S4E4: Other Podcasts You Should Check Out

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 think the deserts are barren wastelands. Again, it's time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. Thank you Joe Jeffrey and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:49 - (Chris Clarke): I'm your host, Chris Clark. I want to start out with a few thanks. Want to thank those of you who are regular listeners who checked in with me regarding my pesky cold that kept me from recording the last couple of episodes that I wanted to do. I'm back to somewhere between 93 and 98%. I still have a bit of a cough, but I believe I'll be able to do this episode without subjecting you to that. At any rate, it was really nice of all of you to reach out and send supportive messages.

0:01:20 - (Chris Clarke): I really appreciated it. Also wanted to thank those of you who sent good wishes for my dog Hart who went into cancer surgery on Tuesday Last on the 11th I have an update there. She sailed through that surgery and right now the biggest problem is keeping her from leaping over fences and up onto furniture and taking off after rabbits because she's got about 18 staples in her belly. They took off a cutaneous hemangiosarcoma, which is a cancer that's about as scary as it sounds.

0:01:50 - (Chris Clarke): And they also took off a squamous cell carcinoma. Just as a bonus, in addition to pulling a tooth that had pretty much disintegrated under a decade of use and abuse by my little girl. She is taking a nap right here with me as I record this snoring a little bit and she gives every indication of planning to recover fully. We do have to keep an eye on her belly skin just because she has spent too many years lying on her back in the sunshine.

0:02:17 - (Chris Clarke): And skin cancers do result from that, especially in light haired dogs. But all signs are pointing to a successful surgery, successful extension of life expectancy, and all that kind of stuff that you want to hear when it's your dog coming back from the vet. So thanks again for checking in, asking after her, and hopefully she will be snoring while I'm trying to record quite a number of episodes in the future.

0:02:42 - (Chris Clarke): And this is where I would ordinarily shout out to new subscribers and new donors to 90 miles from needles the Desert Protection Podcast. And we don't have any to report to you this week. That's not surprising. These things tend to fall off when I don't release an episode for a minute. But if you were planning to donate to the podcast and just forgot because we skipped a couple of weeks while my throat got better, here's your reminder.

0:03:09 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from needles.com donate we do have a bunch of people that have signed up for free on our Patreon site in anticipation of our putting together what it looks like is going to be a discord server for desert activists and people that are curious about desert activism. If you go to 90miles from needles.com Patreon and just sign up for free, which you can do, and be sure and put your email address in there and all that kind of stuff, we will send out invites to you when we have that site ready.

0:03:47 - (Chris Clarke): One last piece of business here, 90 miles from needles.com merchant will get you to our new Bonfire store where you can buy what will be an increasing number of designs, items, T shirts, coffee mugs, all those things that we need to get through our morning. Check it out. 90 miles from needles.commerch all of the proceeds from sales there go to our mothership, the Desert Advocacy Media Network. Okay, so I've been promising you an episode talking about some desert or desert adjacent podcasts that I think you might find of interest.

0:04:32 - (Chris Clarke): And this is that episode. I want to start out this handful of podcasts. We're bringing you with one called How Wild, which is out of kalw, an NPR affiliate in the Bay Area, spearheaded, written and narrated by journalist Marissa Ortego Welch. How Wild looks at the wilderness concept both in general and with a capital W, as in officially designated wilderness under the Wilderness act of 1964 or equivalent legislation in states and other kinds of jurisdictions. Ortega Welch talks about problems with the concept of wilderness in general, how the concept erases traditional and Native people who've been maintaining the land for millennia up until the mid 19th century or even later, and how that concept of wilderness basically reflects the way that we think about our relationship to nature, which is not always really accurate.

0:05:27 - (Chris Clarke): You know, the separation between people and nature that we imagine is there is re emphasized by the wilderness concept, which says that the highest and best form of nature is one that humans visit but don't stay in and don't effect. And that complicated mess of different ideas and competing ideologies is what How Wild and Marissa Ortega Welch jump into in their seven episodes. Here's a quick excerpt of episode four of How Wild, which covers solitude, and how the way we generally talk about solitude in wilderness really reflects the Culture that we grew up in.

0:06:06 - (Chris Clarke): Let's listen.

0:06:09 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): What is solitude exactly? I mean, it has a definition, you know, see Merriam Webster. But the feeling of solitude that's going to differ from person to person.

0:06:19 - (Aparna Rajagopal): Solitude of 100 years ago might be different than solitude of 100 years in the future.

0:06:23 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): And right.

0:06:24 - (Chris Clarke): Like solitude for me might look very.

0:06:26 - (Aparna Rajagopal): Different for you, for them.

0:06:28 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): And whether or not you even value solitude and what you perceive as crowded can often be cultural.

0:06:35 - (Jennifer Errick): Solitude evokes loneliness for me because, I mean, let's face it, I'm from India and there are a lot of people there.

0:06:43 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): This is Aparna Raja Gopal. She consults environmental organizations on diversity, equity and inclusion justice work.

0:06:49 - (Jennifer Errick): I just think of being alone, and for me, it's not a positive feeling. I kind of want to be with other people.

0:06:55 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): Aparna's family version of camping was 25 or 30 of her family members renting vans or RVs and caravanning out to a group site at a national park.

0:07:04 - (Jennifer Errick): When we were family camping, like, our neighboring campers would stare us down like they were pissed. They were like, not happy that there was a huge group of Indian people. The smells were probably one piece. We cooked a lot of Indian food. We were loud, laughing. And so that was my cultural experience growing up.

0:07:22 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): Those camping trips were transformative for Aparna and she wanted more. Later, she became a guide for the National Outdoor Leadership School, or Knolls, the org that helped develop what led to the leave no trace ethic like pack out your waist and let nature's sounds. And on trips she taught those principles to kids.

0:07:40 - (Jennifer Errick): But telling kids from, you know, similar community oriented cultures that they have to stay quiet didn't feel right for me.

0:07:49 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): A lot of times the kids were loud because they were just excited to be in a beautiful place. So this goes back to the question of who decided what's the appropriate way to experience nature.

0:08:00 - (Jennifer Errick): Because if it is a group of immigrants or people of color who are engaging in these places in a way that doesn't feel like the right way, like not solitude, loud. There's automatically assumption that they're not treating.

0:08:14 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): The place well, the quote, unquote, right way to be in wilderness. What we've been calling the John Muir version that a lot of people have adopted is you should be alone in nature and be quiet, contemplative. You hear a lot of people say that nature is their church.

0:08:30 - (Jennifer Errick): I think it makes me laugh, frankly, because, like, first of all, like, I don't know if people have been to like a Hindu Temple, for example. I mean, it is loud. So, like, that doesn't translate to me. Like, and it excludes even saying church. Like, excludes so many of us who are not Christian and who don't go to Christian churches.

0:08:56 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): It's not wrong to call nature your church. But the language we use to talk about wilderness reveals the culture it came from, right?

0:09:03 - (Jennifer Errick): As Americans or settlers were colonizing. Usually we have tales of, like, the first few people who went and did the thing, and usually they're alone, like, living in a cabin. And those stories and those people were glorified. And so then that became how we need to connect with nature.

0:09:20 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): She says. Think about the book Walden that we.

0:09:23 - (Jennifer Errick): You know, a lot of us were assigned. I was assigned in California schools, for sure. Henry David Thoreau's book, the famous book.

0:09:30 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): From the 1850s, was about a guy living a simple life connected to nature in a cabin on Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

0:09:37 - (Jennifer Errick): But the way he writes makes you think he was actually living very, you know, in solitude. But he wasn't.

0:09:44 - (Marissa Ortega-Welch): He actually had neighbors. There was a community of freed African Americans who were also living there. So from early on, solitude is a story more than it's an actual reality. And that story goes in some dark directions.

0:10:00 - (Chris Clarke): So that three and a half minute excerpt of How Wild presents a whole lot of really interesting concepts. And it's interesting to see on the Apple podcast review page just how reluctant some people are to even consider the idea that their approach to being in wilderness isn't necessarily the only way to be in wilderness. Some of the reviews seem actually kind of defensive and clueless about it. You know, it's not racist. It's not.

0:10:28 - (Chris Clarke): And I don't intend to drag on podcast reviewers because I think they do an important thing, and opinions are opinions. But it's just interesting to me, in fact, how much I wanted to resist that conclusion, that being alone and more or less quiet is the way to be in wilderness. Certainly the way I want to be. But I'm not the only person in the world, and other people see things differently, and it's really good to be reminded of that.

0:10:57 - (Chris Clarke): Coming up next, we have the podcast the Secret Lives of Parks, which is put out by my former employer, the National Parks Conservation Association, a couple of months ago in the run up to the designation of ch.  A couple of months ago, in the run up to the designation of Chuckwalla National Monument, that podcast's host, Jennifer Eric, who is a good friend of mine and has one of the best podcast voices ever, came out and talked to Myself and Luke Basulto, who regular listeners will recognize. He's been on the podcast a lot and he's also the president of the board of directors of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.

0:11:37 - (Chris Clarke): Jennifer came out on a breezy, occasionally windy day in the late fall. And we spent some time sitting out in the wilds of Joshua Tree national park talking about Chuckwalla and the way the desert works and how people's attitudes have changed over recent years with regard to protecting the desert. Let's just take it from there.

0:12:02 - (Emily Guerin): Chuckwalla will create a contiguous protected region from the southern border with Mexico, up to Death Valley, over to Lake Mead and the Grand Canyon and up into the Four Corners region of Utah. These connected lands benefit wildlife and people alike.

0:12:22 - (Chris Clarke): There is a campaign that's still technically in progress, though you don't hear as much about it these days of Yellowstone to Yukon, in which conservationists were trying to get connected landscape from the Northern Rockies up to the Arctic Circle. And I remember reporting on it when I first learned about it. It was in the 1990s and it was seen, I think even by the people that were really working on it diligently as kind of a pipe dream. It was like an aspirational goal.

0:12:55 - (Chris Clarke): We have it here. It's an equivalent stretch of landscape. It's just an amazing, amazing accomplishment. And it's, I think, testament to the fact that people really care about the desert these days a lot more than they did even just 10 years ago. Oh, nice. It's a black vulture. What is that?

0:13:21 - (Luke Basulto): No, that's a hawk.

0:13:22 - (Chris Clarke): That's a hawk.

0:13:22 - (Luke Basulto): You're right, it's a massive hawk.

0:13:24 - (Emily Guerin): Luke and Chris have both spent time working with a coalition to preserve the Chuckwalla region. About 400,000 of the national monument's 600,000 plus acres would be designated as critical habitat for the Mojave Desert tortoise.

0:13:41 - (Chris Clarke): Every time people look at an acre of the desert with serious intent, they will find a new species of something. There's all this really cryptic biodiversity. I mean, we're walking among these plants that will be still alive a thousand years after I'm dead and that we're starting life maybe six or seven hundred years before any of the relatives that I remember were born. You're just in the presence of these incredibly long lived things in a landscape that has been constantly changing but is still basically the same overall as it was.

0:14:25 - (Chris Clarke): And it's just such a good antidote to doom scrolling. You know, it's like if you scroll like a page every 1500 years that's what the desert's like.

0:14:38 - (Luke Basulto): That's awesome. That's a good way to put it. Chris and I both live in the Morongo Basin, which is very, very conservation minded. You know, we live in, we live in a bubble and like, it's not the same across the, across the board. In the desert where I grew up, I spoke to it earlier, where you don't have people thinking about this, you know, and I think that that's a really important role that MPCA has been able to occupy in time that we've worked in the desert. And we're good at seeing importance in areas that traditionally people look past.

0:15:17 - (Luke Basulto): You know, Chris said, like, one of his favorite places are the blank spots on the map. And I think that as desert conservationists, that needs to be always at the front of our minds is like, how can we help these areas of the desert that don't have the charisma of Joshua Tree or Death Valley or of Chuckwalla? You know, how do we help some of these areas around Barstow or Victor Valley or the in betweens?

0:15:40 - (Emily Guerin): I feel like the desert just as a whole often gets a short shrift. It's like, oh, it's that empty, barren place. Right. And as we've been seeing all day, it's absolutely not right. So, like the charisma of a Joshua Tree, some folks don't even necessarily see that. So it's, it's a lot of education to get people to see that these are vibrant, alive. Definitely places.

0:16:07 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:16:07 - (Luke Basulto): And it just takes being, being out there and taking the time. I mean, everything's again, so slow here. And it takes, it takes time to build an appreciation for a place like this. And just you take the time and sit here, like, we've been sitting in these rocks for, for an hour or so now. You see all the little things that start coming out and adjusting to your presence here, and that's just really what it takes to see this place for what it is.

0:16:34 - (Emily Guerin): Well, thank you both.

0:16:35 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you.

0:16:36 - (Emily Guerin): I really appreciate you sitting out on the rocks with me.

0:16:39 - (Chris Clarke): This has been beautiful.

0:16:41 - (Luke Basulto): I'll take this 10 times out of 10, looking at a computer screen.

0:16:44 - (Emily Guerin): Oh, my gosh.

0:16:45 - (Chris Clarke): Yes.

0:16:46 - (Emily Guerin): Why is this the missing piece? Why is everything around it protected? And it's been kind of left out.

0:16:55 - (Chris Clarke): There were other places in the desert that conservation activists, especially from outside the desert, liked more, were more familiar with. They'd go to Death Valley, they'd go to, you know, Sema Dome, Joshua Tree for sure. But the Bradshaw Trail, I mean, you need Intense vehicle equipment to do the Bradshaw trail. I mean, my crosstrek would die out there and never be seen again. So it's hard to get to.

0:17:25 - (Chris Clarke): And as a result, there, there really wasn't momentum built up to protect it. There were people that liked it, but it just, it never had the cachet until pretty recently that places like Joshua Tree or Mojave Preserve had. The more pieces of the desert that we can protect, the better off the desert is going to be in 100 years, 200 years, 500 years. This should be a no brainer. Even before I spent any time in the desert, I was fascinated by looking at maps of the desert, especially California and Nevada. In fact, I had a map of the state of Nevada up on the wall next to my bed in 1983, where I could gaze at it until I fell asleep.

0:18:11 - (Chris Clarke): Dream of long valleys filled with sagebrush. At some point around then, 83 or 84, back in the Pleistocene, I noticed that there was a dot on the map in the West, Mojave that had a grandiose name. I'd never heard it before. It was called California City. It was probably 10 years after seeing it on the map before I actually got to California City and found out what people that know California City know.

0:18:40 - (Chris Clarke): It's mostly not there. It's a mostly conceptual idea of a city that would have been developed in the 1960s had things broken a little bit differently. There are people that live there. In fact, in the 1980s, there were about 3,000 residents of California City, which is remarkable considering that the boundaries of California City hold more than 200 square miles of land, making it the third largest city by land area in California.

0:19:11 - (Chris Clarke): And like many places where legitimate real estate development sputters and doesn't really pan out, there are stories of less than scrupulous real estate transactions taking place in California city. In 1971, in his book Power and Land in California, Ralph Nader and his colleagues called California City a fraud and quote, a particularly stark study of government failure. These days, there are around 15,000 people that live in California City. In any event, California City is an emblem of real estate speculation.

0:19:48 - (Chris Clarke): And with the allegations of less than scrupulous dealings in recent years, it all makes for a really interesting investigative story. And that story was tackled about five years ago by reporter Emily Guerin in her podcast California City, produced by KPCC and the Laist in Southern California. And just to whet your appetite a little, here's a short excerpt from the very beginning of that series that sets the scene.

0:20:29 - (Aparna Rajagopal): The Place where Ben said he'd been ripped off is called Silver Saddle Ranch and Club. It's a dude ranch. It's basically this rundown, kitschy hotel where you can shoot guns and ride horses. And it's way out there, 100 miles north of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert town of California City. It is so isolated that when you drive out there, you kind of feel like you're in a horror movie. After I talked to Ben, I talked to a lot of other people who also claimed they'd been scammed at Silver Saddle.

0:21:02 - (Aparna Rajagopal): They wrote complaints on Ripoff Report, too, and on Yelp and on the Better Business Bureau and this website called Scamon. And it's kind of crazy how much their stories have in common. You drive out to the desert expecting something elaborate, something stunning, a fancy resort like the ones in Palm Springs. But when you get there, it feels like a ghost town. So you check in and you notice that most of the people there are Filipino or Latino or Chinese.

0:21:33 - (Aparna Rajagopal): There's a lot of elderly people and a lot of people who don't speak English super well. And of course, you can't tell by looking, but they just don't seem like savvy investor types. By the end of the weekend, you will come to believe that you will get rich if you buy a piece of land out here. I talked to more than 25 people who invested with Silver Saddle, but it was Ben's story that stuck with me.

0:21:59 - (Aparna Rajagopal): Maybe because it was still so fresh. It had happened just a year before I met him. Or maybe it was because the money he said he lost had meant so much to him. Or maybe it was that he'd asked me for help.

0:22:13 - (Chris Clarke): I wanna ask, how do you think.

0:22:15 - (Luke Basulto): I can do to get my.

0:22:17 - (Chris Clarke): Should I find a lawyer?

0:22:20 - (Aparna Rajagopal): His phone cut out a little, but he asked me what he could do to get his money back. I wasn't sure what to tell him beyond what I always tell people when I'm reporting, that maybe together we can bring some attention to this, and maybe enough people will notice and something will change. I had no idea how hard that would be.

0:22:47 - (Chris Clarke): It's hard to think of a watershed that is more storied and more evocative of American history and the colonization of the west than the Colorado River. And when I'm talking about the Colorado river here, I mean the river and all its tributaries, from the Green to the Gila. The watershed overall takes up about a quarter of a million square miles in the western U.S. and northwestern Mexico. Here's a fun The Colorado river, above its confluence with the Green, used to be called the grand river, but the State of Colorado decided they wanted to rebrand it.

0:23:24 - (Chris Clarke): Originally, the Colorado came into being at the confluence of the grand river and the Green river, and it flowed down through the Grand Canyon and the lower Colorado River Valley before reaching the Sea of Cortez. One way you can tell that the upper Colorado used to be called grand river is because it flows through a valley called Grand Valley and is joined by the Gunnison river at Grand Junction, all names that were not updated when they changed the name of the river. At any rate, the overall headwaters of the Colorado river watershed is generally regarded to be the headwaters of the Green river, which rises in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming and flows down through western Wyoming through Flaming Gorge and Dinosaur National Monument and Desolation Canyon in eastern Utah, and then joins the Colorado just a few miles south of Moab.

0:24:18 - (Chris Clarke): It's safe to say that if the Colorado river as a whole didn't exist, there'd be a lot fewer people living in the southwestern U.S. cities like Los Angeles and San Diego and Phoenix and Tucson and especially Las Vegas and even Denver all rely on the Colorado river to make sure their residents are well watered, to power industry, to power agriculture. And so it's a big deal that for the last 25 years, the Colorado river watershed has been in an extended drought.

0:24:51 - (Chris Clarke): In fact, according to the US Drought Monitor, which hasn't yet been taken down by unelected oligarchs, and you can still Access it@drought.gov Basically half of the Colorado river basin is currently in drought conditions that are severe or worse. A quarter of the basin is in severe drought conditions. Another quarter is in either extreme or exceptional drought conditions. 80% of the basin is in some kind of drought.

0:25:22 - (Chris Clarke): The river system that tens of millions of people in all those cities and between those cities rely on is suffering and is likely to suffer more as climate change really kicks in. In 2023, Colorado Public Radio put out a 10 episode podcast series called Parched, which provides a holistic look at the state of the Colorado river and its tributaries and the tens of millions of people that live in the basin, from indigenous people who are still here and have been managing the land for millennia, to new residents of Las Vegas who are reluctant to give up the lawns that they had in Connecticut.

0:25:59 - (Chris Clarke): The podcast host, Michael Elizabeth Sakas, is a climate and environment reporter for Colorado Public Radio News, and she provides a really accessible take as she travels from one end of the watershed to the other, talking to Farmers and ranchers and water agency directors and householders and native people. And she brings us a really important overall look at the basin. This look is going to be more and more important as the years pass.

0:26:28 - (Chris Clarke): Here's a brief excerpt of the first episode of Parched with Michael Elizabeth Saukas.

0:26:38 - (Michael Elizabeth Sakas): Where Arizona and Nevada meets. It's hot and it's dry. Our car is winding through red and yellow canyons. Pale green scrub bushes sit on top of more yellow and brown dirt. Tucked in these canyons is one of the seven wonders of the industrial world. We're about 11 miles out from Hoover Dam. I've heard a lot about how incredible, incredible it is to see in person just how massive it is. Hoover Dam is a legit engineering feat.

0:27:14 - (Michael Elizabeth Sakas): When it was finished, it was the biggest concrete structure people had ever built. This gigantic concrete wall crosses a canyon to hold back the Colorado River. It produces electricity and harnesses water so people can live and survive throughout the southwestern U.S. it means people can drink, shower, grow food and work in some of the hottest and driest places in the country. Okay, now we're driving through lots of power lines.

0:27:56 - (Michael Elizabeth Sakas): For decades, it has fulfilled that promise. Hoover Dam generates power for more than a million people. And it creates the biggest human made pool of water in the country. Lake Mead. It's our water savings. Just like you want to keep money in the bank. All the states from Wyoming to California made an agreement to keep water in Lake Mead as a bank to use when not enough water comes down the Colorado River.

0:28:28 - (Michael Elizabeth Sakas): It's the biggest pool of savings we have. That's why I wanted to see this for myself. Oh, wow. So we're like, we're driving down into the canyon. This is crazy.

0:28:44 - (Chris Clarke): Wow.

0:28:46 - (Michael Elizabeth Sakas): We're under that big iconic and that thing is massive. I've seen photos and they definitely do not do that justice. Millions of people like me come here every year to walk along the dam and gawk at how big it is. But seeing it for the first time on this hot day last October, it looks kind of ridiculous to me. This 700 foot tall marvel of steel and concrete and western ambition is holding up much less water than it once did.

0:29:27 - (Michael Elizabeth Sakas): Today I can see parts of this concrete wall that had disappeared in the 1940s as the canyon filled up with water. People thought they'd never see these parts of the wall. This marvel of engineering almost looks silly. It does not need to be this big anymore. Now tourists are here gawking at the low water levels.

0:29:53 - (Chris Clarke): So there's four podcasts other than ours that I think you should listen to. There are a few others that I've mentioned time and time again, especially the Border Chronicle with Melissa Delbosque and Todd Miller out of Tucson. That's an indispensable podcast and email newsletter if you want to develop a nuanced and fact based viewpoint on migration and the U.S. mexico border and related issues. Absolutely worth your time to listen.

0:30:18 - (Chris Clarke): Absolutely worth your money to support their email newsletter. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention Ken Lane's Desert Oracle, the grandmother of all desert podcasts, which certainly doesn't need our help here to promote. It's a far better known podcast than 90 Miles from Needles, but definitely worth your attention. Ken is a good friend and he does a really fun job with Desert Oracle. Both of those podcasts and all four that we've excerpted from will be linked in the show notes, so check them out. If you have other desert related podcasts that you think we ought to know about, drop us a line.

0:30:57 - (Chris Clarke): I'm hrisignymilesfromneedles.com and that wraps up this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Big thanks to Michael Elizabeth Sakas, Elizabeth Guerin, Marissa Ortega Welch, and the wonderful Jennifer Eric. Our voiceover guy is Joe Jeffrey. Our podcast artwork person is Martine Mancha. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. As I believe I mentioned in the short teaser that we put out last week, we have a revamped website@90miles from needles.com.

0:31:36 - (Chris Clarke): there's still a few bugs in the system. Just found one this morning that I need to squash, but go check it out and if you see something that doesn't seem quite right, please let us know. You can click the contact item in the navigation menu and just type us a note. Easy, easy, easy. And we will see what we can do to fix what you identify. This has been a hellacious couple of weeks, hasn't it? What with illegal and completely nonsensical firings of federal agency staff.

0:32:06 - (Chris Clarke): These are dark times for anyone that cares about democracy, for anyone that cares about proper procedures in government, or for the US Constitution or for public lands. We want to hear from you, especially if you are land management staff in or near the American deserts who've been either let go or are living in fear of being let go. If you want to talk to us in confidence, feed us information, or be interviewed with, you know, a blue dot over your face, except the audio version of that, and tweaking your voice so that your mom wouldn't recognize it, you can reach out to us on signal at hey, 90 miles 21.

0:32:50 - (Chris Clarke): We're going to be paying very close attention to actions that the Trump administration takes, especially the threat of another illegal monument review which has been announced. We're going to be paying very close attention to actions that the Trump administration takes, especially the threat of another illegal monument review which has been announced by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. We've got some monuments here that are near and dear to our hearts and we're going to want to defend them.

0:33:17 - (Chris Clarke): I'm thinking the main targets are likely to be Bears Ears in Grand Staircase Escalante. But the new Bajnavo Ita Kukveni ancestral footprints of the Grand Canyon monument is probably vulnerable as well, as are both Chuckwalla and Aviquame national monuments closer to where I am. But we are not going to let them get gutted without a fight. So stay tuned for that. I will be back next week with another episode in less coughing and probably more snoring by Heart the dog and she and I will see you at the next watering hole.

0:33:54 - (Chris Clarke): Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.