S3E32: Vote, Engage, and Protect Our Desert

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 90 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.

0:00:43 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe, and welcome to another episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I am your host, Chris Clarke, and this is going to be a little bit shorter of an episode than usual because people have other things on their minds today. This episode will be released on election day 2024. The desert advocacy Media Network, which is the mothership of 90 miles from Needles, is a nonprofit. It's a 501C3 and so we cannot legally endorse any candidate.

0:01:15 - (Chris Clarke): However, y'all probably know which way I'm leaning and I can say that there are going to be threats to the deserts regardless of who wins. I think one of the candidates is more problematic than the other, but the point is we get to choose which set of problems we contend with in the desert, and that's just for the presidential election. Plus, there are a bunch of down ballot elections going on wherever you happen to be.

0:01:37 - (Chris Clarke): Depending on which state you're in, there may be voter initiatives. The important thing is that you get out there after paying some attention to who's running for what and what they stand for. You vote your conscience and then you remind yourself that that's the easy part. Once you're done patting yourself on the back or putting that sticker on your lapel, once your ballot's in, the real work starts.

0:02:01 - (Chris Clarke): Voting isn't the be all and end all of our duty to each other. As common residents of this troubled but fascinating country, we need to hold the feet of whomever we elect to the fire to make sure that they fulfill the promises that we like, that they abandon the promises that we don't like, and that they respond to unanticipated crises and opportunities in ways that make us proud as opposed to making us feel sick to our stomachs.

0:02:31 - (Chris Clarke): Please vote. I also want to mention that in the wake of the election, probably as the ballots are still being counted for at least a couple of races, including the big one on Saturday, November 9th. This coming Saturday at 10am I will be speaking with writer Susan Lang as part of the 29 Palms Book Festival at the Old School House Museum, 6760 National Park Drive in 29 Palms. At 10 o'clock, Susan and I will be talking to each other on the topic of desert Literature, A Journey Through Essential Reads, and a description of that Talk from the 29 Book Festivals Eventbrite page, which we will link in the show. Notes says 10:00am Desert Literature Journey Through Essential Reads this session features desert preservation activists Susan Lang and Chris Clark, who will share their essential desert literature reads. Chris Clark, Host of the 90 miles from Needles podcast, explores the American Southwest ecosystems through conversations on conservation, land management and environmental justice.

0:03:36 - (Chris Clarke): Susan Lang, author of a trilogy about life in the Southwestern wilderness, is a Willa Award winner and faculty emeritus at Yavapai College. Together, they offer insights into the literature that captures the spirit and challenges of the desert. And truth be told, I'm still figuring out which essential reads I'm going to talk about after that. On November 30th at 1pm I will be speaking at the Shoshone museum in Shoshone, California, right on Highway 127, right in the middle of Shoshone. You can't miss it.

0:04:09 - (Chris Clarke): Get anywhere in Shoshone and look around and you'll see the museum. And I'm going to be speaking, I assume, to a number of people who are new to the desert because Shoshone is a tourist town. That should be fun, trying to open some minds and open some eyes and win some converts. And that's 1pm in Shoshone on November 30th. Hope to see you there. And as always, I want to remind everybody that this podcast and the Desert Advocacy Media Network is run on individual donations from listeners. People just like like you. We don't get any corporate sponsorships yet. We won't turn them down if it's the right company. But similarly, with foundation grants, we wouldn't turn the right ones down. But right now it's entirely listeners that are paying for all of this. If you're not doing that yet, you can check out 90miles from needles.com

0:04:56 - (Chris Clarke): donate. There are a few different options there for you to make donations of the size and frequency that you like, whether it's one time or repeating annually or monthly. You can also text the word needles N E E D L EE s to 53555 and you will be joining the ranks of our supporters, including our newest supporters, David Dasinger and Elizabeth Wolf. David and Elizabeth, thank you very much for joining the family.

0:05:25 - (Chris Clarke): We are hoping to do some great things with your support in 2025. And remember, we're also still hoping that you'll send us your social media a bowl videos from listeners or fans of the podcast that tell us exactly why you like what we're doing 30 seconds or so. Remember to smile. Be somewhere attractive if possible. Either a really nice part of your house or somewhere outside. Doesn't have to be in the desert. In fact, showing that we have supporters outside the desert is really important. So those of you in the Costa Rican rainforest, you are emphatically included in this request.

0:06:00 - (Chris Clarke): If you get those to us in the next week or two, we'll be able to put them together in a compelling and aesthetically pleasing form and use it to encourage people to donate to us for giving Tuesday and through the year end. Once you've got a video ready and don't worry about editing it, I can take care of that. You can send it to us through any number of means, probably the easiest being uploading it to Google Docs and then sending the link to chris0miles from needles.com

0:06:27 - (Chris Clarke): so we got a couple of questions over the last few months about just what we consider North American deserts to be. These mostly come from people who want to know if we will cover something, but they're not sure whether it falls within the definition of a desert issue. And so I thought I'd talk a little bit about just how fuzzy the competing definitions of desert all are, and just how much latitude that fuzziness gives us in covering what we consider to be desert issues.

0:06:56 - (Chris Clarke): If you were to turn to your favorite search engine and type in something like what are the deserts of North America? You would almost certainly get an answer along the lines of There are four deserts in North America. The Chihuahuan Desert will sometimes be listed as the largest. The Great Basin Desert will at other times be listed as the largest. The boundaries of both of those deserts are subject to dispute, and in fact there are people that say the Great Basin is not a desert, but is rather a sagebrush steppe.

0:07:29 - (Chris Clarke): I think the easiest way to approach it right now is to say that the Chihuahuan Desert is the largest hot desert in North America. The Great Basin Desert is the largest cold desert in North America. Wikipedia has the chihuahuan desert at 140,000 square miles, about the size of Montana and the same source. Wikipedia says the Great Basin desert is around 190,000 square miles. That's the size of California, plus enough leftover to fit West Virginia in.

0:08:01 - (Chris Clarke): There's disagreement as to precisely what should be included in the Great Basin Desert, which is not the same thing as the hydrological Great Basin, which is defined by where water flows when it hits the surface of the earth. The Great Basin has internal drainage, which means that if water falls in the Great Basin, it either soaks into the ground or evaporates into the air. More on that later. Or flows to a saline lake or a sump. That's different from, and I think, larger than the Great Basin Desert, which is, at least in theory, a more ecologically defined area.

0:08:36 - (Chris Clarke): Our two smaller deserts, the Sonoran, only a little bit smaller than the chihuahuan desert. That's 120,000 square miles, about the size of New Mexico. And the Mojave Desert, the smallest and hottest desert in North America, at 22,000 square miles. That's a little smaller than West Virginia. And that is the list of The Mostly Canonical 4 Deserts in North America. All that said, there are a number of other regions defined as deserts, either in the public imagination or in older literature, where biogeographers might have updated their definition of what a place is. But people still refer to a landscape as a desert because it was described that way in a book in 1926.

0:09:23 - (Chris Clarke): Probably the best example of a place that's widely considered a desert, even though it doesn't necessarily fall within the strict definition of deserts, is the Colorado Plateau, centered on the Four Corners area. Red rock country. You know, think Monument Valley, Mesa Verde National Park, Shiprock, Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings, Arches and Canyonlands national parks. The grand canyon, it's about 130,000 square miles, again, a little bit larger than New Mexico.

0:09:53 - (Chris Clarke): There's also the Baja California Desert, which is often enough taken to be part of the Sonoran Desert. It's entirely in Mexico. Includes a significant portion of the Baja Peninsula. It's home to cardone cactus and boojums and peninsula pronghorn. Bunch of really different cool stuff down there. And then in the cold desert areas, sometimes lumped in with a Great Basin and sometimes not, there are places like the Wyoming Basin, the Columbia Basin, the Snake River Plain. There's even an area that's considered by many people to be a desert, which has a few square miles inside the State of Washington, but mostly is within British Columbia.

0:10:29 - (Chris Clarke): Called the Thompson Plateau or the Thompson Okanogan Plateau, it's a place you may never have heard of. The lower elevations of the Thompson Plateau have native rattlesnakes, which feels deserty, but they're not exclusive to the desert. But there are also prickly pear cacti, sagebrush, even introduced exotic tumbleweed, Russian thistle. And so you can understand why people might call it a desert. Let's talk about some of those definitions of desert, the one that you see most often. The simplest definition and the easiest one to determine for a piece of Landscape is that if you get 10 inches or less of precipitation in a typical year, you're in the desert.

0:11:07 - (Chris Clarke): This definition has the advantage of being extremely easy to figure out. Basically all you need is a coffee can and a ruler. And if you go out and measure after each storm and keep a running telly, you can determine whether or not you're in the desert. There's a little bit more complicated definition that some people like. Under the more complicated definition, a desert is an area where potential evapotranspiration exceeds the amount of precipitation you get.

0:11:33 - (Chris Clarke): Evapotranspiration means evaporating and transpiring. Transpiring is what plants do when they suck water out of the soil and let the water vapor come out through their pores into the atmosphere. Evaporation is just what it sounds like. The total of transpiration and evaporation is evapotranspiration, which is the total water demand. If you get less water in precipitation than the total demand, according to this definition, you're in a desert. There are a couple of problems with each of these first two definitions. One's that 10 inches is an arbitrary figure. I think basically based on the fact that we have five fingers on each hand, 10 is an attractive number. It's a round number.

0:12:12 - (Chris Clarke): There are places, however, that are universally regarded as in the desert that get more than 10 inches of rain. Tucson's one of them. Tucson gets about 10 and a half inches of rain. Nobody's going to argue that Tucson is slightly not desert. But if you go with places where the potential evapotranspiration exceeds precipitation, then you're going to have to take a significant amount of land east of the Rocky Mountains and call that desert western Nebraska, eastern Colorado, some of Kansas, places like that.

0:12:40 - (Chris Clarke): And you know, this area was once called the Great American Desert, but that was an even more different definition of the word desert, which nobody uses anymore, which basically just means no trees. There's vegetative cover over the whole area. Thick grassland, short grass prairie, lots of lakes and rivers and things like that. But potential evapotranspiration exceeds the amount of precipitation. The other problem with the evapotranspiration definition is that that's really hard to measure. The formulas for evaluating potential evapotranspiration are complex enough that I cannot understand them.

0:13:16 - (Chris Clarke): In peer reviewed papers you'll see formulas that allow you to calculate the amount of potential evapotranspiration in an area. And they make my eyes glaze over. And I don't blame people for going with A coffee can and ruler definition. Clearly, neither of these two definitions are particularly precise. This is basically because nature is complex. We like to pigeonhole things as a species. We like to have neat categories.

0:13:42 - (Chris Clarke): Whether we're categorizing species, defining what a subspecies is, trying to determine whether something's part of an El Nino cycle or a La Nina cycle, if it's kind of on the border of the two. There are a lot of fuzzy boundaries in nature that a lot of the time we just can't cope with when we're looking for simple definitions. And the definition of desert is one of those things. A third definition, and I think it might be the more popularly accepted definition.

0:14:08 - (Chris Clarke): I don't know if there's been studies on this at all. And this definition covers, to some extent, places like the Thompson Plateau and a couple of other putative deserts even farther north. That we will talk about is that the desert is an area with bare soil. You see this in naming places like the Black Rock Desert, which is a saline playa also called a Salina. A nice word. People should use that more often. There are places like the 40 Mile Desert, Smoke Creek Desert, which is essentially the same as the Black Rock Desert. It's just there's a little bottleneck between the two.

0:14:45 - (Chris Clarke): The Carson Desert, the San Rafael Desert, which is within the Colorado Plateau. There's the Painted Desert in Arizona, which is part of the Hopi and Navajo reservations. And Petrified Forest National Park, White Sands. And the Chihuahuan Desert, the Red Desert in Wyoming, which is itself an interesting place. It includes the Continental Divide Basin, which is where the Continental Divide splits in two and surrounds another area of internal drainage outside the Great Basin.

0:15:13 - (Chris Clarke): There are also deserts by this definition that are, let's just say, counterintuitive. There's a place called the Carcross Desert, which is literally about a square mile outside of Carcross, Yukon, Canada, which is basically a series of sand dunes left over from Pleistocene glaciers which pulverized the local rock, turned it into sand. Carcross Desert is popularly called the world's smallest desert.

0:15:43 - (Chris Clarke): I'm not sure what the precipitation is in the Carcross Desert, but it's not named for lack of precip. It's named for sand dunes. There's also the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes in Kobuk Valley national park in Alaska. Three different sets of sand dunes on the south side of the Kobuk River. And basically that's glacial till sand generated by glaciers grinding down on the landscape during the Ice Age. This is a really similar definition to the one that lies behind phrases like food desert and cultural desert.

0:16:13 - (Chris Clarke): Places where your options are severely limited. Just the notion of absence. And of course that's a problematic definition as well, because there's actually a lot of stuff in deserts. Deserts are not just sand dunes. They're not just seemingly blank expanses of sand or gravel. The idea that deserts are characterized by things not being there has led to a lot of disturbance and development, destruction of desert landscapes.

0:16:40 - (Chris Clarke): It's good for colloquial definitions of places like the Black Rock Desert or the Painted Desert. And it's not really so good for learning about what's in actual deserts. One last definition, sort of sidelong suggested by geographer Diana K. Davis, is that deserts are non equilibrium ecosystems. What does that mean? Well, you know, that whole thing about the balance of nature, that there's this self healing, self correcting, harmonious equilibrium.

0:17:10 - (Chris Clarke): It's basically wishful thinking and a lot of scientists outside of the environmental movement have abandoned it. It characterized a lot of 20th century thought about ecosystems, deserts and otherwise. And we're learning couple of things. One, as we monkey wrench the world's climate, a lot of that apparent stability was really the result of climatic stability. More or less the same amount of rainfall each year, more or less the same amount of days of sunshine, more or less the same temperatures.

0:17:37 - (Chris Clarke): There's variation for sure. I mean, living back east, I heard things all the time like this is the coldest winter since 43, you know, that kind of thing. But the arid lands of the world, and especially in North America, don't have enough stability to provide the comforting illusion that there's a steady state kind of ecosystem system in place. The other big problem with the balance of nature idea is that at least in North America, it erases the work of native people who, regardless of where you lived in the North American continent prior to colonization, human beings were actively intervening in the environment in ways that made it more stable, that preserved stability.

0:18:20 - (Chris Clarke): So anyway, about deserts, what Diana Davis says in her book the Arid Lands History, Polar knowledge, which we have referred to a number of times in episodes of this podcast, is that deserts are non equilibrium environments. And she says abiotic drivers like rainfall are much more important than things like, well, for instance, grazing pressure in determining vegetation cover. And she cites ecologists Ellison and Swift going back as far as 1988 to say that a non equilibrium ecosystem is defined when the coefficient of variation of inter annual rainfall exceeds 33%.

0:18:58 - (Chris Clarke): What does that pile of jargon mean? It means that there isn't a predictable average annual rainfall that bears any real relation to actual rainfall year to year, because the difference between one year and the next and the next after that and the next after that generally exceeds one third. If the amount of variation in inter annual rainfall is more than 1/3, then the landscape we're talking about doesn't operate at equilibrium.

0:19:26 - (Chris Clarke): And I promised you a shorter episode. So we will save the dive into what equilibrium or the lack thereof means for deserts. But basically the idea being if the amount of annual rainfall varies by more than a third from year to year, that's not a bad definition of the desert. Or at least it's an good additional criterion that we could add to things like the evapotranspiration standard or the 10 inches of rain standard. And so here at 90 miles from Needles, we are in a pretty luxurious position when it comes to figuring out what we can cover, because we can justify pretty much whatever we want.

0:20:00 - (Chris Clarke): Anything from Kobuk Valley down to the southern end of the Chihuahuan Desert. This means we've got a lot of desert to cover. We've got a lot of work to do. We're going to do that with your help. But we do need your help. And that wraps up yet another episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martin Mancha, our podcast artwork guy.

0:20:25 - (Chris Clarke): We have again, David Dasinger and Elizabeth Wolf. Thank you so much for joining the crew of donors to this thing. Our theme song, Moody Western is by Brightside Studio 2025 is going to be exciting. I guess we will find out what kinds of desert issues we're going to be facing at some point within a week or two after this goes live. Whether that's a continuation of the onslaught of solar and lithium development, or abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Endangered Species act and the National Environmental Policy act and turning the entire regulatory system into a corporate owned kleptocracy.

0:21:05 - (Chris Clarke): Either way, we're going to have a lot of work to do. So breathe deep, try not to doomscroll. Vote, vote, vote. If you haven't already, we have a whole lot of people working on these issues that we just want to elevate their voices with your help. And this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. So take care of yourself and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. RA.

0:23:39 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.