S4E1: Moab to Mojave: The Largest Conservation Corridor Explained

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:21 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands in it's time for 90 miles from Neil's the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:47 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe Jeffrey, and welcome to season four of 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and like everybody else in the country right now, pretty much, I've been spending a lot of my time in the last few days paying attention to the fires in Los Angeles, at least one of which was extremely close to where I lived for a couple of years when I lived in la. Now we are going to get to some good news in this episode.

0:01:15 - (Chris Clarke): What better way to start a season that we didn't know for sure we'd get to? But I do have something I need to point out about these fires. Our hearts go out to people who have lost family members or lost their homes or both, or even those who've just suffered significant dislocation. A lot of people don't know yet whether or not their homes are intact and this week may be even more destructive than last week.

0:01:44 - (Chris Clarke): It's really tempting to put politics aside for this. I know some of the worst people in the country are using these fires in Los Angeles as an excuse to gloat. They feel like they've scored one against the coastal elites or something like that. The President elect has been spouting palpable, ridiculous falsehoods, trying to blame local Democratic politicians for these fires. It's really a disgusting response. Ordinarily, I would be the first to set politics aside and just help people that have been affected, regardless of who they voted for. They're having a tough month and the important thing is to help.

0:02:25 - (Chris Clarke): And we'll link to some relief efforts in our show notes for those of you who haven't been barraged with good links to those already. And having said that about not getting political on this, there is something that has been bothering me about not just these fires, but lots of destructive fires in California and elsewhere in the Southwest. You know, there are three things that are the leading proximate causes of gigantic wildfires. I mean, the root causes are a combination of climate change and the fact that the landscape out here was evolved to burn.

0:03:02 - (Chris Clarke): But the leading reasons for the little sparks that take root in that climate change affected drought, ravaged, flammable, dried out landscape and turn it into a conflagration like the ones we're seeing in Los Angeles this month are in order, the top three reasons that these fires start. Lightning. Lightning's number one human activity, whether it's carelessness or deliberate arson. And third is transmission lines.

0:03:33 - (Chris Clarke): There is some indication that the Eaton fire, which has been devastating, it's the one in LA with a majority of the reported fatalities so far, has its roots in a transmission line failure. It's not certain yet, but it's looking pretty likely that there are people who monitor transmission line outages in California. They've said that there were significant faults in the area in the hills above Altadena, faults when a transmission line touches something that is not a transmission tower or an insulator.

0:04:07 - (Chris Clarke): In the moments before the fire, there were faults in the area of the Eaton fire. Southern California Edison, which is the main utility in the area, says that they had cut off power to all the homes in that area before the fire started. There are people have responded to SCE's claim by pointing out that their house in the fire area had power until they evacuated. In the Hearst fire, which is up by Sylmar, the northeastern end of the San Fernando Valley, there is eyewitness evidence and I've seen the video of a transformer exploding seconds before the fire started.

0:04:46 - (Chris Clarke): That's the Hearst fire just off Interstate 210 in the San Fernando Valley, right up against the foothills. Now even to me, and I've made a career out of bashing sce, it feels a little unseemly to pile on before the fires are even out. But I think it's really important to say that we can do better. And if it is true that any of these fires were caused as a result of transmission lines failing in high winds, breaking, falling off the transmission towers and sparking fires, it's important to realize that these fires are caused by the same social structure, the same irrelevant, outdated business plans that utilities have been following that caused them to support huge solar power facilities on undeveloped desert land.

0:05:39 - (Chris Clarke): That caused them to intervene in the political process to make it more expensive and more difficult and less rewarding for homeowners and property owners to put solar on their roofs. The idea that investor-owned utilities like Southern California Edison rely on buying large amounts of power from remote power plants and sending that power through above ground transmission lines to people in neighborhoods like Altadena and Pacific Palisades is a business plan that needs to be abandoned.

0:06:12 - (Chris Clarke): Now. As of this weekend, this past weekend, the weekend of January 11th, Southern California Edison apparently had about an $8 billion valuation that's everything the company owns, including assets tangible and intangible, worth a little over 8 billion as of 2022. Now, we've lost 7,000 structures in LA as of the morning of Monday, January 13th, when I'm recording this. And the firefighting crews have included automobiles in their list of structures.

0:06:45 - (Chris Clarke): So it's not clear how much of that tally of 7,000 structures is actually homes, businesses, storage units, things like that. But let's say that 3,000 of those structures were people's homes. That certainly seems reasonable in Altadena, which has been hit really hard by the Eaton fire. Altadena is a modest neighborhood, an important neighborhood historically, a place where African American families were able to buy homes in the 50s and 60s.

0:07:16 - (Chris Clarke): In other places, they were kept from buying homes by redlining. But Altadena was a place where the black middle class could buy property, generate generational wealth, and live their lives in what's actually quite a beautiful setting. This morning I went to Zillow and I searched for homes for sale in Altadena. Zillow has not yet updated its database to reflect the fact that some of those homes are not there anymore.

0:07:42 - (Chris Clarke): As of this morning on Zillow, there were 22 homes listed for sale in Altadena. Not a single one had an asking price significantly less than a million dollars. Most of them were above that. In Pacific Palisades, those figures are radically higher. Safe to say that $10 million is a starter home in Pacific Palisades. So Southern California Edison is responsible for the Eaton fire. Haven't seen credible speculation as to the cause of the Palisades fire yet. But just in Altadena alone, assuming around 3,000, 3,500 homes or similar structures holding businesses, things like that, the damage caused in that fire is somewhere in the neighborhood of half the valuation of Southern California Edison.

0:08:32 - (Chris Clarke): And that's just damage to structures. It's not the inconvenience to people, it's not the contents of those structures. That figure certainly doesn't address the fact that in the Eaton fire, at this counting, 16 people lost their lives. Now, when we fight for a more sensible way of generating electric power that doesn't involve destroying the desert, that doesn't involve locking people into buying all their power from outside, that allows people to decentralize the grid, generate their own power, we're actually fighting to reduce the number of wildfires like this.

0:09:13 - (Chris Clarke): Now, obviously, SAE is doing business in a world that has had its climate monkey wrenched. And so droughts are going to be more commonplace, extremely wet periods are going to be more commonplace, you put drought on top of a wet season. That's one of the most dangerous conditions you can have for wildfire. So SCE doesn't own all the responsibility for this, even if the proximate cause of the fires turns out to be SCE transmission lines, or for that matter, LADWP transmission lines or lines from any of the smaller municipal utilities like Pasadena Municipal Utility, which serves some of Altadena.

0:09:50 - (Chris Clarke): It's interesting to me that for one of the smaller fires, there is a suspect in custody who was apparently seen by locals setting small fires. If that's a credible accusation, that person's going to have the book thrown at them. Why do we not do the same thing to the utilities? Check our show notes. You will find a link there to help people that are suffering through what's likely going to be one of the worst months in their lives.

0:10:23 - (Chris Clarke): But I'm just saying we can do better. We'll get into the good news after a break.

0:10:31 - (Joe Geoffrey): Don't go away. We'll be right back.

0:10:57 - (Chris Clarke): SA.

0:11:24 - (Joe Geoffrey): You're listening to 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. When you've used half your water, it's time to turn around.

0:11:35 - (Chris Clarke): So the winds that picked up in Southern California didn't just cause devastating fires. They also tweaked a schedule for establishment of a really important protected area in the California desert. On January 7, 2025. A week ago, as I record this, we had been alerted that President Biden and a number of other dignitaries were going to be in a canyon not too far from where I live called Box Canyon in the Mecca Hills.

0:12:02 - (Chris Clarke): And that President Biden would show up there and sign a designation of Chuckwalla National Monument under the Antiquities act. More than 600,000 acres of desert in Riverside and Imperial counties in Southern California. And a bunch of us were lined up on the road to get into Box Canyon to go celebrate with the president. And then that wind that was stoking the fires along the coast picked up here in the desert as well. And the tent that had been set up blew over and the police barriers blew over.

0:12:35 - (Chris Clarke): And it was too dangerous to land a helicopter, even if it was Marine One at the nearby thermal airport. And President Biden changed his plans. Plan B, which is in effect now, is to sign the proclamation establishing Chuckwalla National Monument back at the White House and to fly a bunch of stakeholders there so that they could be there. Those stakeholders are flying there as I record this. But on the 7th, after we determined that we were not going to be meeting with The President at the Box Canyon location, a bunch of us gathered at the Spotlight 29 Casino run by the 29 Palms Band of Mission Indians in Indio, California.

0:13:15 - (Chris Clarke): And there we heard a number of elected officials, agency staffers, and most importantly, members of local desert tribes speaking about the importance of this piece of land. And here is an excerpted version of what our soon to be former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said on that occasion.

0:13:39 - (Deb Haaland): My name, it's Akiwita is the crushed turquoise turquoise that we crush and we mix it with cornmeal so we can pray. And my grandmother named all of us, so that is the name she gave me. Honored to be here. Hello friends and relatives and thank you for welcoming me as we celebrate the Chuckwalla National Monument and the many individuals who made this designation possible. As you heard, it was not one person.

0:14:11 - (Deb Haaland): No one person does anything in this world. It takes really committed individuals to come together and make sure that we're moving the things forward that we love. I had the honor of visiting Coachella Valley last year where I met with many of you and had the opportunity to hike Painted Canyon with my friend, Representative Ruiz and Chairman Tortoise. And that morning was one of the highlights of my time as secretary.

0:14:38 - (Deb Haaland): I heard firsthand when I was here the last time from community members, neighbors, wildlife advocates, tribal leaders, outdoor recreation enthusiasts, local businesses and veterans, and young people, lots of young people, about the importance of this special place and their unwavering responsibility to ensure the Chuckwalla landscape is preserved and respected for current and future generations. Well, you did it.

0:15:08 - (Deb Haaland): Almost. Chuck Walla National Monument is protected, will be protected in perpetuity. So please give yourselves a round of applause. The today's the finish line for more than one reason. This monument and this landscape, it still needs you. It needs champions to share why protected lands strengthen the local economy. It needs stakeholders to make sure we get the land management planning right. It needs friends to reach its full potential for the plants and animals and the visitors.

0:15:52 - (Deb Haaland): So here's my challenge to you. Please think about what you can do. Whether it's wearing your Chuck Wallen T shirt loud and proud, whether it's serving on the Monument Advisory Committee or volunteering with the BLM to continue to be an advocate for this really amazing and special place. I'm so honored to have joined you in this most essential work. Dawah. Thank you all so much for being here here. Thank you for welcoming me and for your unwavering commitment to our shared future.

0:16:27 - (Deb Haaland): Thank you all so much.

0:16:30 - (Chris Clarke): So January 7th was a really important day for me. I'd been away from the Chuckwalla National Monument campaign for about a year, but before that I'd been working on it for four or five years, and it's really wonderful just to have played even a tiny role in putting this thing together. But when I looked at the White House press release that was issued before it was decided that the designation was going to be postponed by a week or so, it wasn't the designation of Chuckwalla National Monument or of Satitla National Monument up in Northern California that jumped out at me.

0:17:06 - (Chris Clarke): What did jump out at me? Paragraph 3 of the White House press statement, which said in addition to setting a high water mark for most lands and waters conserved in a presidential administration, establishing the Chuckwalla National Monument in Southern California is President Biden's capstone action to create the largest corridor of protected lands in the continental U.S. covering nearly 18 million acres, stretching approximately 600 miles, this new Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor protects wildlife habitat and a wide range of natural and cultural resources along the Colorado river, across the Colorado Plateau, and into the deserts of California.

0:18:01 - (Chris Clarke): It is a vitally important cultural and spiritual landscape that has been inhabited and traveled by tribal nations and indigenous peoples since time immemorial. The Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor stretches from Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in southwestern Utah, to which President Biden restored protections in 2021, through Bajnuavo Ita Kukveni, ancestral footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona and of Iquame National Monument in Nevada, both established by President Biden in 2023 and reaches the desert and mountains of Southern California that are being protected with today's designation of the Chuckwalla National Monument.

0:18:44 - (Chris Clarke): End EXCERPT now this is a really exciting thing to see in a White House press statement. It mirrors something I've been talking about for more than a decade, just the amount of work that's gone into preserving places in our southwestern deserts that are of ecological or cultural or scenic value. People have done a lot of work to protect this desert, starting in 1908 when Teddy Roosevelt established Grand Canyon National Monument, which was the forerunner of the national park.

0:19:12 - (Chris Clarke): It's almost 120 years at this point. People have been working on protecting the desert, and it shows. You look at a map. If it's got the protected areas marked out, there's a lot of green on that map. And predictably, understandably, the Biden administration in its press statement focused on the pieces of landscape that this administration had a hand in either protecting or reinforcing protections for.

0:19:37 - (Chris Clarke): But if anything, what's actually happened on the ground here is more impressive than that press statement. What's on they're correct that it's just under 18 million acres, 27,000 square miles and change that are directly part of this corridor. Contiguous preserved lands. It's not just the national monuments that were recently established. There is of course, Joshua Tree national park, there's Mojave National Preserve, there's the Grand Canyon, there's Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Capitol Reef National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Bryce Canyon national park, the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, national wildlife refuges like Havasu and Cibola, Natural Bridges National Monument, and then about 25 wilderness areas, all of which are contiguous with nothing more than a two lane road separating them.

0:20:30 - (Chris Clarke): And with the designation of Chuckwalla National Monument, a person could walk from Mecca, California in the eastern Coachella Valley to just outside of Moab and stay on protected land the entire way. It's a phenomenal achievement. It's even more interesting when you look at the protected lands that aren't adjacent and so weren't counted in the total, but are nearby and contribute to the robustness of the ecosystem being preserved in this corridor. Zion national park, for instance, Arches National Park. There's any number of wilderness areas.

0:21:05 - (Chris Clarke): There's places like Red Rock National Conservation Area outside of Vegas. This is just a really astonishing generational achievement. Not generational, more than three generations. Grand Canyon National Monument was established the year before my grandfather was born. So that's like five generations right there. It's also worth noting that there are areas that are protected that are immediately adjacent to this Moab to Mojave corridor that I didn't count in a total. And it looks like the Biden administration didn't either.

0:21:38 - (Chris Clarke): There are things like wilderness study areas and BLM areas of critical environmental concern. Now, wilderness study areas are managed as wilderness and areas of critical environmental concern. ACECs can have significant protection, but I didn't count them because they are ministerial protections. They're not permanent. They can be undone with a stroke of a pen. They're currently in place, so it's good.

0:22:04 - (Chris Clarke): But they're not permanent, so I didn't count them. And there's also some land that I don't think was accounted for in the Biden administration's total. And certainly in my calculations it was going to be difficult to include them. There are wildernesses that straddle national monument or NRA boundaries, and I didn't include the acreage that was outside of those boundaries because it's just hard to find out how much that actually is.

0:22:31 - (Chris Clarke): Nonetheless, in the Moab to Mojave Conservation corridor, there are almost 50 distinct places that are permanently protected, some of them huge. And that's an astonishing achievement. But it gets better, because if you take a look at some of the areas that were nearby but not contiguous enough to count in the corridor, this gets a whole lot more impressive. Take the sand to Snow National Monument near Palm Springs in California.

0:22:58 - (Chris Clarke): It's essentially the westernmost part of this Moab to Mojave conservation corridor. And if you take a look at the map, you'll notice that the south end of San To Snow is five miles north of the north end of Santa Rosa San Jacinto Mountains National Monument and the San Jacinto Wilderness, which roughly overlaps. What does that get us? Well, from Santa Rosa San Jacinto National Monument, which is just under 300,000 acres, we get without any gap in between, to the north end of Anza Borrego Desert State park, one of the largest state parks in the US 640,000 acres, thousand square miles.

0:23:39 - (Chris Clarke): And then there are a bunch of wildernesses clustered around Anza Borrego and one state park, which gets us a corridor running basically from Palm Springs to the Mexican border. Slightly over a million acres of protected lands. And five miles might seem like a big gap, especially because it's got Interstate 10 running through it. But you know what? There are checkerboarded pieces of BLM in that gap between Santa Rosa, San Jacinto and Santa Snow.

0:24:06 - (Chris Clarke): It is feasible to make a connection through there without buying any private land. It'd be good to have some wildlife crossings across the interstate. But at any rate, that little five mile gap separates the nearly 18 million acres of Moab to Mojave from another stretch of really important preserved desert land all the way to the Mexican border at the Jacumba Wilderness. But it gets even better. One of the linchpins of this corridor is Mojave National Preserve, 1.5 million acres and change.

0:24:39 - (Chris Clarke): Mojave National Preserve runs up to Interstate 15 near Baker, California. North of Interstate 15, just west of Baker, is the Soda Mountains wilderness, just under 25,000 acres. There's a gap of about five miles between the north boundary of Mojave National Preserve and the southern edge of the Soda Mountains Wilderness. East of Baker, there's the Hollow Hills Wilderness, which is a little under 23,000 acres.

0:25:04 - (Chris Clarke): And again, that's just a couple of miles from the north boundary of Mojave National Preserve, if you're in either the Soda Mountains Wilderness or the Hollow Hills Wilderness, and you go to the north end of those wildernesses, just about two miles away is the south end of the Avawatz Mountains wilderness. That's almost 90,000 acres surrounded by a whole lot of different wildernesses to the east. But most importantly, it abuts the south end of Death Valley national park, which is just under 3.5 million acres.

0:25:35 - (Chris Clarke): The whole complex of protected lands in that direction not included in the Moab to Mojave corridor is a little under 4,750,000 acres. And so we're looking at essentially 23 million acres and change of protected land, which includes the Moab to Mojave Corridor, the wing going up to the north end of Death Valley and the Piper Mountain and Sylvania Wildernesses up that way, and then the wing going from Santa Snow down through Santa Rosa, San Jacinto all the way to the Mexican border.

0:26:05 - (Chris Clarke): This is just an astonishing accomplishment and it is worth celebrating. Let me know if you'd like to hear an episode or a couple of sequential episodes about a road trip from one end of this corridor to the other. It'd be a good excuse to get out and talk to folks in a bunch of different states. And that brings us to the end of this episode, episode number one of season four of 90 Miles from Needles.

0:27:02 - (Chris Clarke): Thanks for sticking with us. We're really happy to have some good news to offer you, and I'm grateful for once to this administration for doing the right thing and protecting not only Chuckwalla, but all those other places that they've worked on in the last four years, as well as Satitla National Monument, which is an amazing place. A little bit out of our bailiwick, but I've been there and it definitely is a marvel.

0:27:33 - (Chris Clarke): If you ever want to see an entire cliff made of just obsidian and nothing else, that's the place to go. And in the unlikely event that President Biden is listening, Joe, this almost gets you off the hook for nuking the Desert Tortoise government website in 2011. Maybe I'll forgive you for that sometime. Thanks to Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martin Mancha, our podcast artwork creator. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Bright side Studio. Hail to the Chief was Performed by the U.S. marine Corps Band, and I need to credit them because I live a couple of miles from more than 12,000 active-duty Marines and they might come and get me.

0:28:16 - (Chris Clarke): I also want to give really heartfelt thanks to our newest contributors, Supinda Sirihekaphong, Kathryn Davies, Michael Mandel and Scott Williams. Thanks for jumping in on our year end appeal and giving quite generously thanks as well to those of you who responded to our appeals on various social media. We don't have all your names but I do have some. So thanks to Dave Hogan, Shelby Logue, Kathy with Cats, Hal Rager, Tiffany Wahlberg, Love you pal and Jeffrey Burbank. Next episode we're going to be bringing you handful of desert and desert adjacent podcasts that we think you should be listening to. Some of them have specialties either geographic or topic, but they're all worth listening to.

0:29:07 - (Chris Clarke): And with that, thanks for joining us. Take care of yourselves. Going to get some really weird stuff going on in the next month or so and it's really important to do that self care. In the meantime, I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now.

0:29:27 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.