Now, the Biden administration has announced its intention to proclaim approximately 450,000 acres, nearly 700 square miles and practically the entire southern wedge of Nevada, off-limits to development, creating Spirit Mountain National Monument under the 1906 Antiquities Act. It would protect the tract between the Mojave National Preserve, 1.6 million acres between I-15 and I-40 on the California side, and Lake Mead Recreation Area, the largest in the nation, prohibiting developers, particularly wind- and solar-power companies, from encroaching on sacred lands and threatening desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, golden eagles, and dozens of other species.

A wide-ranging coalition of tribes, local and national lawmakers, environmentalists, and the local business community supports the measure, though the renewable-energy industry and its advocates claim it could thwart the country’s climate-change goals.

Some of the companies are asking for a small carveout, which they’re calling a “sliver,” that doesn’t impact culturally or environmentally sensitive areas, but gives them access to what they consider some of the best resources for clean-energy development on the continent — the strong winds of the many canyons in the proposed monument, plus flatlands that enjoy 300 days a year of sunshine and no cloud cover, along with numerous mining claims for rare-earth elements, especially valuable for clean-energy technology.

Thus far, the feds have been holding hearings. But it seems likely that the national monument will be created, marking the largest tract of land that will be preserved in this presidential term.