Conservation bill would make Nevada history
We are on the cusp of something historically significant in Nevada. It’s something for which I’ve been waiting 50 years while engaged in the effort to secure wilderness designation for the amazing wild landscapes we cherish in Nevada.
We’ve celebrated many successes, beginning with the federal legislation that decades ago established the Mount Charleston, Arc Dome and Mount Rose wilderness areas, plus 11 others. There have been additional designations since, resulting in more than 3.4 million acres of wilderness in our great state.
As profound as each of those actions were, we have an opportunity this year to accomplish something even greater, thanks to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Rep. Dina Titus, along with all of our congressional delegation. They have introduced the largest conservation bill in our state’s history. It would designate more than 1.6 million acres of wilderness in Southern Nevada, providing permanent protection for critical wildlife habitat and areas sacred to Indigenous people. And it will stop the U.S. military from expanding its bombing range further into the magnificent Desert National Wildlife Refuge and closing more of it to the public.
The Desert Refuge, the largest in the lower 48, was established by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 and had barely started showing up on maps when the military secured joint administration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The western part of the refuge became a bombing range and the public was shut out. It’s been threatened by further military expansion ever since. Since 1974, much of the refuge has been officially proposed as wilderness. Just in the past few years, the military has pursued a destructive plan to take over another 300,000 acres and close it to the public. Those of us who’ve been fighting off those threats for decades have an overwhelming sense of relief that, if this bill is approved, military expansion should stop. Closure, at last.
I’m proud of my involvement with Friends of Nevada Wilderness, which not only fights to protect places like the Desert Refuge, but manages a robust volunteer-powered program that has contributed thousands of hours and more than $2 million of in-kind labor to steward public lands throughout our state. Even in the challenging year of 2020, our organization led multiple trips into the Desert Refuge to help federal land managers maintain trails, install markers and interpretative kiosks, and otherwise nurture this place we treasure.
I hope all Nevadans will join me in thanking our representatives for introducing this bill and fighting to get it through Congress. It is the kind of history we should be making in the great wild state of Nevada.
Roger Scholl has been a leader on Nevada wilderness issues since 1969 and was instrumental in the passage of the Nevada Wilderness Bill in 1989. He served as deputy executive director of the Wilderness Society in Washington D.C. for several years in the 1970s and was a founder of the Statewide Friends of Nevada Wilderness in 1984. He currently serves as chair of the organization’s board of directors.