S3E21: The War on Facts: Environmental Protection after Chevron

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

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 nine 0 mile from needles.com. donate or text the word needles to 5355. Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. Thank you, Joe, and welcome to yet another episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:00:51 - (Chris Clarke): I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and I want to start off by thanking those of you who got in touch to offer condolences for the loss of my brother-in-law a couple weeks ago. It was very sweet to have so many of you reach out, and since then I mentioned that I was going to take a little time off. I said two weeks, and then I mistakenly said that the next episode would be on July 9, and that would have been just one week.

0:01:17 - (Chris Clarke): And I thought about putting together an episode last week and realized that probably the best thing to do was to give myself the two weeks that I had said. And I the reason for that is that the studio in which I record is insufficiently insulated. And we had quite a hot spill over the last week and a half. Two weeks. We actually beat our all-time record. The absolute top temperature that we had experienced in the four years we've lived in this spot was 121.

0:01:52 - (Chris Clarke): We set a new record of 122, which meant that my office was around 01:05 and then a day later, we set a new record for the yard and house of 123. And so clearly I wasn't getting a whole lot done in the office here. If any of you happen to be qualified to install mini splits and want to do something nice for this podcast, get in touch, because, you know, I'm pretty good at handing people tools if they know what they're doing.

0:02:24 - (Chris Clarke): I can probably install a mini split, except I'm not really qualified to run a 240 volts line. And we have one handy here, but not where it needs to be. So there's need to be a little bit of electrical work. At any rate, it's been hot. It's been very, very hot. We've had multiple records broken, desert cities setting all-time records for that particular date for the first couple of weeks of July. And there's something that happens when the desert gets really hot.

0:02:55 - (Chris Clarke): It is hot in the Mojave Desert. And, you know, that may seem, on the face of it, to be a platitude, like a statement about the pope's religious beliefs or the gastrointestinal activities of bears and where they occur. Of course, the desert is hot. And the Mojave in particular. The Mojave's got Death Valley in Ithoodae, where the world record, more or less verified highest temperature was recorded July 10, 1913.

0:03:21 - (Chris Clarke): So it's 111 years ago this month that was reading over 134 degrees Fahrenheit, also known as 57 c. And there is significant controversy over whether that was actually an accurate reading because it was out of the ballpark for, among other things, the temperature and other nearby places on that same day. It's very possible that Death Valley set a record, a real all-time record of 123 a couple years ago.

0:03:55 - (Chris Clarke): And I wouldn't be at all surprised if they break that at any rate. So it gets hot. And if you aim the full force of the summer sun at the Mojave for long enough, if you saturate the land and all its suffering inhabitants with that full and I constant 1 surface, eventually that desert, or should I say we in the desert can't absorb any more heat. We give it off. We discharge that heat into the air. We radiate it into the cloudless night sky.

0:04:30 - (Chris Clarke): We glow with it. We give off tons and tons of infrared radiation. The Mojave Desert air gets heated day and night, and it rises. And nature, like my dog, abhors a vacuum. So when the Mojave air rises skyward, other air has to flow in from nearby to replace it. And a couple hundred miles south of where I live, there is a 700 miles long water cannon pointing at the heart of the Mojave Desert called the Vermilion Sea, or the Sea of Cortez or the Gulf of California.

0:05:08 - (Chris Clarke): It's an arm of the Pacific that was created when Baja peeled itself off the mainland of North America. It's going to keep moving north as that part of the continent gets pried off. Riding on the Pacific Plate, the sea of Cortes will eventually reach into Fresno and Sacramento. At any rate, if you start the air rising over the Mojave, the mountain ranges in Baja and mainland Mexico will channel that marine air from the Mazatlan coast all the way up to Puerto Peñasco and then into the Mexico Mexicali and imperial valleys.

0:05:42 - (Chris Clarke): And those winds, that marine air, gets humid as it travels, and it doesn't meet any resistance until well into California, where it rubs up against a cluster of east west trending mountain ranges, the Cottonwood Mountains, the Oracopias, the hexies, the Pintos, the little San Bernardinos. So you get these winds, and they reach a mountain, and there's nowhere to go but up. That air cools as it flows up and over the mountains, and as it cools, it can hold less humidity.

0:06:14 - (Chris Clarke): It's like those mountains are a squeegee drying the air. And on Sunday, July 14, one of those storms landed pretty much right on our house. I was actually on my way out to do a little bit of grocery shopping. I was driving through the sort of rural suburban streets of 29 Palms and I found myself stuck. Something that you learn really fast out here, or you stop learning everything at all, is you don't drive into suspicious looking depressions in the landscape with water flowing across them.

0:06:48 - (Chris Clarke): It's really best not to do any kind of driving onto pavement that's covered with water because you never know just exactly how fast it's moving. Whether that water hides large potholes that are just been scoured out of. You could high center your car pretty easily. I've got a fair bit of clearance in my car, so I tend to take the smaller puddles and in stride, even if they're flowing across, if they're not flowing really quickly, I will go through it.

0:07:18 - (Chris Clarke): I did see little sheets of water, but they were in the minority. What I saw was, I'd call it white water, except it was brown. There were rooster tails, there were standing waves two and 3ft tall. And these are on roads with 55 miles an hour traffic most of the time or more because desert drivers are crazy. I ended up pulling off of the main highway and seeing if I could find a safer way to get either closer to the grocery store or back home. Because by the time I stopped on this road and pulled off onto a side street, it was pretty much impassable in either direction.

0:08:00 - (Chris Clarke): The thin little sheet of water just on top of the pavement had turned gradually into a couple inches of water that was sitting just on top of the pavement. And then that turned into a couple more inches of water that was actually flowing pretty steadily across the pavement. I pulled into a side street, turned myself around. I was on high ground. There was no water on the pavement where I was, but all around me was water flowing with peaks and standing waves and foam and spray.

0:08:32 - (Chris Clarke): And all of this was happening as one of the strongest hailstorms I have ever experienced in my life was just erupting. I was a little surprised later to find out that there were no dents in my car because it really sounded like people were loading up air guns and shooting golf balls at the roof of my car. It made me a little nervous, I'll confess. You know, every time there's a storm like this anywhere in the desert, you will hear stories about someone who decided to drive into a wash that's full or into an underpass where it looks like there's 2ft of water and turns out there's five, and loses their life, or gets badly injured or suffers a serious financial setback. And there are places, Arizona being one of them, where there are laws against that kind of thing. And they are sort of uncharitably called the stupid motorist laws.

0:09:25 - (Chris Clarke): But like I said, one of the first things you learn around here when you move to the desert. Indeed, much nicer language is used in California, probably other places too. Turn around, don't drown. You are never in so much of a hurry that you need to drive across a flash flood. And that's what I reminded myself of on Sunday as I was sitting there on the corner in this little island of high ground, outside of the flow of traffic. It was a residential side street.

0:09:54 - (Chris Clarke): I was right up against the curb. There was water flowing down that street to my left, but I was a good six or eight inches above the tumult. We were on the top of a hill. The water that was in the road was just falling on the road and going down the road. It wasn't like there was a big mountain canyon that was collecting a bunch of water and disgorging it onto the road. We were on the top of a hill and the road was flooded.

0:10:17 - (Chris Clarke): And so it was a little odd, but at the same time, I knew that I was in no danger unless I tried to do something where I was. I was safe. And there's a certain amount of really wonderful freedom and relaxation that comes with that. And if you just stay where you are, you got nothing else you gotta do. This was a trip to the grocery store, but nobody's gonna starve to death if I don't make it home in an hour.

0:10:44 - (Chris Clarke): And I just was able to watch the water flowing by and get startled by the golf ball sized hill. There's something about being safe and sound in a place where you can see all around you just the masterful workings of the natural world, how they follow rules. And you don't have a week and a half of record temperatures in the desert without summoning the monsoons. We were assuming that monsoons were going to come. I was seeing monsoon clouds on the eastern horizon for the last week, maybe a little bit longer than that.

0:11:18 - (Chris Clarke): And then here's the other thing. As I was sitting there in my car, all of the water in the world falling right on our heads. Some of it frozen into high velocity ice bullets, the rest of it in immense standing waves in the middle of a two-lane road. I happened to look at my thermometer on the dashboard of the car and it was 40 degrees cooler than it had been when I left the house. And yeah, that cool comes with an immense amount of humidity.

0:11:47 - (Chris Clarke): Your swamp cooler stops working. Swamp coolers work by blowing moistened air into a place that has really low humidity. And that's what they do best. That's why people in the desert have them. They're way cheaper than air conditioning. Assuming you have a source of water. The rain is only around for a couple hours. The relative humidity goes from eight or 12% up to higher than 50, sometimes higher than 70, and you just really got to resort to the ac at that point.

0:12:21 - (Chris Clarke): Swamp cooler is not going to cut it. Swamp cooler is just going to blow moist air into your house and make you feel muggy. And as I record this, my cheap little indoor thermometer in the studio here says we are at 84 degrees, which is 20 degrees cooler than we were two days ago. And so what choice do I have but to put an episode together and share it with y'all? If you're in the desert this year, you will not be surprised by the story of actually a rather uneventful flood. As far as we know.

0:12:54 - (Chris Clarke): As far as physical damage goes, I think Tucson got a lot worse a couple weeks ago. Moab got a lot worse a couple weeks ago. This was a love tap from the ecosystem, and it's just nice to remember that the ecosystem really still works a couple of weeks ago. On June 28 of this year, the US Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in a case called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Ray Mondo, which overturned a 40-year-old piece of case law that has been the basis of a huge amount of regulation, the Chevron deference doctrine. And there's been a lot of talk about this, and I have found that not a lot of it is accessible to none policy wonks and non attorneys. So I thought we would talk a little bit about this decision from June 28 and what it means for the desert and what it means for protecting the desert.

0:13:56 - (Chris Clarke): And what we're going to have to do is take a little trip back to June 1984. On June 25, 1984, Colorado politician Gary Hart seemed ever closer to snagging the Democratic Party's nomination for president in the 84 election. When doves Cry was number four on the Billboard r and B charts. Two days later, it would reach number one and stay there for five weeks and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch of the Supreme Court of the United States was at that point, 16 years old.

0:14:36 - (Chris Clarke): His mom, Anne Burford Gorsuch, was the head of Ronald Reagan's environmental protection agency, and in her role as director of the EPA and Burford Gorsuch was sued by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups over interpretation of the Clean Air act. Now, the Clean Air act required states that hadn't yet achieved national air quality standards to establish a permit program regulating new or modified major stationary sources of air pollution. This is referred to often enough as a stationary source rule.

0:15:09 - (Chris Clarke): Burford's EPA passed a regulation under the act allowed states to treat anything that emitted pollution in the same industrial grouping as though they were a single bubble. What does that mean? It meant that polluting plants could install or modify one piece of equipment without needing a permit if the alteration didn't increase the total emissions of the plan. Now, there were a bunch of environmental and other groups, including NRDC, that I think rightly thought this regulation was misguided.

0:15:45 - (Chris Clarke): It's an incredibly vague guideline. And there are emissions and there are emissions. CO2 is an emission. Cyanide is an emission. Plutonium is an emission. Ethyl alcohol is an emission. There are a bunch of different things that polluters can pollute with. Some of them are much more hazardous and much more concerning than others. So measuring total emissions of the plant, it's kind of beside the point.

0:16:13 - (Chris Clarke): Contrary to the intention of the Clean Air act, if you ask me. And the US Court of Appeals for the DC circuit agreed with NRDC, and they set aside the Reagan EPA's regulation, calling the whole bubble rule inappropriate for a program that was enacted to improve air quality across the board. And then the case made it to the Supreme Court, which reversed that ruling unanimously and said that the bubble rule was a reasonable interpretation of the term stationary source in the Clean Air Act.

0:16:45 - (Chris Clarke): Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court, said that Congress didn't have a specific intention for the interpretation of that term, and the Supreme Court held that the EPA's interpretation was a reasonable policy. Now, even though the NRDC and its colleagues lost that case in the Supreme Court, I remember it well, we viewed it as a defeat. We were not happy. But in the 40 years since, environmental activists and many, many other kinds of activists came to rely on the Chevron standard in order to defend agencies interpretations of what is often incomplete or vague language in laws passed by Congress. And that makes sense.

0:17:27 - (Chris Clarke): You don't elect people to the House of Representatives because they've got a doctorate in wildlife biology or statistics or the health effects of gamma rays on individuals. You elect them because they are able politicians, because they know law, because they are effective in getting laws passed, and because you agree with their ideology and you want more of that kind of ideology reflected in the halls of Congress.

0:17:53 - (Chris Clarke): Congress passes laws about any number of topics that in order to carry out those laws, to enforce them, you need expertise in areas from law enforcement to wildlife biology to organic chemistry to particle physics, interpretations of history, psychology, sociology. We do not expect our elected representatives to be experts in all those fields. And so it makes sense, given that we have an executive branch that is made up of agencies which can hire subject matter experts, it makes sense to allow those agencies some leeway in interpreting how to create a system in which the agency can carry out the mandate that Congress has given it to do whatever, to clean up air pollution or water pollution, to ensure that schools are not segregated, to make sure that jets don't fall out of the sky, to allocate funds in granting programs equitably from township to township across an entire nation.

0:18:52 - (Chris Clarke): Congress has more important things to do than to anticipate all the possible ways in which this law could affect governance. So it makes sense to allow the agencies to do that. And that straightforward, common sense, expertise-based approach to regulation and making rules and implementing laws is what the Supreme Court voted six to three to toss out. The Supreme Court now has said that those questions need to be resolved by courts, by judges who are.

0:19:26 - (Chris Clarke): Some of them may be conversant with science, but it is not required. It's not a standard by which judges are evaluated. Almost said judged. We abandon this idea of having government funded experts who really know what they're talking about making some of these decisions. Instead, hand that over to judges that won a local election or got appointed out of political favoritism. The Eileen cannons of the world would be making decisions on how much benzene you can breathe in at a gas station and how many insect parts are allowed in your Oreo cookies.

0:20:07 - (Chris Clarke): That doesn't seem better to me. Now. It's worth noting that Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissent against the majority opinion in this case two weeks ago, and she gave five real world examples of how chevron deference has been used in actual decisions. I'll go through them real quickly. The Food and Drug Administration regulates biological products, including proteins, and Kagan asked, when does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as a protein? Must it have a specific defined sequence of amino acids?

0:20:38 - (Chris Clarke): That was the subject of a case. Second example under the Endangered Species act, the Fish and Wildlife Service must designate endangered vertebrate fish or wildlife species, including distinct population segments of those species. Who is better qualified to make that decision? A wildlife biologist who studied the genetics and the behavior and all the other aspects of what goes into making a wildlife population unique, or a judge armed with Webster's dictionary and case law, an example that is really relevant to us here at 90 miles from needles, Congress directed the Department of Interior and the Federal Aviation Administration to cut down noise from aircraft flying over grand Canyon National park, in the words of the law, specifically to provide for substantial restoration of the natural quiet.

0:21:32 - (Chris Clarke): And Kagan asked, how much noise is consistent with that? How much of the park for how many hours a day has to be that quiet for the substantial restoration to be met? And she also talked about the chevron case itself. Does this term stationary source refer to each pollution emitting piece of equipment within a plant, or does it refer to the entire plant? There are plenty of common sense arguments that you can make in favor of the Chevron deference doctrine, a lot of them having to do with who is the person that's best qualified to make decisions about how to implement a law in the real world, somebody that is a law school graduate and practicing attorney and judge who hasn't paid attention to a biology class since they were 17 years old, or somebody that has actually studied the precise topic, gotten an advanced degree, perhaps worked for a decade or five.

0:22:24 - (Chris Clarke): Now, this would be one thing if this were just a purely legal argument, a purely academic dispute. But in actual fact, reversing the Chevron case takes place in the context of at least 40 years of conservative ideologues in the congress, in the executive branch, in the judicial branch, who are seeking to limit what agencies can do to keep corporations from making money. The nice thing about being an environmental activist, just to take the example that we're most concerned with here, is that for the most part, science backs us up, and not the polluters, not the developers. You start talking to the scientists and they don't always agree, there's going to be arguments around the edges. Sometimes there's going to be arguments that can't really be resolved that are central to the very concept of what you're discussing. But for the most part, facts are facts, and for the most part, the facts support the environmentalist premise. And so people that stand to lose money from protection of the environment, protection of worker safety and workers’ rights, protection of civil rights, protection against drinking poisonous water and breathing tainted air have to change the conversation.

0:23:39 - (Chris Clarke): It is worth noting, I think, that the very case that brought this about, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raymondo, concerned a herring fishing company. Loper bright enterprises fisheries are depleted. Fisheries have to be managed aggressively in order to keep from utterly crashing out the fish stocks. Cod is an example of this. Lobsters are an example of this. There's just a bunch of different species of fish that we cannot take all of them that we find and chop them up and turn them into breaded fish sticks. Below a certain level, populations crash. It is the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management act of 1976 that's at issue here. Magnuson Stevens was revised in zero seven to add annual catch limits to end over fishing. Magnuson Stevens is an environmental protection success story. In July 2020, National Marine Fisheries Service published a report showing that the number of us fish stocks subject to overfishing was at an all-time low in 2019.

0:24:42 - (Chris Clarke): 93% are not overfished. Compare that to the worldwide levels where about a third of fish stocks are being fished at biologically unsustainable levels, and that seems like a pretty good return on your investment. One of the ways that the national marine Fisheries Service achieved this great result was by requiring independent observers on fishing boats. This is an interpretation of some provisions of Magnuson Stevens that was allowed under chevron. So how does loper bright Enterprises v. Raimondo fit into this? This lawsuit was filed by loper Bright Enterprises.

0:25:14 - (Chris Clarke): Gina Raimondo was at the time the director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, so her name is on the lawsuit. Loper bright Enterprises sued because the National Marine Fisheries Service had decided that individual fishing boat owners needed to shell out the money to cover the cost of having those independent monitors on the boat. Now you can argue whether or not this is a good idea. It does seem a little burdensome just on first glance, especially when you consider that there are a lot of people running fishing boats that are not rich.

0:25:46 - (Chris Clarke): The monitors required by the National Marine Fisheries Service often made considerably more money in a day than the people running the fishing boat did. So I understand the resentment and the reluctance to pay. And what's left out of most of the reporting I've seen is that the National Marine Fisheries Service had decided to make the fishing boat owners pay the cost of the monitors on board because their own budget to pay for those monitors had been slashed. In Congress, National Marine Fisheries Service no longer had the money to pay for this incredibly successful program, but they were still obligated by law to keep it going. And so they came to, I assume reluctantly, to the conclusion that they needed to charge the fishing boat owners for the cost of the monitoring program.

0:26:30 - (Chris Clarke): And can I just point out that the monitoring program actually helps those fishing boat owners make money in the long term. I mean, 93% of the fish stocks that are controlled by this program are not overfished. That means that there's more fish to go around. It means that there are fewer limits on fishing. So it's not completely unreasonable to ask the fishing boat owners to pay for the monitoring program.

0:26:55 - (Chris Clarke): But I get that it's tricky. It's optically a little weird, but it's really important context that we need to remember is that the reason that this lawsuit came about, the reason that the National Marine Fisheries Service decided it had to take a sort of Hail Mary approach and ask fishing boat owners to pay for the monitors, is that Congress had slashed the agency’s budget. Congress yanked the funding out of this incredibly successful program.

0:27:28 - (Chris Clarke): Those monitors were shining a light on practices that certain people would rather remain hidden and Congress didn’t want them out on the boats. Kind of like the if we don't test for Covid, then our numbers will go down argument. You know, if we don't monitor for overfishing, there's plenty of fish. Until there aren't. It's not overregulation, it's not socialism, it's not executive branch overreach. That's really the problem for these people. It's inconvenient facts. Inconvenient facts will doom the conservative project, and they can't have that.

0:28:04 - (Chris Clarke): So they declare war on facts. Now this war on facts is not a new thing. It didn't start in the last couple of years. It didn't start with the 2016 presidential election and the subsequent administration. Todd Wilkinson, the author, traces it back at least as far as 1962, when Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring came out warning the dangers of rampant pesticide use and its impacts on wildlife populations, especially birds.

0:28:37 - (Chris Clarke): The chemical companies and their tame agency allies couldn't argue with her science, so they undercut her in every direction possible. Todd Wilkinson's book entitled science under siege, which came out in 1998, is a really good resource on this general topic. It's a bit dated necessarily, but it's a wonderful profile of a number of expert scientists, environmental scientists, who were too attached to the truth and too attached to actually getting their job done, doing the job that they were hired to do, that the agencies they worked for retaliated, often at the direction of corporations that had basically captured those agencies.

0:29:18 - (Chris Clarke): The book is definitely worth a read. And up in the beginning of it. There are a bunch of tactics that Todd Wilkinson lays out, citing Thomas Devine, who wrote a report called the whistleblower survival Guide. And these tactics are common to agencies that are faced with a whistleblower in their ranks that's doing things like saying, yes, this planned oil field will in fact harm the caribou, or these solar panels are going to destroy tortoise habitat, or whatever controversy of the moment you might remember from the last 25 years or so. One of the tactics that Wilkinson features he calls substitute democracy for the scientific method.

0:30:02 - (Chris Clarke): And I'll just read Todd's words here for a moment. Employ the bureaucratic equivalent of mob rule. A group of peers who will not challenge the dysfunctional status quo and who are loyal to corrupt managers outvotes the whistleblower in management decisions and thereby subdues him or her. A more subtle variation of this tactic is to misuse peer review as a discrediting tactic by packing the allegedly objective panel with people who have a particular bias.

0:30:33 - (Chris Clarke): This is precisely what the Supreme Court is attempting to mandate with its reversal of chevron. By taking this type of policy decision out of the hands of agencies and putting it in the hands of predominantly lower federal courts, the Supreme Court is declaring war on expertise. The Supreme Court is handing over some of the most important decisions this society has to make as we face climate change and an extinction crisis and growing racist right wing, and handing it to a class of people who are by their very nature, unqualified to make these decisions as qualified as they may be to be federal court judges, which is not always because we're talking political appointees. We're talking, like I said, the Eileen cannons of the world are going to be ruling on whether or not you can inhale tritium, and that is just not the right direction to go in.

0:31:35 - (Chris Clarke): This is a pro corporate decision. It's an anti-regulatory decision. And the best thing that I can say about it is that agencies have been moving away from Chevron a little bit as justification for some of the policies that they make. This may not be the catastrophe that some of us are fearing. It is just because there are workarounds. The Administrative Procedures act provides some leeway for agencies who want to set policy that is not, strictly speaking, delineated in the law. There are some federal laws that are more susceptible to a challenge based on overruling chevron than others.

0:32:13 - (Chris Clarke): If Congress took care to write some specifics into a law that helps the agencies, there are moves to think about rewriting some of the laws that might be vulnerable to pressure from a post chevron legal landscape. Amending those laws to expressly give the agencies the power to make the decisions that they need to make is potentially a very useful workaround, assuming that we can get anything through Congress, which is a huge assumption.

0:32:39 - (Chris Clarke): The big result of this decision by the Supreme Court is that we are likely in the next few years to see what I think is technically referred to as a metric fuck ton of lawsuits attempting to overturn regulations based on the end of chevron deference. This could slow down projects that have to do with the environment or public health or social justice or education or disaster relief in the desert. I would be paying very close attention to groundwater.

0:33:12 - (Chris Clarke): I would pay very close attention to the build out of solar and wind and geothermal critical minerals, mining and transmission lines going across federal land. There are ways that agencies do things that are not set down in law that may well be vulnerable to lawsuit. The devil is going to be in the details, and some of the details won't show up for years. And the good news is that there are a whole lot of progressive attorneys and trained legal minds on our side that are looking at this and figuring out how we get business done in this new environment.

0:34:22 - (Chris Clarke): And that wraps up this episode of 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I want to thank Dan Lapay and Robert Hand for joining the ranks of our contributors to our funding. It's very much appreciated. Both of you also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover artist, and Martine Mancha, our artist artist. Our theme music, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. You can donate to us by going to nine 0 mile from needles.com

0:34:54 - (Chris Clarke): donate. There are a number of different ways you can help us out there. One thing that we will be opening up by the end of this month is the Desert Advocacy media network online bookstore, where you will be able to find Todd Wilkinson's science under siege and a bunch of other books, all of which we think you'll benefit from reading. Working with bookshop.org to provide an alternative to the big behemoth online bookstore, you'll be able to pick a book and buy it from your local independent bookstore, and we'll get a little cut. It's a win win win.

0:35:25 - (Chris Clarke): It's a win for the bookstore, a win for us, and a win for you because you get a cool new book. In the meantime, please take care of yourself. Stay hydrated. It's especially important right now. Don't drive into running water. Turn around, don't drown, and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.