S4E11: Beauty Meets Struggle: The Endangered Treasures of BLM Lands

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. It's time for 90 miles from needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe and welcome to 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host Chris Clark, and we.

0:00:53 - (Chris Clarke): Have for you today what I think.

0:00:54 - (Chris Clarke): You'Ll find a very interesting interview with Josh Jackson, author of a new book coming out in June on BLM lands in California. This book is called the Enduring A Journey into California's Public Lands. It looks to be the first of a series of treatments of BLM land in different states in the west and you can pre order this book or look at the reviews anyway at our bookstore@9zeromilesfromneedles.com books. I got a sneak peek at it prior to release and it is a lovely book.

0:01:23 - (Chris Clarke): I am so happy to bring you that interview, but first, I've got to confess it this has been an extremely difficult past week for the Desert Advocacy Media Network and 90 miles from Needles on the political front, we were really glad to see so many people come out on April 5th. I was with a few hundred of my closest friends in downtown Joshua Tree for a couple hours on the 5th and public support was really wonderful.

0:01:47 - (Chris Clarke): We had people driving by, honking all the time, raising fists of support or peace signs, including people that were driving for work, like semi drivers and delivery truck drivers, EMTs. We were just very happy to have three or 400 people there doing our part to build that 5.2 million people that demonstrated nationwide.

0:02:08 - (Chris Clarke): And as for me, I'm going to.

0:02:10 - (Chris Clarke): Be back out there again on April 19th. Check our show notes for a link to a website where you can find what's going on near you on April 19th, the next coordinated nationwide day of protest against this incredibly destructive regime in Washington. And that same regime caused us to have a really bad week. We were very fortunate and grateful to have been awarded a grant by an organization called California Humanities.

0:02:36 - (Chris Clarke): We had put in a proposal to put together a documentary film on the Amargosa Basin. California Humanities decided that that project was important enough to give us $50,000 in matching funds to do that documentary. We would have had to raise another $50,000, but this was a huge break for an organization that generally has an annual budget between 8 and $12,000. This was really good news. And then the National Endowment for the Humanities pulled all Their funding from not just California Humanities, but all other similar groups across the country.

0:03:09 - (Chris Clarke): These cuts aren't just getting in the way of us putting together a documentary on the Amargosa. They are endangering libraries, especially in small rural towns. They're endangering museums and other cultural institutions across the country. And it's a pretty significant threat to this organization and to the podcast you're listening to right now. The funding was not only going to help us publicize the current existential threats to what's probably the most biologically diverse few square miles in the North American desert, but it would also have had a few line items in there that would have really made this more sustainable for the people that are working on it, myself included. A relatively meager but nonetheless much needed income for a couple of months would have been part of this, and that has fallen by the wayside. It may be that Cal Humanities or somebody else reverses these funding cuts through a class action suit or something like that, but we can't count on that.

0:04:04 - (Chris Clarke): And right now, the Amargosa Basin is facing existential threats from mining for lithium and gold and, you know, in a sense, mining for sunlight. A delay in funding this project means a delay in bringing more public attention to the issues there in the Amargosa. And you know, I have to admit, I am pretty much beside myself at this development. Between those horrible cuts and having a few people very apologetically dropping off our donor list, saying things like, I really wish I didn't have to do this. I love you guys. And a few of our really important vendors have increased prices in response to costs that have already increased for them due to the tariffs.

0:04:42 - (Chris Clarke): As a result of those price increases and losing a couple of donors, our bank account was in the double digits all of last week. If we make it through the rest of the year, it's going to be because people like you heard this message or messages like it, and stepped up and went to 9zero miles from needles.com donate. You don't have to have a spare 50k that you want to drop on us. We'll gladly accept that if you do.

0:05:08 - (Chris Clarke): Have a spare 50k.

0:05:09 - (Chris Clarke): But 10,000 people giving us 5 bucks would be even better, to tell you the truth. In other words, if you wanted to join our newest supporters, Jean Hooper, Daniel Bell and Hazel Videon, now would be a good time. And just for the sake of completion, we have one other donor who wrote a note to me saying, no need to read my name. I'm going to assume that that's a request not to read the name rather than just saying they don't mind either way just to play it safe. But this person made a generous donation and they said supporter from Prescott, Arizona. By the way, I enjoyed season four Episode ten as a biologist, that's a great note.

0:05:47 - (Chris Clarke): Season four Episode ten is the most recent episode other than this one. We talked about cool desert science in that episode. Thank you so much for that good note. It was a really good week to get a note like that. 90 miles from needles.com donate okay, let's get to our interview with Josh Jackson, author of the forthcoming the Enduring A Journey into California's Public Lands.

0:06:12 - (Chris Clarke): We are very lucky to have Josh Jackson joining us in our virtual studio. Josh is a writer who is the author of the forthcoming book the Enduring A Journey into California's Public Lands that is out later this year from Heyday Press in Berkeley. And Josh is also behind the Forgotten lands project at forgotten. What's the URL for forgotten lands project?

0:06:43 - (Josh Jackson): It's just forgottenlandsproject.com oh that's easy. Yeah. And the book comes out June 24th.

0:06:50 - (Chris Clarke): So not too far away. And we will have a way that you can order that book that helps both Josh and this podcast later in the episode. Josh, thank you for joining us.

0:07:02 - (Josh Jackson): Hey, I'm a big fan of the pod. I've been listening for a long time, so it's a real honor to be on with you here.

0:07:08 - (Chris Clarke): That is definitely mutual. And just wanted to first off talk a little bit about the book. It's not exclusively a desert book but but we'll still talk about it. It's got a lot of desert content in it, but why don't you give the idea of what the book is and how the idea occurred to you.

0:07:31 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, since 2/3 of BLM land in California is in the desert, a lot of the book has some desert in it. Yeah, I think the for me, this whole project started back in 2015. I had two small kids at home. They were five and two at the time and we just had another child, a newborn. I was looking for a place to camp and as with campgrounds around Los Angeles, pretty much everything I knew about was already booked solid for a last minute camping trip. And I reached out to my friend and asked him like if he had any suggestions and he said why don't you camp on some BLM land?

0:08:05 - (Josh Jackson): And that was the first time in 2015 that I had ever heard of the term BLM land. Even as an avid outdoors person who grew up camping, hiking, hunting, I had never Even I didn't even know what it was. And so of course my next question was, where is that? And he said, I think it's out in the desert somewhere. He didn't even have a great understanding of what it was. But that sort of was the beginning for me.

0:08:34 - (Josh Jackson): I got on the BLM website, which felt like going back into the pixelated days of domains, and found a place called the Trona Pinnacles out in the middle of the Mojave and thought, hey, that looks like a place I can camp. And I loaded up my Honda Element and my two kids and we hauled out to the desert and spent a night out there. And that was my first experience. It was incredible, to say the least. I had no idea that these lands first of all existed, let alone that they were open to the public and that they were part of our public lands that are shared by all of us.

0:09:07 - (Josh Jackson): But with two young kids and a third newborn in tow, I really wasn't able to get out very much. We did mostly state park camping. And then so I just started reading. I read a ton of books that helped me understand pour a foundation of understanding for BLM lands. What they were, where they were, what they involved, the history of them. I still had a lot of questions, and I always talked to my wife about getting out to these places to see them firsthand. And of course, when the pandemic hit, my furniture business orders started almost drying up immediately. We had a retail store we had to shut down as a non essential business. And so my wife was actually an ER nurse at the time. So things were pretty crazy for us around those early pandemic days. But because her shifts gave her extended days off in between, and my kids were older at that point, we thought, hey, let's get out there and start seeing these places. So I have a huge 1989 BLM wall map that lives in my house, and I started just writing down names of all the yellow shaded areas on the map and trying to put together sort of an itinerary, a game plan for covering as much of California as I could.

0:10:20 - (Josh Jackson): And my first trip was in April of 2020. And it just grew from there. I started documenting maybe a year and a half into the trips, I started documenting on Instagram some of the places I was seeing and photographing along the way. And then out of that, I started thinking like, maybe this could be a book. And so I wrote up a proposal and sent it off to several publishers. And heyday was always my first on the list. I love I know you've had Obi on the podcast. I love Obi Kaufman's books. And Laura Cunningham. I also had read her book back in the day, so I had a familiarity with Hayday. And yeah, luckily for me, they signed on to tell the story of these landscapes. And that wasn't until 2023. And these things take a long time. Yeah. Over the last five years, I think I've camped 110 nights. I've visited every single parcel of BLM land in California that I could get to, from Nevada to Arizona, on the borders of all those states, Oregon, down to Mexico and across to the Pacific. So I've definitely gone out there and seen these places for myself.

0:11:26 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. And I had a lot of fun looking at some of the places that you describe where I've spent some time hiking over the last four or five years and before that, too. But the pandemic kind of raised the stakes for I got to get the hell out of this house. It's a real treat to see some of these places that are, I think, really deserving of more attention. There's always that creative tension between keep this place a secret so that it's not overrun and at the same time, publicize it so that people will learn to love it and then want to defend it.

0:11:59 - (Josh Jackson): So, yeah, it's a delicate. A delicate balance between that, like, intersection of recreation and conservation. I know. But, yeah, the thing that really drives my whole project is Senegalese forester baba Diom. In 1968, he said, in the end, we will conserve only what we love. And I just wholeheartedly buy into that sentiment. I think that the only way we're going to protect these places is if we love them.

0:12:25 - (Josh Jackson): And the only way to love them is to experience them. And the book is all about. It's not really a guidebook per se. It's more about my experience, going from someone who didn't know anything about BLM lands, didn't know anything about the desert and some of these other landscapes and my experience walking through them. But the idea is that people will hopefully read the book, see the photographs, want to get out there and see some of these places for themselves, and like you said, hopefully fall in love with them like I have, and then want to protect them when they are under attack, as they are, as they have been really, since 1946. I will say they've had.

0:13:01 - (Josh Jackson): There's been different threats over the years. Like, famously, Bernard DeVoto in the 1950s and 40s was writing about the land grab that was happening. And then the 80s sagebrush rebellion and the Malheur Wildlife Refuge takeover. There's been different iterations of the same threats from privatization and land transfer movements that wish to dispose of these lands. I think the book couldn't have come out at a, at a more strategic time than right now, as these landscapes are as under threat as they've ever been. I think.

0:13:35 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. And it's something that, and I think this is part of what you address with the Forgotten Lands project, but it's something that I wouldn't say it's escaped notice by people that are interested in protecting public lands. But the BLM runs a distant third in attention when it comes to people.

0:13:54 - (Chris Clarke): Being outraged about layoffs.

0:13:56 - (Chris Clarke): And the BLM has had the layoffs.

0:13:58 - (Chris Clarke): That all the other interior agencies have had.

0:14:01 - (Chris Clarke): I wonder if you have been able to get some stats on just exactly what the BLM has been facing with this latest round.

0:14:09 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, you're right. There's the lesser known, lesser visited public lands that we have. I would. I wrote in the book, but I always talk about it, too. If drilling company wanted to come to Yosemite and drill on Half Dome, there'd be riots in the streets. But then when a gold mining operation wants to set up on Conglomerate Mesa or in the Bodie Hills on BLM lands, it's like there's very few people that even know what's going on.

0:14:33 - (Josh Jackson): I think the anonymity that once protected these landscapes now works against them. And even when all the layoffs happened, the Valentine's day massacre, within two weeks, I think on March 1st, 20,000 people protested at 145 different national park units, saying, hey, what's going on? But at the Same time, it's 800 BLM employees were also fired. And that's like a big deal. And then the threat to these landscapes in terms of selling them off or turning them into development for housing, there's just not a lot of talk about it. They're under the radar.

0:15:08 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah. So, I mean, 800 employees were terminated at the BLM, luckily, because the two different judges repealed those firings and mentioned them as illegal. I think almost all of those BLM employees have gotten their jobs back.

0:15:23 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, good.

0:15:23 - (Josh Jackson): But that doesn't count the. And I know you and Kristen talked about this on that great podcast a month ago.

0:15:30 - (Chris Clarke): Just a quick parenthetical here. Josh is talking about an episode that we did with my former NPCA colleague Kristen Brengle, which went live on February 26, episode five of season four, with the title Doge Layoffs are Sabotaging Public lands. You can listen to that by going to 90miles needles.com check it out.

0:15:50 - (Josh Jackson): But 2,700 employees at the Interior have resigned by participating in Trump's Fork in the Road program. So it's not necessarily clear how many of those employees that resigned were at the blm, but you can imagine at least a quarter of them were BLM employees. So that basically guaranteed the fork in the road, guaranteed them full pay through September if they would leave the job now. And of course, you can imagine the chaos, fear and uncertainty if you were one of the civil servants who stayed behind and still is working there.

0:16:23 - (Josh Jackson): It's like having a boss who not only believes you're part of the bureaucratic waste, but is also extremely incompetent and doesn't really understand what you do. So I met a lot of civil servants at the BLM in the last five years, and I've talked to a lot of them over the last couple of weeks, and it sounds pretty dire. It's really unfortunate what's going on. And the. I don't know if you knew that the Doge plans to close the BLM field office in Ukiah in California. They manage a lot of land up in Northwest California, including the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, which I write about in my book. It's a really important place for a lot of different reasons, but closing that field office is going to have dire consequences down the chain, like, where are those employees going to work? Where are they going to be fed to? It's really important for these field.

0:17:09 - (Josh Jackson): With the blm, for these field offices are very localized. And so you have local people working at these field offices who understand the landscape around those in that area that they're managing better than anyone. They're involved with the local supervisors and politicians that work, they're involved with the landscapes, the different friends organizations that are working on those. The. As of now, the Ukiah field office will be no more come August 31st. And so, yeah, there's a lot of, pardon my language, a lot of shit that's going down.

0:17:41 - (Josh Jackson): As you've talked about before on the pod. Yeah. Yep.

0:17:45 - (Chris Clarke): And this is on the heels of the first Trump administration attempts to really gut the agency, moving the headquarters to Western Colorado and putting it under the supervision of William Perry Pendley, who is quite possibly one of the worst human beings on earth. My last job was working with BLM folks, occasionally suing them, but mostly not, and working to do things like help where I could in getting public comments in for management plans for national monuments that the BLM was running. Mojave Trails being the big obvious example.

0:18:25 - (Chris Clarke): We're going to have to go through the same thing with Chuckwalla if it's left alone. And just by way of illustration, Mojave Trails, 1.6 million acres of land, had one BLM staffer working on the management plan for a long time. They eventually hired another halftime person to do that, and there's still no management plan. And they've been burning out monument managers for Mojave Trails. It's pretty much that's the last job you want to get at the BLM because you're coordinating with several different field offices and at the same time really don't have much support.

0:19:03 - (Chris Clarke): It's just. It's not like the BLM was replete with superfluous staff even before this.

0:19:12 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, that's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up because all of the recent cuts are adding to the layers of already being underfunded and understaffed. Like, I think the BLM has funding for like 10,000 employees across the west and Alaska, and there's so many vacancies even now at the agency. And plus, they're incredibly underfunded. It just feels like year after year, decade after decade, their maintenance backlog right now is $4.7

0:19:40 - (Josh Jackson): billion. Their annual budget is 1.7 billion. So it's like it's three times the annual budget for the entire BLM. So you imagine that backlog of maintenance is just going to get. That number's just going to keep going up. Like you said, in some districts, BLM rangers are managing. For every one ranger is 1 million acres of land. It's already a really impossible job. They manage more land than any other federal land agency, and they receive 12% of the budget. Budget.

0:20:09 - (Josh Jackson): So it's. I'm glad you brought that up. They're critically understaffed and under underfunded already. So it's hard to imagine how they're going to pull it off after all the. There's more proposed cuts coming.

0:20:21 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:20:21 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, it's really. It's the defund, dismantle and divest playbook from Doge masquerading as efficiency, but really just stripping public assets from the American people. And it's. It's sad. It's. The playbook is. I know you and Kristen talked about it, but it's like by slashing budgets and eliminating jobs, the government is making these agencies less affected. Of course. Less rangers patrolling the backcountry, less wildfire fires, fighting fires.

0:20:49 - (Josh Jackson): Like you guys talked about emergency responders in the Grand Canyon, there's going to be less responders responding to things that are happening out in the backcountry. These are things that are like, affecting the everyday people that are going out to see these landscapes. Not to mention the scientists, ecologists, biologists, geologists who aren't going to be around to monitor ecosystem health and habitat vitality.

0:21:15 - (Josh Jackson): And then we're already seeing trails. And BLM campgrounds are sometimes laughably understaffed with toilet paper backup in the bathrooms, or no toilet paper at all. Or bathrooms pit toilets backed up, no toilet paper, trash everywhere. I mean, those things are going to get worse. Road closures, trail closures. We're already seeing some of this. It's disappointing to say the least. But then the formula from Doge is then as public lands become harder to access and more frustrating to visit, dissatisfaction will of course grow with users. And that's the whole point.

0:21:53 - (Josh Jackson): Like a system deliberately starved of resources will inevitably struggle, fueling the argument that federal agencies can't do their job. And if federal agencies can't do their job, then why don't we sell them to the highest bidder or transfer them to states that supposedly will do a better job at managing them, when in all likelihood, as we've seen historically, states sell off their lands when they hit a budget deficit or their friends in the oil and gas industry need to build a third home.

0:22:21 - (Josh Jackson): So it's a playbook that's playing out in real life or in real time.

0:22:28 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it was nice to get that one little piece of good news from the Supreme Court that they weren't going to hear. The Utah.

0:22:34 - (Josh Jackson): The unappropriated lands lawsuit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:22:39 - (Chris Clarke): From the Supreme Court is not easy to come by these days, but that was a good one.

0:22:43 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, that was really big. And hopefully the judges that are returning federal employees back to their jobs, like maybe that can be a sort of a stopgap from some of these illegal things that are happening on public lands.

0:22:57 - (Chris Clarke): So something that I know listeners will bring up if I don't address it is that the BLM has had a checkered reputation as a land management agency among people on the environmental side. Friend of mine who's a retired BLM person pretends to get really pissed off when I talk about bovine's logging and mining as part of the mission statement. It's a variable agency. You have different state offices that have different priorities. And California's is probably a little bit more conservation minded than some of the others, but it's had this reputation as you want to cut down trees. Sure, go ahead. Here's the program plan.

0:23:40 - (Chris Clarke): You want to do oil and gas leases not so much in the California desert because there isn't much oil and gas in the California desert, certainly in other places. How does has that affected the way that you've decided to write about blm? BLM is not the National Park Service and they are obligated by law to.

0:24:00 - (Chris Clarke): Do these other things.

0:24:01 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, it's the multiple use mandate. It was something I learned about real early in my book reading about BLM. The 1976 Federal Lands and Management Policy Act FTMA required the BLM to be a multiple use agency. But I think until then, I think Ed Abbey was the one that coined the phrase Bureau of Livestock and Mining pretty much. If you had thought About BLM before 1976, you had thought about grazing and mining just happening unfettered across the across the West. And then I think flitma was a good start to start addressing recreation and conservation as part of their mandate.

0:24:39 - (Josh Jackson): But I think 25 years later, Bruce Babbitt, who was the interior director under Clinton, famously said it's no longer the Bureau of Livestock and Mining, it's the Bureau of Landscapes and Monuments. And started when the new national monuments were designated after that. Previously they had transferred from the BLM to the National Park Service. But he was fighting to keep BLM lands as BLM lands even in the national monument when they became national monuments. But yeah, it's. I've run up against it over and over again. The fact that even with conservation and recreation as part of the mandate, only 15% of BLM lands out of 250, 45 million are really protected as conservation lands. But even those lands still have mining and grazing because they were grandfathered in before the landscape became a wilderness or a national monument or a wild and scenic river.

0:25:32 - (Josh Jackson): And even with Bruce Babbitt hoping for landscapes and Monuments designation, it's still the balance to me feels still ridiculously out of balance leaning towards oil gas mining. In one of the chapters in the book about the Bodie Hills, I write about gold mining that's happening there. And I that that's probably the biggest stand I take against mining in particular in that chapter. But as you've noted it, the book is really just focused on California. And in California we the balance of recreation, conservation and development is much more equally balanced. You know, we have 15 million acres of BLM land in California and over half of those fall into that national conserv lands.

0:26:17 - (Josh Jackson): So it I didn't feel like I had to tackle it as much in this book because we do have that. The balance seems much better than it does like in other states. But I'm in talks now to maybe do a second book on Utah.

0:26:31 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, yeah.

0:26:32 - (Chris Clarke): I was going to ask to go.

0:26:33 - (Josh Jackson): Into the belly of the land grab beast and like the new State of the Rockies poll. Like, even people, the people in Utah believe in public lands and want to keep. The majority want to keep public lands in public hands. But the representatives that work for the people of Utah absolutely aren't in that boat. And you mentioned the lawsuit. But yeah, for that book, I will certainly be going into the heart of the discussion in terms of the imbalance of use on BLM lands in the state of Utah.

0:27:06 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:07 - (Chris Clarke): Utah is a good second book.

0:27:09 - (Chris Clarke): I was going to ask if you had any plans for sequels in the works. And I was, of course, because of where I live, I was thinking Nevada and Arizona, which both have some amazing BLM lands, but Utah is probably the place to go because it's going to be the flashpoint.

0:27:27 - (Josh Jackson): Yep. As soon as that, I was thinking of Nevada. That would be the next place I go. I mean, it's 67% BLM land, which is remarkable that if you were to parachute into the Nevada desert, in all likelihood you're going to land on BLM land. But then when the state of Utah filed the lawsuit of their 18 and a half million acres of unappropriated lands, and I think it was last August, I thought that's where I need to go next. Let's see what these unappropriated lands actually entail.

0:27:57 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, it's interesting. So many of the great photographers and writers, they're going to like the most epic landscapes that they can. They're going to the ends of the earth to capture something that in a place that no one's ever gone to. Or they're going to Yosemite to the Firefalls to get the perfect shot, or they're going to the national parks or they're going to Nepal or wherever. And I just felt like when I was starting out on this project, it's like, why aren't more people telling the story of these BLM landscapes? Like, what's happening here? Like, why aren't more. Right. I know you're writing about them and you're talking about them, but there's just not enough of us talking and photographing these places and not enough writers writing about them. And that was really the impetus for the book was, let's see what stories they have to tell and let's tell them. And from my perspective, I'm going in with almost no idea what's out there. For every day you've spent on BLM land, I'm so far behind you. I've had to like play catch up over the last five years. I didn't even know what the Cadiz Dunes Wilderness was or where what it looked like. And I didn't know there was water under there that they're trying to take. These are all things that I've had to learn along the way.

0:29:05 - (Chris Clarke): But yeah, I may be ahead of you in hours spent on BLM land, but you've got a book coming out, so I think you could gloat there if you want.

0:29:14 - (Josh Jackson): Catching up.

0:29:15 - (Chris Clarke): I was really delighted to see some of the places that you featured and the two that just leapt out to me were both on the east side of the state, the easternmost end of the state, the Chemawevi Mountains Wilderness, which is a stunning piece of land. And Snaggletooth, which is the day use and camping location that's pretty close to Chemawebi Mountains. It's just amazing country. And obviously there are some folks that know about Snaggletooth because there's usually an RV there, even on a Wednesday morning.

0:29:51 - (Chris Clarke): But it really is a place that I think deserves more attention. And.

0:29:55 - (Chris Clarke): But Snaggletooth was in Kansas.

0:29:57 - (Chris Clarke): It would be a National Park 100%.

0:29:59 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah. I feel like Snaggletooth is when I first stumbled upon it, I was like, what is this place? But it's almost like the Alabama Hills, but just a smaller area, but with just incredible dispersed camping. And for the book, I really I grew up around hunting, and hunting was part of my family on my mom's side, and I had my hunting license when I was in middle school. But I never really hunted. Like, I never deer hunted. But in all the reading I was doing, I kept coming across all these incredible hunters who were also conservationists, from like Teddy Roosevelt to Aldo Leopold and modern day hunter, angler, conservationists. And so I wanted to tell their story through the lens of 150 years, both the bad and the good.

0:30:44 - (Josh Jackson): And in order to tell that story, I asked a couple of hunting friends who are deer hunters to see if they'd go on a hunting expedition and take me along into the Cheme Hue Wilderness to hunt mule deer. And yeah, it was an incredible experience. I had been to that wilderness before. I had literally hiked for miles and miles up and down the mountains, up the trampus Wash that kind of takes you up into the interior of the mountain, and then that actually leads down to the Colorado river on the other side. So I had spent a good amount of time camping at Snaggletooth, walking across the road and just really engaging with the wilderness. But going on this hunt, it was a bow hunt for mule deer. It was really opened my eyes to and I had. I experienced the landscape in a way that I never had before.

0:31:32 - (Josh Jackson): It's like your senses are all on overload, because if you come over a ridge, if you see a deer, it's like game on. My nose was keyed into the landscape. Of course, my eyes, like, every single step I took. At one point I. I almost stepped on a tarantula. And I like, I was like, oh, my God. I had way too big of a response. And one of my buddies I was with just looked at me and shook his head like, come on, don't let a tarantula almost crunching a tarantula ruin our.

0:32:01 - (Josh Jackson): The next two hours of our mule deer hunt. Yeah, it was an incredible experience. And like you said, that wilderness area, I think it's like 70, 70 or 80,000 acres, is a really special landscape once you get up into there, especially once you're into the sort of the mountains, there's springs up there, there's. The amount of flora really was astonishing to see. And if you brought a tent up there, you could spend a couple of weeks just walking around up there. And not in the summer, but in the winter months and have a grand old time.

0:32:34 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. In the section where you were talking about the hunt and the being in the wash, I was wondering if that was Trampus Wash you were talking about, because, yeah, that's a favorite spot. And it actually took me an embarrassingly long time and embarrassingly long sequence of failures in order to find the trailhead that goes into Trappist Wash, because there's not a pull out.

0:32:56 - (Chris Clarke): There's.

0:32:57 - (Chris Clarke): You got to park on the side of the highway and hope that nobody runs into you.

0:33:01 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, there are no good signs over there. I. I don't know if you're familiar with Onyx. It's an app that kind of tells you what land you're on. And I pretty much use that at all times. So I. Because you can download offline maps before you go and when you're out there, and of course, you don't have any reception. It's a way to see where you're at in real time and not get lost. But I think that was the only Reason I was able to find the trailhead for the Trampus Wash.

0:33:26 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah.

0:33:27 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. I think I. The one time I actually got into the wash, which is gorgeous. It's a really beautiful place. I hiked about two thirds of the way to the river and then just realized that I needed to turn back. A pair of coyotes jumped down into the wash right in front of me. They hadn't expected me to be there. And they were the prettiest coyotes I've seen in a long time. They were just completely unused to people, for one thing.

0:33:52 - (Chris Clarke): So they.

0:33:52 - (Josh Jackson): Right.

0:33:53 - (Chris Clarke): They got spooked immediately on seeing me and they took off. But they were kind of reddish brown and very fluffy and they looked like they had been living the good life there with the rabbits and the pack rats and such. It was just a really nice moment.

0:34:07 - (Josh Jackson): That's sweet. Yeah. I write about seeing a coyote in the Amargosa Canyon, and I. A similar moment to just the awe of seeing one in the middle of nowhere and it being as surprised as you are.

0:34:20 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. We just had a board meeting a couple of months ago of the Amargosa Conservancy at China Ranch, which is right in the Amargosa Canyon. And it was really hard to pay attention because there were coyotes just, like watching us for the entire first day of the meeting.

0:34:38 - (Josh Jackson): Oh, my God.

0:34:38 - (Chris Clarke): Standing 15ft outside of the little house that we were in.

0:34:43 - (Josh Jackson): Wow.

0:34:43 - (Chris Clarke): That's where I would want to be if I was a coyote, I think in the Amargosa Canyon.

0:34:47 - (Josh Jackson): Absolutely. Perennial water source. And.

0:34:51 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. At least Willow Creek. I don't know if I'd want to drink the Amargosa proper, but no, probably not.

0:34:56 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah. Oh, man. The opening chapter in the book is about the desert. And I had always imagined the outside of Death Valley and Joshua Park. I imagined all the other desert. First of all, I didn't know who owned it or what was out there, but I always thought of it as like the drive by desert. You know, is anything even out there? I mean, it's crazy to think about now. When I first started out on these journeys, I.

0:35:18 - (Josh Jackson): One of the questions I was asking myself, like, were, are these landscapes even worth protecting? What is out there? You see those shacks off the i40 or i15 out in the middle of nowhere and you think, oh, these are just ramshackle properties that nobody cares about. But then even. And even on my first trip, I wrote, if I could read a little bit here.

0:35:37 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:35:38 - (Josh Jackson): I wrote, looking at the arid landscape. I was awestruck by the sheer scale of barrenness. Words Describing the scene spun through my mind like a thesaurus entry. Bleak, austere, infertile, empty, forsaken. Everything appeared to be running on repeat. Rocks, sand, shrubs and mountains. An endless array of the same muted colors and interchangeable rock formations. And I wrote that in a place called Rainbow Basin, which I'm sure you've experienced.

0:36:04 - (Josh Jackson): That was my first trip out there. I I all that to say it doesn't happen overnight like the desert. You can get out there and you're like, you're not sure what's happening. It does look like that. All interchangeable rock formations, landscape on repeat. But of course, it didn't take long to get over that. My spy, my second trip, I had really started to see the landscape in a different way.

0:36:27 - (Chris Clarke): The way that you describe getting to see that landscape in a different way was really pretty wonderful. And I wonder if you want to talk about that a little bit.

0:36:37 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah. For one, the one of the books I had read before I embarked on all these desert trips was Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams, which I know is like one of the most famous desert books. And for, for good reason. But she has this great line in the book, if the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place, which is where my forgotten lands project comes from. It's a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred.

0:37:00 - (Josh Jackson): Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the Self. I was in the Rainbow Basin thinking of that line. Is this desert really holy? Is it really sacred? And that idea of a pilgrimage to the self was so mind boggling to me at the time. Like, how could this desert have anything to say to me? And before I embarked on my second trip to the Amargosa, I had really spent a lot of time thinking and contemplating that idea. Like the idea of pilgrimage. Like, okay, maybe a pilgrim.

0:37:31 - (Josh Jackson): I had always been the kind of person who hiked as many miles as I could hike, gained as much elevation as I could gain, and really sought out the most epic scenery I could find in the most efficient way possible. That was always my mandate as a hiker. And when you're thinking about a pilgrim, you're thinking about someone who's walking and not hiking. You're thinking about someone who's noticing instead of just flying by everything, like getting as much of the trail done as you can in a day.

0:38:02 - (Josh Jackson): And so on that trip in the Armagosa, I really slowed down. I write about how I think I covered one mile in three hours. And it was really the beginning of learning to understand that the desert moves in a way that other landscapes don't and that it requires you to slow down. And yeah, now I've been to the desert dozens and dozens of nights under the stars. I think I've walked over 200 miles just on BLM lands in the desert, and I feel a lot differently about them now.

0:38:35 - (Josh Jackson): But yeah, I think that I wrote in the book again, I said, amidst the extraordinary and nuanced scenery of the desert, I experiment. I experienced a pilgrimage to the Self. Each mile made me confront my preconceived notions of what it means to be immersed in nature. I had always looked for show stopping, scenery and pulse raising adventures around every corner. And I used to feel underwhelmed if I didn't find them.

0:38:57 - (Josh Jackson): But the desert invited me to leave behind my notions about what I might find or experience or even how I might feel. A person can go looking for this or for that, whatever it is they have in mind. But the desert doesn't always give you an explosion of grandeur. Holiness here is not a rapture. It is a whisper reminding you that everything you need to see is around you at every moment. The great secret of the desert is that it often sings quietly.

0:39:23 - (Chris Clarke): That's really wonderful.

0:39:24 - (Josh Jackson): Oh, thank you. That's how I. I end that chapter. But it's true, you know, I like those photographers that I wish would go to BLM lands to tell these stories. I was the kind of nature junkie who wanted the most epic scenery, and the desert really stops him in my tracks. And the pilgrimage to the self was slowing down and seeing the more subtle beauties are to be found.

0:39:47 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. And pro tip for listeners, if you don't want to go through the long process that Josh went through, you could do what I did and just marry a botanist because that keeps you from hiking very fast.

0:39:58 - (Josh Jackson): Great tip.

0:39:59 - (Chris Clarke): A mile in three hours. That. That sounds about right.

0:40:04 - (Josh Jackson): That's a great tip. Yeah. Marry a botanist or start behaving like one.

0:40:08 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. Let's talk a little bit about the non desert sections of your book because they talk about places that are really important, and we can certainly declare that the Carrizo Plain is an edge case for being in the desert or not. But yeah, let's. Let's talk about BLM lands in California outside the desert for a minute.

0:40:30 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, absolutely. Even though I went pretty much everywhere, I focused the book on seven different essays that all come from a different point in California. So like you said, one of them's the Carrizo Plain National Monument in sort of central California. It's, it's pretty much empty, except if there's so much rain that the March miracle, or what they call now the super bloom happens. But outside of that, there's not a lot of people that go out there.

0:40:56 - (Josh Jackson): So yeah, every chapter is tied to a place, a BLM land in California. But then there's also. I tried to tie it to the history of that place, the indigenous history of that place, my experience of traveling there, as well as a big idea that I want to have, I hope people reflect on. And so in the Carrizo Plain, it's this idea of place attachment theory that the more we understand and the more knowledge we have about a place, it changes our relationship to that place. And for me, in the Carrizo, I had been there in November after three and a half years of drought.

0:41:31 - (Josh Jackson): Soda Lake was completely dried up. It was like a white salt flat. And I described the scene as looking like a giant bale of hay. Hay essentially. But then I also went there during super bloom years in 2023 and in lesser extent in 2024 when the place was packed with people that were all looking at the flowers and people camping and Soda Lake was full and the brine shrimp were there and birds were flying through as part of their Pacific flyover.

0:42:00 - (Josh Jackson): It's an incredible place. But I also go up to the King Range National Conservation Area in Northwest California. The. That little place that romantics call the Lost Coast. I spent, I've spent a lot of time up there, a lot of time with my family, camping up there with my kids and stuff. That's like their home away from home up there and outside of Petrolia there. And the big idea in that chapter is reciprocity. The reciprocity that the indigenous matol had with the landscape, with that salmon have with the river and the surrounding forest.

0:42:33 - (Josh Jackson): Go to the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument is near and dear to my heart. The big idea there is the idea of the radical center. I go back into the 60s and 70s when, when our best environmental laws were passed and the bipartisanship that took place. It's funny, like President Nixon of all presidents called public lands the breathing space of our nation, which I just find so, so poetic. When that was, you would never guess that Nixon would utter those words, but he did in a lot of beautiful environmental laws were passed during that time period. And then Berryessa itself was a decade long process to get that national monument designated. Was involved a lot of the same kind of bipartisanship and a thousand cups of coffee. That happened during those 60s and 70s. And so I talk about that.

0:43:21 - (Josh Jackson): I go up to the Eastern Sierra, as I mentioned. I spend a lot of time in the Bodie Hills. And it's not out of the question that there could be a cyanide heap leach mine in the Bodie Hills right on Bald Peak, which straddles the California Nevada border right above the Dry Lakes Plateau. The Bodie Hills are probably my most special landscape that I've visited in all of California. I have a real attachment to that place and so I talk a lot about the gold mining threats that are currently happening there.

0:43:49 - (Josh Jackson): And of course we've already talked about the Mojave. Two different chapters in the Mojave one and sort of my experience in the Amargosa and also hunting in the Cheme Hueve.

0:43:59 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, there's just some astonishingly beautiful places. And personally I consider the Bodie Hills to be part of the California desert.

0:44:06 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah. In that transition zone.

0:44:08 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. There's a really beautiful route to take from Hawthorne, Nevada to just around Bridgeport that gets you in the north end of that range, a place called Lucky Boy Pass. I think it's probably 25 years ago that ex girlfriend and I were wandering around back there with a front wheel drive pickup truck and coming across pronghorn and old west style buildings with false fronts. And it's just a really beautiful place. And I had never heard of it before. And even then I had a couple of decades of paying attention to public land stuff in California.

0:44:46 - (Chris Clarke): I just never heard of the place. Mount Grant. What's that? Yeah, so it's just, it's a wonderful, beautiful place.

0:44:54 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, I love the Bodie Hills. It's like not my big wall map. It's just this big section of yellow BLM above. It's really like a dozen miles from just the edge of Yosemite National Park. It's so close. And then it's north of Mono Lake there. It just. I'm like, what is this landscape like? There's nothing about it in my map. Even if you go on the BLM website, there's really nothing about the Bodie Hills. It's really difficult to find anything. And of course like Friends of the Inyo is a friends grassroots organization that does really great work along that eastern Sierra corridor.

0:45:27 - (Josh Jackson): They were the ones that kind of put. Put the gold mining threats on my radar. And that's when I started exploring it up there and fell in love with it. It's a high elevation landscape. I think there's 300 nights a year where it Falls below freezing. It's just a. It's a harsh climate. It's wild to think that 5,000 people lived up there mining gold in the 1870s. It's amazing that any of them made it.

0:45:52 - (Chris Clarke): Yep, for sure. And friends of the INU of course is also working on the issue of potential gold mining on Conglomerate Mesa, which we're going to have to do an episode about. And been up on Conglomerate once in my entire life and even just doing an episode so I have an excuse to go back is a good idea. But yeah, it's just a horrible idea. Even if you assume that we are going to need to mine gold somewhere, Conglomerate Mesa is just quite likely the worst place to do it.

0:46:27 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, it's so beautiful up there. It's right above Centennial Flats and Malpai Mesa is right there. And then Cerro Gordo, which is. Yeah, it's this flat top mesa form full of incredibly dense Joshua trees that are like. I know you've written about this, I've mentioned this on my sub stack, but you have that great piece, Myth Mutualism and Survival I think is the title of it, I think is part of my Joshua Tree Bible knowledge.

0:46:53 - (Josh Jackson): If in 2100, if it's true that 90% of the Joshua trees in the national park are gone, like it's Conglomerate Mesa and Centennial Canyon where our great grandchildren will be going to see these iconic species. And so a cyanide heap leech mine there would be pretty devastating. Yeah, I know they're doing a. They're Big Bird festivals this month and they're taking people up to the mesa as part of that festival for Friends of the Inyo. But yeah, if you get up there, let me know, maybe I'll come with you. That sounds good up there.

0:47:26 - (Chris Clarke): I have taken up a bunch of.

0:47:27 - (Chris Clarke): Your time here and it's been a really great interview. Have I failed to ask you anything that you were hoping I'd ask?

0:47:35 - (Josh Jackson): Oh gosh, no. I think all my notes up here, I think I've gotten most of it mentioned. Thank you so much for taking interest in the book and in the project and it really means a lot to me that you're. That you'd have me on. So I am really grateful.

0:47:50 - (Chris Clarke): You are absolutely welcome and thank you for putting this wonderful book together. If you listeners go to 90 miles from needles.combooks you'll see a place where you can pre order it and Forgotten Lands Project, how do people find that?

0:48:06 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, forgottenlandsproject.com you can also go there to see the book and I write from forgottenlandsproject.com you can also find my newsletter where I write weekly on substack. It's called Forgotten Lands. I write three out of four Sundays a month and I'm always highlighting new BLM lands across the West. Right now it's mostly in California, but I'll be going to Nevada and Utah in the coming months and in Oregon too actually.

0:48:31 - (Josh Jackson): Yeah, it's an immersive photographic journey through BLM lands in the west and it's a really exciting to see people get excited about it and want to get out there and hopefully fall in love with these places and want to protect them.

0:48:45 - (Chris Clarke): Sounds good. Josh Jackson, thanks so much for joining us.

0:48:49 - (Josh Jackson): Thanks for having me.

0:48:51 - (Chris Clarke): And that's it for this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. Huge thanks to Josh Jackson for joining us and talking about his book and his travels through BLM lands in California. Again, 90 miles from needles.combooks if you Want to pre order that, it's out.

0:49:10 - (Chris Clarke): In a couple of months. Also want to thank Hazel Videon. Hazel, I'm sorry if I'm getting your last name pronounced wrong, as well as Gene Hooper and Daniel Bell, plus our biologist from Prescott, Arizona. I also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, Martine Mancha, our podcast artwork creator. Our theme song, Moody Western is by bright side studio April 19th folks. April 19th next time we try and get more than 5.2 million people out in the streets protesting this horrible regime.

0:49:46 - (Chris Clarke): Before that, I'm going to be in Los angeles this Saturday, April 12th with probably tens of thousands of other people. Dare to listen to and cheer for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who will be given their stump speech about contending with and opposing this administration. Looks like there's going to be some celebrity musicians there too, people that Bernie probably listened to when he was a kid.

0:50:11 - (Chris Clarke): Neil Young and Joan Baez, for instance. No shade intended. I listened to them at the same time. If you see me, tap me on the shoulder and say hello. I'll be the guy with long gray hair and a matching beard. And with that along with heart, the ancient Lady Pitbull who has been snoring by my side as I record this. I hope you're taking care of yourselves. Don't forget, 90 miles from needles.com donate and I will see you at the next watering hall.

0:50:45 - (Chris Clarke): Bye now.

0:50:49 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.