This Week at Interior July 5, 2024

This Week at Interior  

President Biden, First Lady Jill Biden and Secretary Haaland visited Stonewall National Monument in New York City this week to celebrate a new Visitor Center and the 55th anniversary of the uprising there that was a catalyst for the modern LGBTQI+ movement.  

Today Stonewall helps tell the courageous story of those who stood up for their basic human rights and fought back against oppression and discrimination.

Today, I am proud to unveil a new visitor center for Stonewall National Monument, the first-ever LGBTQ+ visitor center in the national parks of America.  (Applause.)

The Stonewall Inn and nearby Christopher Park were designated a National Monument by President Obama in 2016.

Elsewhere in New York, Secretary Haaland met with Tribal leaders to underscore the Department’s continuing commitment to strengthening Indian Country. The President’s Investing in America agenda is deploying record investments to provide clean drinking water, safer roads and bridges, reliable and affordable electricity, affordable high-speed internet, good paying jobs and economic development in every Tribal community. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law alone invests more than $13 billion directly in Tribal communities across the country.

Secretary Haaland also traveled to Colorado this week, where she joined federal, state and community leaders to celebrate conservation efforts in the Thompson Divide area. In April, the Secretary signed an order withdrawing more than 220,000 acres of public lands from mining, mineral and geothermal leasing for a 20-year period. The Secretary’s action will enhance the way of life that Coloradans embrace, protecting the land for wildlife and the state's farmers, ranchers, hunters and anglers.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management this week announced the approval of the Atlantic Shores South offshore wind energy project. The project includes two wind energy facilities, located about eight miles offshore New Jersey -- once complete they're expected to generate up to 2,800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power close to one million homes. With this approval, the Department has approved more than 13 gigawatts of clean energy from offshore wind energy projects – enough to power nearly five million homes.    

The Department this week announced its decision to reject the proposed Ambler Road in Alaska, avoiding significant and irrevocable impacts to Tribal subsistence uses and permafrost. That road would have traversed 211 miles of significant wildlife habitat and pristine waters along the iconic Brooks Range in north central Alaska. An analysis by the Bureau of Land Management found that more than 60 Alaska Native communities would experience restrictions on their subsistence and, of those, more than 30 would experience significant restrictions of subsistence uses, should the road be constructed. The road also would have required over 3,000 stream crossings and would have impacted at risk wildlife populations, including sheefish and the already-declining Western Arctic caribou herd, which are critical food sources for Native communities.  

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week announced the approval of $48.4 million in grants to support land acquisition and conservation planning assistance projects, through the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund grant programs. The grants contribute to the President's America the Beautiful initiative goal to conserve, connect and restore 30 percent of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030.

And our social media Picture of the Week, the turquoise waters of the magnificent Diablo Lake in the heart of Washington's North Cascades National Park. During the summer, ice melt and mountain erosion bring glacial flour into the lake. And that fine rock flour refracts sunlight just right, turning the lake a bright shade of turquoise.  

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That's This Week at Interior!