Losing California’s protected national monument status puts the water at risk

By Heather Bourbeau, especially for CalMatters

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I visited the newly designated Sáttítla Highlands National Monument this June as part of a series of trips I’ve been making through national lands at risk of losing federal protection.

Over the course of 10 months, I traveled to 40 national forests, monuments, parks and other designated public lands in eight western US states. I collected field notes, made short videos, took photographs and wrote poetry.

I set out to document these lands before they were lost or irrevocably altered. What I learned was how devastating these losses would be for all Americans.

Encompassing 224,676 acres in the Modoc, Shasta-Trinity, and Klamath National Forests of Northern California, the Sáttítla Highlands is home to bald eagles, black bears, salmon, trout, and many threatened, endangered, or rare species of plants, insects, and animals, as well as massive underground volcanic aquifers that supply water to millions of people.

Sáttítla—meaning “place of obsidian” in the Ajumawi language—also includes part of the Pit River Ancestral (Ajumawi–Atsugewi) and Modoc (Mo Wat Knii–Mo Docknii) peoples, and is central to their spiritual beliefs and cultural practices, as well as to those of a number of other indigenous tribes, including the Karuk, Klamath, Shasta, Siletz, Wintu, and Yana.

Nominated for President Joe Biden it is a national monument in January 2025, days before he leaves office. Nearly four months later, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum calling for the Sáttítla Highlands’ protected status to be revoked as a means of combating the nation’s “energy emergency.”

I drove on a nearly empty highway to Medicine Lake, in the caldera atop the Medicine Lake volcano, which covers an area nearly 10 times the size of Mount St. Helens in Washington. For roughly two decades, the U.S. government has designated much of the land around the lake as a “Traditional Cultural Property Area,” meaning that the relevant Native American tribes must be consulted when planning projects and programs for this sacred and healing place—though that doesn’t necessarily limit development on those lands.

I seemed to be alone when I parked my car, except for one guy fishing in the distance. I walked a short distance into a forest that hugged the water. Small chipmunk calls preceded the sounds of birds, small periwinkles and small butterflies mingled in the air, and the droppings of small mammals littered the trail.

Eventually I ran into other people, mostly there to camp and fish. While walking along the shore of the lake, I saw a grandmother and granddaughter collecting tadpoles. When I remarked that the water was warm enough to swim in, my grandmother reminded me how awful and recent ours had been drought years are: Two years ago, she recalled, the water was so low that she and her husband were able to walk around the perimeter of the lake.

It’s a striking aspect of the Satitla Highlands that most people don’t see—the porous volcanic rock that filters rain and snowmelt into one of the largest underground aquifers in the United States.

These caves—which hold as much water as California’s 200 largest surface reservoirs—supply water to the state’s largest spring system. This affects millions of Californiansincluding farmers who use the water to feed the nation. I have been its unwitting beneficiary for much of my life, as a teenager in Sacramento and as an adult living in the Bay Area.

Beyond the aquifers, the Sáttítla Highlands is home to 19 plants and dozens of animals and insects considered threatened, endangered or rare in California, including the white bark, the rare talus collomia, the northern spotted owl, the cascade frog, the long-toed salamander, the Townsend’s big-eared bat, the Sierra Nevada red fox, and the Franklin’s bumblebee, which has one of the most restricted geographic distributions of all the bumblebees in the world.

Nowhere in the monument are there signs explaining the small miracles of freshwater stored and distributed through these aquifers, nor telling about the biodiversity that leads to, among other benefits, better soil health, increased carbon storage, improved flood control, and improved air and water quality. Nowhere is the oxygen produced by mature trees mentioned: A mature tree can produce enough oxygen for four people a day.

The Trump administration’s attempt to revoke Satitla’s designation as a national monument will put all these lives at risk. In addition to devastating areas of cultural significance to Native tribes, millions of people across the West will feel its impact on our water, air and climate.

I thought about this as I watched the granddaughter keep scooping up cups full of tadpoles to admire and then drop them. Studying it, I remembered how this kind of commitment led my cousin to become a marine biologist and led me to write about the beauty and sustenance that such lands offer.

I wondered if the people who want to end the protected status of this land understand all that is at stake.

This commentary is adapted from an essay created for Plinth Public Square.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.