S3E7: Saving the Chihuahuan Desert with Frontera Land Alliance

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:08 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.
0:00:29 - (Chris): Thank you, Joe. And this is yet another episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and I want to talk a little bit this episode about a place I got to know briefly in February. I am definitely going back. It's an amazing place, the Chihuahuan Desert. It's the largest of the four north american deserts. A lot of times the Chihuahuan Desert escapes attention from people that are not real close to it, at least those of us who are Anglos, because 90% of it or more is in Mexico. It can actually be kind of a struggle to find english language field guides for the majority of the Chihuahuan Desert.
0:01:09 - (Chris): And that lack of information extends to precisely where the Chihuahuan Desert is. I mean, nobody disagrees that the desert is primarily in Mexico, covering a huge part of the state of Chihuahua and a lot of Coahuila, northeastern Durango, the northern end of Zacotecas and a little bit of Nuevo leon. Nobody disagrees that the transpicos section of the state of Texas, in other words, that part of Texas that is west of the Picos, is in the Chihuahuan Desert. And the consensus, at least on the north side of the border, pretty much ends there.
0:01:48 - (Chris): You got some authorities who say the Chihuahuan Desert reaches as far north as Albuquerque. You have some who say that it doesn't get any farther north than Secoro, New Mexico. There are people that put a lot of southeastern Arizona, Benson, Wilcox, Safford area in the Chihuahuan Desert. And there are people that say that, yeah, none of Arizona is really in the Chihuahuan Desert. It's interesting to see why people have those disagreements and it has to do with climate and soil characteristics and what plants grow there and what animals grow there, all that kind of stuff.
0:02:30 - (Chris): Nobody disagrees that El Paso is in the Chihuahuan Desert. El Paso is part of the largest concentration of people in the Chihuahuan Desert. In fact, a large metropolitan area that includes not only Las Cruces, New Mexico, but also Juarez in the state of Chihuahua, right across the Rio Grande from El Paso. There are, at latest estimates a little bit more than 3 million people living in the general El Paso las Cruces Juarez area.
0:03:01 - (Chris): There are other large cities as well in the Chihuahuan Desert. Chihuahua, the capital of the state of Chihuahua with a million people. Saltillo in Coahuila, also has a million people. Torrejon, also in Coahuila, has about three quarters of a million people. The area around El Paso is the largest metropolitan area in the Chihuahuan Desert. And as you might expect, especially given the extremely business friendly atmosphere in the state of Texas, a lot of the Chihuahuan Desert within the city limits of El Paso has been paved.
0:03:39 - (Chris): The development includes commercial and industrial and residential development. It's a relatively compact town, but it is starting to sprawl. The last time I was in El Paso before this past month was, I kid you not, 40 years ago. And it has grown considerably since then. It's a textbook sprawl area, but that sprawl has really been confined to the flatlands, the plateaus and the mesas in the city up until fairly recently, when real estate prices and development pressures started, developers casting an eye at the washes and canyons that separate those maces.
0:04:16 - (Chris): And unsurprisingly, since El Paso is in a pretty blue part of Texas, people that lived there were concerned about not only their access to open space and their ability to have mountain bike trails and hiking trails and things like that, but also just to protect the natural landscape, to preserve biological diversity among the plants and animals, to preserve cultural sites. And there are places in the area that have been protected, the largest being the Franklin Mountains state Park, which is entirely surrounded by El Paso.
0:04:50 - (Chris): It's one of those places that has been claimed to be the largest urban park in the US. There are a number of smaller preserves. Then just almost a year ago, as I record this, on March 21, 2023, this happened.
0:05:07 - (Joe Biden): Look, second thing we're doing is we're protecting the Castner Range in Texas. Thank you. Veronica Escobar, represented for your leadership in this. Now I hope you'll still have reason to call me, because you called me a lot on this one. This is managed by the United States army at Fort Bliss, and it tells the story of the tribal nations who live there and the members of our armed forces who trained in those lands.
0:05:42 - (Joe Biden): It's also a place of incredible beauty. And right now, right now, as winter gives way to spring, mexican gold poppies are bursting into bloom. What I wanted to do is have all this in a video behind me here, because when you see it, it's just breathtaking. Transforming desert plains and hills into a sea of vibrant yellow and oranges, framed in the rugged mountains of the blue sky. The people of El Paso have fought to protect this for 50 years.
0:06:13 - (Joe Biden): Their work has finally paid off. And now we'll clear the area of old munitions, create access to the outdoors for communities and parks, and we're going to green spaces that are harder and harder to find. And importantly, Castner Range will be preserved for future generations.
0:06:42 - (Chris): The Castner Range National Monument was established by President Biden via his authority under the Antiquities Act. 6672 acres of the Franklin Mountains on the east side of the range. It's a huge, beautiful, extremely steep mountain landscape with amazing rock formations. And don't buy your plane tickets just yet, because the Castner Range was a longtime test site from the 20s through the, there is a significant amount of decaying, unexploded ordinance, which is called Uxo by people who like the jargon. So the department of the army, which is going to be managing the Castner Range National Monument, needs to remediate all those exploding and toxic things that it left laying around before people can just wander through the national monument.
0:07:35 - (Chris): National monuments don't just happen on their own. They require public support. They have to have a committed base of people who are working hard to make sure that the place gets protected. There's a long process. You got to make sure and get buy in from a bunch of different constituencies in the area. You gotta find a congressional champion who's willing to take it on. Both of those are important so that designation of a monument doesn't blow up in somebody's face. And you might be wondering who in El Paso took that on. Who formed the nucleus of the movement to protect the Castner Range? Well, I met some of them when I was in El Paso.
0:08:10 - (Janae): My name is Janae Renault Field. I'm the executive director of the Frontera Land Alliance. So I have been with the Frontera Land Alliance since 2011 and started off as part time, and the organization has grown with wonderful support. So I am now full time, and we have staff that is also supporting the conservation of the region.
0:08:35 - (Kathia): Hi, I'm Kathia Gonzalez. I'm the development director here at the Frontera Land Alliance. I was born and raised here in El Paso, Texas, and then started moving my way up north through different job positions. And after gaining knowledge and more love for conservation, I ended up here with Frontera. And it's been almost, I think, three years now.
0:08:58 - (Rocio): My name is Rocio Ronquillo, and I am the open space manager for the Frontier Land Alliance. After finishing my position in Colorado as the wilderness ranger, I needed to come back home, and I think I had realized that I needed to give back to my community, and I wanted to put those skills to work and back to where I was born and raised, here in El Paso, Venezuela, in Juarez. So I saw the opportunity and I jumped for it.
0:09:30 - (Janae): Frontera Land Alliance was created in 2004 20 years ago for the sole purpose of preserving cats and arrange. At that point, they were looking at if it could be conveyed to Frontera, then handed off to the Franklin Mountain State Park. That did not happen mainly due. I mean, there were many reasons, but a main cause is there are existing UXOs and MECs on the property, a huge liability, and to hand that off, the liability would remain with the army. So it didn't make sense.
0:10:02 - (Janae): And over time, the focus had transitioned to national monument. And we started that effort in about 2014. It was a community effort, it was a collaboration amongst many groups, and there were some top organizations that were leaders. Frontera Land Alliance, El Paso Community foundation. We worked closely with the Tiguas and as well as Witherra conservation project. And of course, we worked with the congress, petrol Roich, and with Congresswoman Escobar, and we worked closely with all of them as it transitioned to the national monument.
0:10:42 - (Janae): Then the collaboration shifted. And through that shift, we built relationships with the army to see how they want to manage castnerange in the future. So the plan right now is Frontera oversees the Friends group for Castor Range National Monument, and the army will, in perpetuity, own and manage the land. They are working on a feasibility study, which will involve asking the public for input in the near future.
0:11:15 - (Janae): I don't know what that means in near future. And they hope to have the land open at least a trail in six to ten years, it being a 52 year fight to conserve the land to ensure that it wasn't developed, because over that time, 1200 acres was sold off and developed. It's where the El Paso Community College is right now in the northeast, and Sam's club and Walmart and housing and schools, Techstot headquarters and Border patrol headquarters.
0:11:44 - (Janae): So when people say, oh, it wouldn't have been developed, I had been. And so we now are very excited that coming up soon will be the one year anniversary that we'll be celebrating its preservation and knowing that it won't be developed. And now we're looking forward to how can we open up aspects of it safely without destroying the existing habitat? By removing the mecs and UXOs just.
0:12:10 - (Chris): Jumping in here quickly. As a side note, MEC spelled MEC is the acronym for munitions and explosives of concern. And that's kind of a broader category that contains UXOs. You could think of it this way. MECs are anything that could conceivably pose an explosion risk, while UXOs are a more dangerous subset of MECs, in which the bomb, or whatever it is, has been set to explode and then just didn't go off yet, for whatever reason.
0:12:40 - (Chris): At any rate, Frontera Land Alliance has more going on than just a successful campaign to protect the castner range. Here's Janae.
0:12:48 - (Janae): Currently we manage over 1,400 acres of land, have over 14 miles of trails that we work to keep people on so they don't damage the fragile surface of the desert by going off. And also teaching people that they can't just create their own trails that they want to because they think it would be a good trail for biking or running or hiking. And so we manage a lot of the systems, but Rocio is the one on the ground doing that type of work.
0:13:24 - (Rocio): I think it's the teaching component of what is outdoor recreation and how to properly do it, which leads to us first creating that land connection with the people and how they can relate themselves to the land and what creating that relationship of the land goes back to your history, to your ancestors, to many of our ancestors, I think before we can teach people how to properly hike, how to properly do mom biking, how to follow the leave no trace rules, it's building that connection to the land and why they need to be connected to the land, why they should care to conserve the Chihuahuan Desert, teaching them even the name of their desert. Because when we do volunteer events or hiking events, we usually have a survey attached to it, to their waiver that they need to sign.
0:14:24 - (Rocio): And we have simple questions as what is the name of your desert? Do you know where your water comes from? And they leave them blank because they don't know that relationship, that connection. So that's where we can get an idea of what is needed for us and how we can create this program so the people can enjoy the desert, the ecosystem, but also connect them to it. So then they can come back and then start thinking of, like, how can I get myself involved more?
0:14:56 - (Rocio): Or I might now want to learn how to properly hike because now I know that the desert is not ugly or it's not a threat or there's nothing for me to enjoy. When I do land management and I'm out there on the trails, that's the first thing that I see. I see sometimes on most of our conserved land, there's not a lot of people out there. And it's not because they don't want to or they don't care. It's because they just either don't have time.
0:15:27 - (Rocio): It was not in their culture when they were growing up. They think that the mountains are just there, but you cannot access them so it's just us teaching that component of like, no, you can go there, they're there for you.
0:15:40 - (Janae): It seems that the community is disconnected from the Chihuahuan Desert. And so we're working to show the value of the desert land through the education program, whether it be in libraries to schools or actually bringing anybody of all ages out to the properties that we manage. So they can see that the desert offers wonderful opportunities there for exploration, from the insects to the birds to the mammals. And most people don't realize that when they're hiking on these properties.
0:16:16 - (Janae): There's mountain lions right there and there's bobcats. And these little tiny insects are there inside rare flowers that bloom after a rain. And so helping to teach everybody the value of the desert, as simple as leave no trace principles of staying on a trail, it leads to future stewards.
0:16:38 - (Chris): We'll be right. We're back. Now, I'll confess that my knowledge of the Chihuahuan Desert is not very deep. I know a few things, but I wanted to get a sense from people that were born and raised in the Chihuahuan Desert, like Rocio and Kathia, what they thought the desert was for them. So I asked, and in response to my question, Kathia broke into a huge smile. In your neck of the woods, what's the desert like?
0:17:35 - (Kathia): What's the desert like? Alive, beautiful, diverse. That's not the answer that you get from most locals, though. They just see it as like, oh, it's dead, it's gray, there's nothing there. But once you take people out there and we have seen firsthand how students, once they're there and they just hear the birds chirping, they see lizards, they see all the different types of vegetation. They're like, oh, wow, it really is diverse and alive.
0:18:04 - (Kathia): So we have a bunch of plants. We have gobernadora, which is a creosote bush. We have opotillos. We have prickly pear cactus, which has very tight connections to us because our grandmas or moms, they make nopalitos from the prickly pear pads. And what else does you, what else can we.
0:18:25 - (Rocio): The lechugilla, that is also known as the shindaggers.
0:18:29 - (Kathia): Sotol.
0:18:29 - (Rocio): Sotol, the soap tree yuccas, where also you can eat the flour from it in salads or cook it, which is. Most of these plants either are edible or they produce a smell that is just nature. Like the Creosote bush. We also tell people smell it and what does it remind you of? And they're like, oh, rain. And you're like, yes, this is the smell of our desert. This is the smell that you guys, when you guys are driving or you guys are at your home. And even if you don't live near nature or near the mountain, you can still smell the smell of the Creosa bush, which is really nice.
0:19:08 - (Rocio): And now they can create that connection. And when they even come back, they're like, oh, I told this to my mom or to my grandma. They said that, yeah, this plant, they used it or they knew about it. That's what we want. Because then we know that they're getting the message and they're now spreading the scenery of the Chihuahuan Desert. Our Mexican gold puppy, which is one of the staple ones here with Castner Range, which when it blooms, you just see a blanket of orange yellowish color, which is really nice. And it's a good time for people to see that. Even the desert provides wildflowers.
0:19:48 - (Rocio): And they're unique to this ecosystem and they're unique to what they provide for pollinators that we have here, for the insects and all this interconnection of ecosystems, but also the flora and the fauna that we see here.
0:20:04 - (Chris): What kind of reception are you getting from people that you're asking for support? Do they understand the issues in the desert? In the Chihuahuan Desert specifically?
0:20:12 - (Kathia): I think it's challenging. It's challenging, but we are doing great. Janae can tell you when they started, they had around 40 individual community members that donated. Frontera is an environmental nonprofit, so we do rely on individual donation from community members, businesses and of course, grants. And the bulk of our funding is grants, it's foundations. And while we are grateful to our grantors, we do want to diversify our funding because grants can be not as reliable from year to year.
0:20:49 - (Kathia): So we do want community members and local businesses to take ownership of our open natural spaces of our desert to understand what their support makes, the difference, the impact on the land, on community members. So we do have a few business sponsors. We want more, of course. We want to increase the amount of local and corporate businesses that want to support the work that we do because it benefits everybody, right? It benefits the economy.
0:21:21 - (Kathia): It provides ecosystem services, it brings education to children. So it does benefit all of us and community members. I run a membership program and we have seen such an increase in engagement in people wanting to not only donate their time, but also do monetarily donations which keep the work that we do going. So we have seen an increase tremendously in the amount of people that are part of the membership program.
0:21:50 - (Janae): And we don't look at our members as dollar signs. They really are part of the family, so we really work to get to know them. And then with sponsors, same thing. We like to invite the sponsors employees out for a hike or if they want to have a service project day and come out and work on trails with Rocio. And we do have partnerships with various builders. The developers aren't anti conservation and we're not anti development.
0:22:20 - (Janae): It's more of a collaboration of how do you build and conserve at the same time the important areas in 1990.
0:22:29 - (Chris): A group called the Southwest Organizing Project, based in Albuquerque, wrote a letter to the group of ten environmental organizations. It was addressed to Jay Hare, president of the National Wildlife Federation, and CC'd to the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Policy Institute, and Friends of the Earth, the Isaac Walton League, the Wilderness Society, National Parks Conservation association, which was the name at the time, and Natural Resources Defense Council, which said, among several other things, that large environmental organizations were not only not representing the interests of communities of color in the southwest, but we're actively hurting those communities. If I can read just a little bit of that letter says.
0:23:19 - (Chris): For centuries, people of color in our region have been subjected to racist and genocidal practices, including the theft of land and water, the murder of innocent people, and the degradation of our environment. Although environmental organizations calling themselves the group of ten often claim to represent our interests and observing your activities, it has become clear to us that your organizations play an equal role in the disruption of our communities.
0:23:43 - (Chris): There is a clear lack of accountability by the group of ten environmental organizations toward third world communities in the southwest, in the US as a whole, and internationally. Now, it would be nice to say that that problem is in the past. And from my perspective, people have been doing a lot of work to correct the flaws. Let's say that the Southwest organizing project, correctly diagnosed back in 19, 90, 35 years ago, almost the environmental activist world in southern California, which I know pretty well, is increasingly brown.
0:24:17 - (Chris): And that's a great. You know, I have my own perspective. I have my own blind spots. So I thought I would ask Kathia and Rocio how that was for them, what they perceived as their relationship with other environmentalists. Did they feel welcome? Did they feel alienated? I was curious, and they had some interesting answers. Let's listen.
0:24:38 - (Kathia): Intimidating, for one. But as we moved along and gained more experience and we met other people and made connections, I think that helped a lot. Also doing the work that we do and being from El Paso, from the community, we relate to the people that we do the work for, basically, because we were also not exposed to the mountains. Growing up here, I saw the mountains, but I didn't know they were accessible.
0:25:11 - (Kathia): I didn't know what was there, what's happening, what conservation practices were taking place. So I think we relate a lot when we take people on a hike and it's their first time hiking, or when we go and do in classroom visits that students don't know the name of our mountains, of our desert.
0:25:33 - (Kathia): So it just helps a lot, I.
0:25:35 - (Kathia): Think, being from here and meeting other people as well, I don't know. What was your experience like Rocio?, .
0:25:45 - (Rocio): I think I never had an idea that conservation was a career path. I majored in environmental science with biology concentration, going further out of research, and all of that cool scientific stuff. But when it was time for me to get a job, internship, or whatever, I encountered this other aspect of conservation, where it's where I started and learn more about what is conservation, what we need to do, and the importance about conservation.
0:26:20 - (Rocio): I was in New Hampshire. I remember I was so scared to leave my hometown because I am a latina woman. I come from a family that nature was never on a radar. Nature was maybe going to the park or playing in the street in front of your house with your neighbors. That was nature for me. Me going to a state that I had never heard about and so far from home that I didn't even know if I was going to see a representation of myself in that environment, that was the most scary for me, to see if I was going to find somebody else that looked like me, talk the same language as me, or even if I was going to be accepted in this world of conservation, that was one of the most, I think, afraid things that I had to do.
0:27:12 - (Rocio): But then when you jump it and you're like, okay, you know what? I'm not doing this for what the benefit, but I saw it as I want to do it to create that representation, to show people that are from here, El Paso, because we're a border town and Juarez, that they can leave their hometown, and if they don't see that representation, they can create that representation for themselves, but also for upcoming generations and even the current generations.
0:27:42 - (Rocio): So I think that really helped me, and I could see it. When I transitioned to the forest Service, I was also the only hispanic person, and there was a major hispanic population in the city that I was in, so I was usually the one that would do the spanish bilingual programs, which was really nice, because then you would see kids there, and they look up to you and they're like, I can be like her. I can be a ranger, I can be a conservationist. I can be a scientist or whatever the field you want to be.
0:28:16 - (Rocio): So I think here, coming back to my community, I think that's why I wanted to do like I left. I created that representation. Now it's time for me to come and tell our future conservationists that you can also be that representation and for them to create that world of no matter how you look, you can still bring something to the table. I think in the perspective of conservationists that live in Juarez, another city next to us have come up to us to see how we're doing, what we're doing and how they can start implementing it in their city.
0:29:01 - (Rocio): So we've become this, I think I can say it, this land trust role model of what they would want in the future for their land. So over there we have La Sierra de Juarez, which is owned by 18 different private landowners. Some are official, some are not official. So they have that problem which we don't. That's one of the first things. But then there was a time where they were interested in how we're preserving our nature preserves and how we do the land management portion.
0:29:34 - (Rocio): So we gave them a tour. We took them to Ressler Canyon so they could see how we've shaped Ressler canyon, which is an arroyo, and how we divert water or control erosion. They see Knapp Land Nature Preserve. So they've come on tours here to see these properties, on how we've created this mechanism of, one, protection, how we start the protection of the land. And two, after the protection is done, how do you keep it stable and managing it.
0:30:11 - (Rocio): And the third one is now how you start educating the people to start caring for that land that is protected and how you can engage them to start either doing the education component, become a land steward, become a monitor of the land, or even incorporate families with their kids to do a kid education program. But it's very difficult for them because they run with a different government system. It's not the same here, but we have provided them that, I guess we can say recipe of this land trust of how they can start to create something like this and maybe create a mirror organization on the quadrasite.
0:30:57 - (Janae): So where to go for information on how to help, the website is www.fronterralandAlliance.org, and you can support by becoming a sponsor or becoming a member. You can also call 915-351-8352 and ask any questions. We have the PayPal account set up for easy credit card processing. And of course we take checks.
0:31:22 - (Kathia): Yes.
0:31:23 - (Kathia): In order for us to continue doing the beautiful work that we do and continue preserving our majestic Chihuahuan Desert, you can visit the Frontera Land Alliance website under how to become a member and all donations are welcome. You can also follow our social media platforms. Facebook is Frontera Land Alliance and then Instagram is EP_FronteraLandAlliance. This is home. This is home to me.
0:31:49 - (Kathia): And I think it's worth preserving. And it's beautiful.
0:31:54 - (Rocio): Yeah. I think also, as Kathia was saying, you can get a feel for it on our social media. We do put a lot of what our events look like, what our volunteers are doing out there, what programs we're doing. You can see how people are enjoying what we do here in the desert. We're going to start, hopefully a storytelling where people can tell us their connections and their stories after they attend our event and what they feel in the desert.
0:32:27 - (Rocio): I think for me here, I would also say it's home is where I grew up, is where my ancestors history is, is where I want to keep learning from my history, where I come from, who was being represented in our Chihuahuan Desert, the history of those people, and also spread that history to our current and why not to our future generations. I think our desert is wonderful. We have a lot of diversity that you can see. And when you step into our desert, you can feel that inside of you, that energy, which is really nice to have.
0:33:11 - (Chris): That's excellent. I just want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us and let us know what you're doing. It's really impressive work.
0:33:20 - (Kathia): Thank you very much having us and giving us a space to tell you a little bit about our corner.
0:33:30 - (Chris): Well, that wraps up yet another episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I want to thank Janae Reneaud Field, Kathia Gonzalez and Rocio Ronquillo of the Frontera Land Alliance for spending some time with us talking about what work they are doing. It's excellent work. You can reach them@fronterralandAlliance.org. Also want to thank our voiceover announcer Joe Geofferey, our artist Martín Mancha and you for listening.
0:34:04 - (Chris): Please let us know what you think. Give us a call at 76039 219 96. Send us a postcard at Po Box 127 29 palms, California 92277. Check us out on social media. We're 90 Miles from Needles on Facebook. Instagram is 90mifromneedles. All y'all take care, keep loving the desert and we'll see you at the next watering hole. Bye now.
0:36:43 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy media network.