If you are aged 45 years or older, it may be time to talk with the healthcare professional about colon cancer screening, Medicare, Medicaid and the marketplace have you covered for more information, visit healthcare dot gov or call 803 one 8 two 5 9 6. A message from the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. Thanks for tuning in to native America calling. I'm Sean spruce. We're getting an update on the push to name more than 700 square miles of land in Nevada, a national monument. President Biden promised to put of equal may under federal monument protection. However, just last week he postponed a chance to follow through. Do you have a comment or question about today's show? Are you concerned with the delay regarding federal protections for a week will may might mean? Give us a call at one 809 9 6 two 8 four 8 one 809 9 6 two 8 four 8. Our phone lines are open. We've got Taylor Patterson on the line in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she's the executive director of the native voter alliance of Nevada and Taylor before break you were talking a little bit about the uniqueness of Nevada tribes and with regard to this coast stewardship model. Please continue your what you were saying. Yeah, absolutely. So what I was drawing the comparison to is we have a lot smaller tribes in Nevada and frankly are just under resourced to completely manage a big parcel of land like and so what I was talking about before with all of the tribes that have been involved in this project, it really takes a lot of tribes to put work into this to be able to even get the federal designation, let alone to have complete post stewardship over these parcels of land. And so my point while long winded is that we're smaller tribes out here and it's going to take a lot of us to really be able to band together and get this project done. And so we've seen that with E. coli and the entire process of getting everybody that has ancestral ties involved in this. Also on the show today is Alan O'Neill at former National Park Service superintendent. Alan, do you see any drawbacks to national monument status with regard to tribal lands such as of equal me? No, I don't. Obviously, we see this as an opportunity to have the tribes playing a much larger role in planning and stewardship of this area. But I think the national monument designation was the right vehicle because it provides permanent protection and this is something that tries to an interested in a long time. This is their ancestral lands and it's important that we have that they play a large role in how this is eventually stewarded. This is an important cultural historic landscape, but it's also a very important ecological landscape. This is probably the best this is the best desert tortoise habitat. We have anywhere in Nevada, but as important as it does or tortoises, there's also 50 other plant and animal species that are listed as a special status because there's some concern, but their conservation over long-term. So having that concentration of special status species and this landscape is important that they be protected. That's also the eastern terminus of the world's largest Joshua tree force. In fact, the largest Joshua tree in Nevada is found within this landscape and unusual for the Mojave desert. This is a very unique grasslands, which are usually find in the Mojave desert. So there's like 28 species of native grasses that are in here and very significant for measure. I can't recall any place within the Mojave desert doesn't have these kinds of grasslands. So in addition, this is important for bighorn cheap migration. They move back and forth between these mountains. An important birding area, this area is actually by Audubon as an important birding area. So Jason to the Pacific flyway coming up the Colorado River system, but it also has an unusual combination of bird some of which are more common in the sonoran desert. So in terms of raptor species, there's like 28, 18 different raptor species here. It's also Harry has one of the highest concentrations of goal and eagles anywhere in the states. So, you know, from an ecological and cultural standpoint, this is an incredible landscape, but also for resources like dark knight sky and natural quiet and the visual resource this landscape does offer the opportunity to protect some of The Dark Knight sky and kind of the rural lifestyle here. And Alan, if you could share what was the most pressing threat to me, which makes these protections so valuable. Well, it was in gesture development. Primarily wind development. And some solar. There are two really bad wind projects, a searchlight wind project, followed by which was actually a suit brought by private landowner in here and prevailed against BLM and the courts canceled that project. And then the Crescent peak wind project, which was a devastating wind project in terms of here. It created an industrial island surrounded by area that we worked decades trying to protect and that particular project had like 200 over 200 wind turbines, about 700 feet high with about 20 miles of ridge line. So that would have forever changed us landscape. And so when the department interior and December of 2000 18 cancel that Crescent peak wind project, that was kind of a wake up call that we better get our act together here and determine what it is we want to do collectively to protect us landscape or we're going to we're going to be fighting the next bad project and we're all supportive of renewable energy, but like Taylor said it's it depends upon location. We're possible place you could put. Okay. Yeah, and along those lines with regard to location. I mean, what does this mean for the energy supply without a wind farm at this location of equa may? Are there any alternatives for those projects to still provide renewable energy?