S3E12: Our 50th Episode

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0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out 9 miles from needles.com. Donate or text the word needles to 53555.

0:00:24 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:00:44 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe, and welcome to another episode of 90 Miles from the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and this is the 50th episode of this podcast. And I'll tell you the truth, I really wanted to put out a special 50th episode on Monday, 22 April. And then it turned out that starting the previous Friday, I didn't sleep at all for about four days. And I wish there was a fun reason why I didn't sleep at all, but I'm not sure why.

0:01:18 - (Chris Clarke): I finally got a solid 10 hours of sleep last night, still groggy several hours after waking up and drinking a pot of coffee. That lack of sleep sapped my cognitive powers, sapped my energy. I did not feel capable of creating a new episode up until late yesterday, but I wanted to get something out this week, even if it's a couple days late, just to celebrate the 50th episode. A couple things have happened in the last few days while I was stumbling around trying to be functional.

0:01:51 - (Chris Clarke): One is that last week I noticed a Norway rat running around in the garage, which is the building that my studio's in. We have a separate room in the back, then to the garage that I've worked to turn into a studio here in 29 palms. And mind you, I do not dislike rats as a species. I've had pet Norway rats. I've gotten very emotionally attached to some individual rats. I have a whole bucket full of cute stories I could tell you, but I prefer they not live in my garage and chew through camping equipment and things like that.

0:02:28 - (Chris Clarke): And Lara, who is as much a bleeding heart when it comes to dispatching animals as I am, talked a little bit about what we were going to do about it, and I said something to the effect of, after I get back from Ash Meadows, which is where I spent the weekend, I'll clean the garage out, remove anything that might attract a rat, let it go somewhere else. We've got a perfectly good compost pile on the property.

0:02:49 - (Chris Clarke): It's about 20 yards away from the garage. And then I went to Ash Meadows and celebrated that refuge's 40th anniversary. Came back Sunday, got nothing done for the next two days. And then this afternoon, as I was trying to figure out what I was going toa do for this episode, I opened the door between the studio and the rest of the garage, and there, I don't know, leaning up against the door as I opened it was a diminutive but nonetheless perfectly beautiful and healthy gopher snake.

0:03:21 - (Chris Clarke): If I had to guess the length, I'd say it was something like 18 inches long, not a big one. They can get up to 5ft or more around here, but 18 inches will do to eat a rat. And so that was good news. I'll hasten to add that if you're a person who is afraid of either rats or snakes, and we invite you to be interviewed for an episode of the podcast, you don't have to show up here. We can do it remotely.

0:03:46 - (Chris Clarke): You don't have to challenge your phobias at all. We will support you if you decide you want to. Goer snakes are, in the main, benign. They're very calm, very chill snakes amenable to being handled a lot of the time, though. This one saw me and took off really fast. But for instance, just last week we were out getting a medical appointment taken care of and Lara picked one up. That was an inconvenient place right by the door of the eye clinic and far away from any suitable habitat. The closest vacant lot was across a busy street.

0:04:20 - (Chris Clarke): And so Lara, being a trained field biologist, just walked up to the snake, essentially asked it to jump into her arms, willingly entwined itself around her arms and shoulders for stability, and she walked it with no struggle, about a hundred yards to a little clump of Aedere bushes with lots of shade beneath, happily went into those bushes. It's a five foot long snake. If it had wanted to run or strike or be uncooperative in any way, it could have very easily.

0:04:50 - (Chris Clarke): But it was like, "yeah, all right, cool, we're good. You're picking me up. All right, I can deal with that." I really like gopher snakes. And this little one in our garage, we're going to be appointing chief sanitation officer or chief sanitation contractor, maybe, because I don't think she will be sticking around very long once the job's done, she's welcome to, and if you have a suggestion of a name to call this beautiful gopher snake, let us know.

0:05:20 - (Chris Clarke): More on topic if you are not subscribing to the newsletter Sage and sand put out by Patrick Donnelly, great basin director for the center for Biological Diversity and a good friend of this podcast, you are missing a sporadic treat in your email inbox. I wanted to take a minute and just read a section of this week's missive from Sage and sand. That really struck me, and it goes along with what I was hoping to offer to remind you of why we're doing this podcast. So, starting to read from Patrick's newsletter the Great Basin and Northern Mojave Desert resource extraction boom is accelerating with far reaching consequences for biodiversity and communities.

0:06:02 - (Chris Clarke): Mining for lithium gold, rare earths, hell, even absorbent clays, oil and gas, solar, geothermal and wind energy, pinyion juniper removal for biofuels, harebrained pumped storage projects, nuclear waste dumps and large scale planning efforts meant to accelerate all of the above and caught in the middle is the most arid region in the country, one of the most biodiverse regions in the country, one of the least understood and least appreciated regions in the country, one that most Americans are perfectly content to put on the chopping block.

0:06:36 - (Chris Clarke): Also caught in the middle is my beloved home. Patrick is, of course referring to the Amargosa basin, home of Death Valley National park in Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, and a whole bunch of destructive projects that are being proposed, he continues. The number of concurrent projects moving toward permitting and development simultaneously is dizzying. Just this month we've got open NEPA comment periods on the Western Solar plant, DPIs, Greater Sage grouse land use plan amendments round three grid Alliance Perump transmission line, ash Meadows zeolite mine North Bullfrog Gold mine, Rhyolite Ridge Lithium mine, rough hat solar, the Clark Solar Deis Grenlinink North Transmission line, Spring Valley gold mine, Robertson Gold mine and that's just in my little area of focus.

0:07:23 - (Chris Clarke): We're also waiting on environmental documents for green Link West, Rover critical minerals, Ash Meadows project, Golden Current Solar, now known as the Purple Sage Energy center, and Bonanza Solar in Inyo county also waiting on 10,000 acres of the Amargosa being stuck in a geothermal energy lease sale later this year. And again, that's just in my little corner of the world. Multiply that extraction bonanza by the whole western United States and you've got the entire public lands environmental movement basically just hanging on by our fingernails, trying desperately to engage on projects, trying desperately to save these lands and species, while also trying to walk the delicate balance of not actively subverting the carbon free energy transition, all while the climate cognoccenti and DC policymakers view us as either right wing trolls, dim witted NIMBYs, or outright climate deniers.

0:08:15 - (Chris Clarke): Patrick continues, "a collaborator called me freaking out because they have an order of magnitude more projects on their plate than they have hours in a day. We feel this intense urgency to respond because. Because we're watching what we love disappear before our eyes. What's a biodiversity activist to do?" He has some suggestions. They include bear down muster resources, build alliances, get away from that damn desk and into the field document survey.

0:08:42 - (Chris Clarke): And he goes on in that vein. You can read the rest. It's well worth reading at sageinsand dot substack.com Patrick describes pretty much what has been my life as both an activist and a journalist. A journalist since 1993 and an activist for 20 years before that. And it's demoralizing. It seemed like the world was coming apart when the 104th Congress came in. It was the most conservative Congress in decades.

0:09:11 - (Chris Clarke): They were actually able to get things done, unlike our current Congress, and that was a mixed bag. A lot of the initiatives the 104th Congress pushed through would have been derided as woke liberal claptrap by the current Republicans in Congress. But I point is, every year the drumbeat of bad news continues. Every year it seems to get worse. And if you take each piece of bad news outside the context in which it occurs, it can be demoralizing, can be overwhelming. When we started 90 mil from needles, it was with the idea that the desert needs way more defenders than it has. There's a big core group of really committed desert activists that have been doing amazing work over the decades, at least over the decades, that I've been aware of what they're doing and to involve to whatever degree. And at the same time, up until quite recently, it was the same usual suspects working on California desert issues. At least we'd see one or maybe two new people show up in a typical year. That pace is sped up a lot. It especially sped up during the Trump years, and it continues to again gain speed. And that's good news.

0:10:09 - (Chris Clarke): But I've been doing this kind of thing too long to assume that increase in recruitment for desert protection movements is a permanent thing. People go through life changes. Sometimes they have to move away from the desert. People get jobs, people have kids, people get sick. The people we try to actively, the more people we bring into actively trying to protect the desert, the better off the desert is. The usual two glib way I put it, is that activism is way too important to be left to the activists.

0:10:38 - (Chris Clarke): What we've been trying to do with this podcast for 50 episodes now is to have a good mix of things about the desert that are threatened, reasons they don't have to be threatened, descriptions of why those things that are threatened are important or beautiful, or for whatever reason worth protecting, whether they're scenic viewpoints or threatened species or rare plants or cultural communities, indigenous and otherwise.

0:11:00 - (Chris Clarke): There is a lot in the desert that absolutely deserves protection. And most of all, we've been wanting to bring examples of people, not necessarily heroes, though some of them act heroically, but just regular people that went to school, fell in love, fell out of love, had heartbreaks, got married, got divorced, had kids, or didn't have kids, have day jobs. People who aren't sure they know what they're doing when they get involved, who aren't sure what the difference is between an Endangered Species act petition and an environmental impact statement.

0:11:33 - (Chris Clarke): And the truth is, we need people like that 90 miles from needles. And the Desert advocacy media network that sponsors it exist to bring one listener after another closer and closer to becoming committed activists, even if the only time they have to put in is an hour a month. We had a really interesting opportunity to take part in a tv show called Earth focus, which I used to work on when I worked at KCET back a decade ago.

0:12:01 - (Chris Clarke): And this episode of Earth Focused was, well, focused on tourism and Joshua Tree and how that tourism has affected life inside the park and lives of residents and gateway communities. And as usual, for productions like Earth Focus, the crews got, in order of magnitude more video and audio than can be fit into a show less than an hour long. And there was something that I said in my interview that didn't make the cut, and that was that in the particular example of tourism at Joshua Tree, 3 million people come to visit Joshua Tree every year.

0:12:35 - (Chris Clarke): Now, what would happen if a 10th of 1% of those 3 million annual visitors fell so hard in love with the desert that they decided to work to protect it? One 10th of 1%. That would seem like a failure from the percentage point of view, right? I mean, that would seem like 99.9% of people that came to Joshua Tree. This movement to protect the desert just failed to reach. But that would be 3000 new desert activists a year.

0:13:05 - (Chris Clarke): That'd be about eight new desert activists every day. There would be nothing we couldn't win. There would be no campaign we couldn't prove victorious in. You can check out that episode of Earth Focus. We'll put a link the show notes. It's quite well done. Here's the thing, though. In order for desert activists to be effective, in order for us to get our points across to other people, to make the case for protecting individual pieces of the desert, or for valuing the desert as its own entity that has its own integrity, that deserves to exist on its own terms, we need ways of getting that information out to people.

0:13:46 - (Chris Clarke): Now, in the past, we've had a mixed relationship with mainstream news media. Sometimes desert coverage in mainstream media has been excellent. The recent reporting of Louis Sahagegan at the LA Times being one example, Henry Breen at the Arizona Daily Star's another, certainly others. But our access to news is being restricted these days. Just this past week, Google announced that it's going to start removing links on a trial basis to California news websites from search results for people in California in reaction to a proposed California law that's in the state legislature right now that would require that Google pay a small fee when they connect residents of California to news sources so that those new sources can recoup a little bit of what they spent on putting that news together.

0:14:37 - (Chris Clarke): California is often well ahead of the curve for these kind of things, but in this particular instance, this is a concept that has been put into practice in a couple other places, Australia and Canada being the two that I know well, and Google, which has profited greatly off free link to news stories that required a significant amount of money to develop, fought those places too, and it turned out it didn't hurt them all that much.

0:15:06 - (Chris Clarke): And those news stories do require money to develop. There's payroll, there's travel expenses for reporters, there's renting office space, there's buying computers, there's paying for access to databases and symposia and things like that. And then there's just the value of the accumulated expertise that comes into play when a reporter's been covering a beat for a few years. And those reporters, in a sane world, would make a little bit more money than someone that was just starting out. News costs money to create, and Google has been skimming that off the top and making money and not giving any of it back.

0:15:40 - (Chris Clarke): And this is a double edged sword, because in the past they've offered that access to the general public for free, so that people on the net can at least get the idea of what's going on in the world, they can at least see the headlines, even if the whole story is behind a paywall. But now, at least for the time being, some of us in California, perhaps more and more, will be iced out of having access to, even to the knowledge that these stories exist.

0:16:07 - (Chris Clarke): And this is just an escalation of a phenomenon that's been going on for quite some time now. News media are in an existential crisis. Journalists are being laid off. News organizations are making severe cutbacks. In 2023, ten american newspapers went out of business each month. Last year, more than 2600 journalism jobs were lost. Hundreds more journalists have been laid off so far this year, including the aforementioned Louisa Hagan from the LA Times.

0:16:39 - (Chris Clarke): I think technically he took a buyout, so that was good for him, but nonetheless were deprived of his voice and others. And this is a long term trend. Since zero five, the US has lost a third of its newspapers, two thirds of its journalism jobs. And those news outlets that remain are increasingly likely to take the approach of putting paywalls on their content, which is in the failure of ad revenues to being able to back up the expenses.

0:17:08 - (Chris Clarke): Paywalls on content is a completely reasonable reaction, but they still block the vast majority of readers from staying informed about issues they care about, or perhaps more importantly, about issues that they didn't realize they cared about. And while all of this is happening, it's not just google that's putting a tourniquet on the news flow. Facebook has tweaked its algorithm to deemphasize news.

0:17:35 - (Chris Clarke): Twitter used to be the single best social media site for getting news from all over the political spectrum. Journalists would post links to their stories on Twitter almost as soon as they were live. And this was especially true for environmental and science journalism. It was a treasure. And in the last year, Twitter has become essentially useless for that. What does this mean for the desert, though?

0:17:59 - (Chris Clarke): What it means for the desert is that there isn't an easy way to reach a lot of people with issues that are affecting the desert. There isn't an easy way to combat the widespread and pernicious assumptions about the desert that get in the way of us protecting it. That the desert highest and best use is holding our landfills, or our big, destructive, unpleasant projects, or paving it for solar development, scraping thousand year old plants off the surface of the earth in order to go after the lithium beneath them.

0:18:32 - (Chris Clarke): Shorter me if we're going to defend the desert, we need more desert activists. And if we're going to get more desert activists, we need them to have access to information. And that access is going away. Kind of a stark contrast. About 15 years ago, I was working for an environmental nonprofit doing desert stuff. That nonprofit doesn't exist anymore, but every day I would scour online newspapers, find stories about different pieces of the desert, ranging from good news to horrible news. I would compile them and put them in a newsletter that I sent out at least three times a week, sometimes every day, depending on how much news there was to share. I'd send that out, and then people that got the newsletter could just click on the link and go read the story and that is not possible anymore. If you can even find references to the stories that exist in the mainstream newspapers and television websites, they're almost always paywalled.

0:19:24 - (Chris Clarke): And how are you going to find them? You're notnna find them by using Google to search for them. You're not gonna find them by cruising your Facebook feed. You're sure as hell not gon toa find them on X. Desert Advocacy Media Network and 90 miles from needles are trying to fill a news provider niche that started emptying out 20 years ago. 20 years ago, there was plenty of misinformation making print, and that needed to be challenged. But now we mostly don't even have access to a mainstream take on desert issues that's readily available.

0:19:57 - (Chris Clarke): And what this means is that the deserts need 90 miles from needles, and the people that listen to 90 miles from needles more than ever before. There's enough environmental news in desert that deserves attention that we could easily do an hour of podcasts a day, seven days a week if we had the resources to do it. We've done what we've done with 90 miles from needles. With about a $15,000 annual budget. We don't need a lot.

0:20:25 - (Chris Clarke): Really. The biggest stumbling block to getting more episodes out and for those episodes to be better produced and better researched is staff time. And staff time is money. Now, for the last year and a half or so, the number of recurring donors we have that give a set amount every month or every year has stayed stable, which is great. We'not losing donors, some nonproits are, but we've stayed at about 100 of you.

0:20:54 - (Chris Clarke): Right now, we are at exactly 100 recurring donors. In a typical month, we have about 1500 people listening to 90 miles from needles. That's growing every month. And in a way, that's exactly what we want, because we want to provide news and information, updates on campaigns. All the information you need to know to be a committed and effective desert activist. We want to get that to you for free. And our 100 or so donors, both recurring and those who give one time donations, is subsidizing about 15 people to listen to this podcast. And that's fantastic. And we want to keep that going.

0:21:32 - (Chris Clarke): 15 to one ratio between people served and people donating is not unusual in the nonprofit world. But my estimate, which is a bit arm wavy, but we'll go with it, is that there are about 21 million people that live in the north american desert, north of the US border. And that means if we have a 15 to one ratio between donors and listeners, if we reach them, all we're going to need 1.4 million regular donors to 90 miles from needles. What I'm saying is that we've got a lot of room to expand. Even multiplying the number of donors we have right now by ten, moving it up to around 1000 would allow me to get paid for doing what I do.

0:22:15 - (Chris Clarke): This is a full time job for me right now, and it could be a low paid, full time job and it would be a lot more sustainable. Having ten times as many donors would allow us to hire a professional podcast editor that actually knows what she's doing. It would allow us to hire freelancers with reporting experience to go out and bring us stories from all over the deserts, from Idaho Toaka teas and from California to west Texas.

0:22:41 - (Chris Clarke): It could radically change our effectiveness in our reach. So for those of you who are listening to this and have not yet decided to help us out with a little bit of cash, if you've been persuaded by my little rant here, 90 miles from needles.com, donate will get you there. You can also go to 90 MFN dot substack.com subscribe to our email newsletter that we put out every time there's a new episode. And we usually have regular links in that newsletter to ways you can donate or other ways you can help us out. You can be sharing our episodes on social media. You can go subscribe to our new YouTube channel that gets us a little bit more prominence.

0:23:21 - (Chris Clarke): You can tell people what you're listening to. You can tell people what you think about our podcast. I was not sure when we started this thing up two and a half years ago that we would make it to 50 episodes. There were times last year when we were lagging between episodes that I wasn't sure we were going to make it to 40. It looks like we're going to keep going. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to have honed my skills and to have met some fascinating people reported on issues ranging from Los Angeles county to west Texas to Salt Lake City.

0:23:59 - (Chris Clarke): It's just been an amazing ride and it'snna get more intense. It'snna get more important. The desert desperately needs your help. And we at 90 miles from needles and the desert advocacy media network desperately need your help because we've only really got a short period of time. That is our r1 chance to save these deserts. They're under threat like they've never been before. And if you want to donate even a dollar a month, it'll help us bring this news to you and to 15 or 20 of your closest friends, family and neighbors.

0:24:35 - (Chris Clarke): We can work together to protect this desert. If those of you who are listening, who are not yet donors to 90 miles from needles, decide you'd like to help out, we'd be extremely grateful. And along those lines, we would like to thank new donors Wayne Hazel and Russell Woodruff for their generous donations. And that about wraps up this 50th episode of 90 miles from needles. Want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our announcer, for our intro, and outro Martine Mancha, our wonderful podcast artist.

0:25:10 - (Chris Clarke): Want toa thank you for listening. Our podcast theme, Moody Western, was performed and written by Bright side Studios. We will have a more substantive episode next week, hopefully with a bunch of new donors to thank at the end. Nine 0 mile from needles.com donate'get. You there. We are extremely grateful you've made it this far with us. Here's to the next 50 episodes and the next 250 after that. Take care of yourselves and we'll see you at the next watering hole.

0:25:47 - (Chris Clarke): Bye now.

0:27:55 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network U.