This Week at Interior September 20, 2024

Hi, there. This is Rem Hawse, we are here with the Bureau of Land Management in the Arizona state office in Phoenix, Arizona, and you’re watching This Week at Interior!

This Week, at Interior

Secretary Haaland and National Park Service Director Chuck Sams traveled to Marfa, Texas this week to celebrate the designation of Blackwell School National Historic Site, and kick off National Hispanic Heritage Month. Built in 1909, the school serves as a significant example of how racism and cultural disparity dominated education and social systems in the United States during a period of de facto segregation from 1889 to 1965.

Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management this week announced that an offshore wind energy lease sale will be held next month for eight areas on the Outer Continental Shelf off Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. This is a first for the region. If fully developed, these areas have the potential to generate approximately 13 gigawatts of clean offshore wind energy, which could power more than 4.5 million homes.  

Interior this week announced nearly $1.3 million in awards to strengthen local governments’ wildfire response by converting vehicles to wildland fire engines. The Slip-on Tanker Pilot Program will help small, remote emergency response agencies quickly expand their wildfire response capacity as they continue to face the devastating impacts of climate change, drought and intensifying wildfires.    

The Bureau of Land Management this week announced an additional $3.25 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding to support Interior’s Gravel to Gravel Keystone Initiative. That will improve ecosystem health and Pacific salmon resiliency in the Yukon, Kuskokwim and Norton Sound regions in Alaska. The Department’s initiative is relying on Indigenous Knowledge and the best available science to inform plans for collective action to support resilient ecosystems and communities in the region and make immediate investments to respond to the salmon crisis.

The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement this week announced more than $4.8 million from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda for Maryland to address dangerous and polluting abandoned mine lands. This helps create good-paying, family-sustaining jobs, and will catalyze economic opportunity. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides a total of $16 billion to address legacy pollution, including $11.3 billion in AML funding over 15 years.

The Bureau of Land Management this week released a final environmental impact statement for the Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Mine Project in Nevada. The proposed mine holds enough lithium to supply nearly 370,000 electric vehicles each year, and represents another step by the Biden-Harris administration to support a responsible domestic supply of critical minerals to power the clean energy economy.

Landslides are a damaging, disruptive and potentially deadly geologic hazard that occur across the United States. Now the U.S. Geological Survey has released a new interactive national landslide susceptibility map, showing where landslides are more or less likely to occur. These maps are useful for land-use planning and reducing risks in many areas in the U.S. where landslides are a major concern.

Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Shannon Estenoz and the National Park Service marked the completion of the National World War One Memorial in Washington, DC with an illumination of the memorial's centerpiece sculpture, "A Soldier's Journey" this week. The bronze sculptural wall is nearly 60-feet long and took years to complete -- it displays the journey of a soldier from enlistment to combat to homecoming. More than four and a half million Americans served in the First World War between 1917 and 1918.

And our social media Picture of the Week, the Dena'ina people of Alaska call it “Yaghanen," or the good land. It's also known as Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. From its ice fields and glaciers to its tundra, forests and coastal wetlands, the Kenai Refuge is often called “Alaska in miniature."

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That's This Week at Interior!