Grand Canyon – Parashant National Monument (Back to Landscapes Program Index)
A Monument Is Born
"To save these last, vast pieces of wild country from haphazard development means that my sons' children will have room as we do, to get lost or find their bearings, to meet in themselves some long forgotten ancestor's resourcefulness and grit, to take heart."
— Ann Weiler Walka
With these words, poet Ann Weiler Walka introduced President Clinton at Hopi Point on the South Rim of Grand Canyon. Moments later, the President announced his decision to protect over 1 million acres of canyons, cliffs, buttes and valleys in the Colorado River watershed north of the Grand Canyon. And so the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument was officially born on January 11, 2000 — exactly 92 years to the day that President Theodore Roosevelt originally declared Grand Canyon a national monument.
In his remarks, President Clinton referred often to President Roosevelt's legacy, and reiterated Roosevelt's belief that an essential characteristic of America government must be foresight. "It should be a growing nation with a future that takes the long look ahead," President Clinton said, quoting Roosevelt. Then, with a stroke of his pen, the President doubled the amount of Grand Canyon lands protected.
It was in March, 1999, at a town meeting in Flagstaff, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt first introduced his idea of a new monument in the Parashant region. Grand Canyon Trust and the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council (GCWC) were the only organizations to rise and speak in favor of the idea, and to suggest a greatly expanded boundary. Over the following months, the Trust and GCWC, along with other regional and national environmental organizations, worked hard to achieve designation of the expanded monument.
The Trust's advocacy and the excellent scientific information compiled by the GCWC helped lead to the designation of a monument nearly double the size of the original proposal. January 11th at Hopi Point was the culmination and celebration of months of hard work.
The Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument is unique in a number of ways — its boundaries are based on ecological criteria, it will be jointly managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the National Park Service (NPS), and it provides a significant boost to an important mission shift in BLM, towards resource protection and landscape level management. The 1,054,000-acre monument encompasses diverse plant communities that provide habitat to more than 116 bird species and 50 different mammal species. Twenty-three animal species, including the California condor, the Mojave desert tortoise, and desert bighorn sheep are recognized as rare, sensitive or endangered species by state and federal land management agencies. More than 50 of the 223 plant species are recognized as rare, sensitive or endangered. The Monument includes over half of the Shivwits Plateau, the entire Grand Wash drainage in Arizona, Toroweap Valley, and it provides connectivity from Grand Canyon to the Grand Wash, Mt. Trumbull and Mt. Logan wilderness areas. The scale and boundaries of the monument allow for management that restores the land's native ecosystems and protects the habitat of large, wide-ranging predators including mountain lions and black bears and species such as mule deer, pronghorn antelope, cottontail and black-tailed jackrabbits, and Gambel's quail.
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Grand
Canyon-Parashant National Monument
© by Michael Collier |
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On a sunny morning at Hopi Point, President Clinton noted that we live in a time of unprecedented opportunity — economic prosperity, social progress, and the absence of internal crisis or external threat — a time for which the country's founders shed blood but could not have imagined. "Now, when we're in this sort of position, we have a heavier responsibility even than our forbearers did a century ago to take that long look ahead. To ask ourselves what the next century holds, what are the big challenges, what are the big opportunities, to dream of the future we want for our children, and then to move aggressively to build that future."
"So I ask all of you not only to celebrate this happy day but to see it in the larger context of our common responsibility and our opportunity to preserve this planet." The Grand Canyon Trust is committed to working with the BLM, NPS and all others who care for and live on the Arizona strip to craft creative management approaches to protect and restore the ecological integrity of the new monument. In that work, we will always try to heed Teddy Roosevelt and 'take the long look ahead.'
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