This Week at Interior April 30, 2021

This Week at Interior 

Interior this week took several steps to honor our nation-to-nation relationship with Tribes and uphold the Department's trust and treaty responsibilities. A new Secretarial Order will re-delegate authority to review and approve applications to place tribal land into trust to the Bureau of Indian Affairs' regional directors...that move speeds up the pace for Tribes to develop housing projects, manage law enforcement agencies and develop local economies. Interior's Solicitor's Office also issued rulings that speed up the land into trust process, and expanded Interior's authority over that process for the benefit of Alaska Natives.

At a White House Press Briefing last week, the Secretary spoke about the Biden-Harris Administrations "all of government approach" to tribal engagement.

For too long, Indian issues were relegated to the Tribal offices within federal agencies.  If we’re going to make sure that Native American and Alaska Native communities thrive, that Tribal sovereignty is respected and strengthened.  And if we are truly to repair our nation-to-nation relationships, then that means every federal agency needs to be thinking boldly about our obligations to Indigenous Peoples.

Secretary Haaland joined the Second Gentleman of the United States Douglas Emhoff to mark National Park Week, and to announce sixteen additions to the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program. They join nearly 700 other sites, programs, and facilities in the network that honor, preserve, and promote the history of resistance to enslavement through escape and flight. 

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management this week announced it will prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for the Construction and Operations Plan submitted by Revolution Wind. If approved by BOEM, Revolution Wind would be allowed to construct and operate an 880 megawatt wind energy facility offshore Rhode Island and Massachusetts. 

For the sixth year, people from around the globe can get up-close-and-personal with an endangered California condor chick in real-time.  The newest chick hatched earlier this month...its parents are a ten-year old female and fifteen-year old male. Thanks to intensive, ongoing captive breeding and recovery efforts led by the Fish and Wildlife Service and its partners, the California condor population has grown to just over 500 birds worldwide. In 1982 there were only 22 birds in the wild. 

The Tyrannosaurus Rex has been extinct for 65 million years, but we're still learning new facts about history’s most fearsome predator...and it turns out they may have been even scarier than we imagine. The Bureau of Land Management says new research from Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument reveals T-Rex may not have been a solitary predator, but instead hunted in packs, much like modern wolves. You can find out more, and get a virtual tour of the monument's paleontology lab, at "utahpubliclands" on Instagram. 

And our social media Picture of the Week, this Florida bobcat prowling around the Sunshine State's Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. Occupying 140,000 acres on Florida's largest barrier island, the refuge shares its space with the Kennedy Space Center...it's home for a thousand plant species, hundreds of varieties of birds, and dozens of species of fish, reptiles, and mammals.

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