S4E8: Plan Sonora: The New Face of Green Colonialism

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

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

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

0:00:48 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host Chris Clark and we have a fascinating interview for you today with a Caroline Tracey, a journalist who is these days writing for the Border Chronicle, which is, as regular listeners will know, one of my favorite podcasts. They do top notch reporting on a seriously underreported and misunderstood place phenomenon and political issue, namely the U.S. and Mexico border and other borders as well.

0:01:19 - (Chris Clarke): Caroline's recent article over at the Border what Is Plan Sonora? Details some efforts to do the kind of aggressive development of renewable energy generation capacity and lithium mining that we have seen in the US desert for the last 15 years or so. And while Mexico is right to try to get off of fossil fuels just like everybody else is going to have to, there are right ways and wrong ways to do that.

0:01:44 - (Chris Clarke): Personally, I increasingly think that enlisting large corporations to do your climate mitigation work is going to kick you in the butt inevitably. I really enjoyed talking to Caroline. I think you'll enjoy listening, but couple of things first. First off, Desert Defenders have suffered a loss in the last few days with the death of Representative Raul Grijalva, who represented Arizona's 3rd congressional district, including Tucson, Nogales, Ajo, Giliband, San Luis.

0:02:15 - (Chris Clarke): He was elected to the house in 2003. He was there for 22 years and in October of last year he announced that he would not be running for re election in 2026 due to treatments for lung cancer, which is what indirectly did him in. Now, I didn't have the pleasure of working with Mr. Grijalva, although one evening in September 2010 he did hand me a plate of tacos. He was in the habit of putting together some really good Sonoran food for constituents, friends and supporters in Capitol Hill in D.C. and I had the privilege of attending one of those taco parties.

0:02:50 - (Chris Clarke): It was a nice time. Now, Grijalva was not and would not claim to be a perfect representative or a perfect human being. But he did good. He did a lot to defend the desert and the people that live in it, the native people that have stewarded it for millennia. And we are poorer for losing him. Also, as we record this, Southern California's desert activist community is on the edges of our chairs due to what amount to, I guess it's accurate to call them rumors that the Trump administration is about to reverse the Antiquities act designation of Chuckwalla National Monument.

0:03:25 - (Chris Clarke): As I said on social media and a couple of different places discussing this, he probably can't do that legally and he probably doesn't care. So we're going to be tracking that rumor and if it becomes really real, we'll be bringing it to you in an episode discussing it. And lastly, on a happier note, before we get to our interview with Caroline Tracey, this is a place where we usually thank our donors and we have some.

0:03:52 - (Chris Clarke): But this is a special week because 2 of our donors, which is 66.6 et cetera, percent of the donors that I'm going to thank, two of them wrote us a note, which we love. So let's dive into the mailbag, shall we? We got a card with a very generous donation by check from Lynn Buckner up in the San Francisco Bay Area who writes thanks for the excellent podcast. I used some info from the Ivanpah episode for an article I wrote for the Rise and Demise of Ivanpah.

0:04:24 - (Chris Clarke): Now Survivor, in case you're not familiar with it, is a publication put out by a wonderful Bay Area based desert protection group called Desert Survivors. Lynn, I'm really glad that the Ivanpah episode was of use to you and I am looking forward to reading that article. I need to make sure and get a copy of Survivor. We also heard from Andrew McDonough who gave us a donation for the first time in the last few days.

0:04:47 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Andrew and Andrew. I live in Tennessee, working for parks and conservation now, but my heart's in the desert. Your approach to conservation, writing and environmental issues, communication I take into my work and life. So thank you. I hope to give more in the future. Thanks for what you do. In addition to Lynn and Andrew, Rebecca Ward threw a nice donation at us on the 16th and I just want to say thank you to all of you.

0:05:14 - (Chris Clarke): Reaching out like that, donating like that, it makes it feel like what we're doing is of value. And sometimes that's all the motivation you need. And sometimes that's all the motivation you get. Anyway, we are very privileged to have Caroline Tracey join us in this episode. Caroline's a writer who covers art, literature, environment and migration in the US Southwest and Mexico and the borderlands between the two.

0:05:42 - (Chris Clarke): She is trilingual, speaking and writing in English, Spanish and Russian. She has worked at High Country News and Zocalo Public Square. Her reporting has appeared in N1, the Nation, the Guardian, as well as in Spanish in Mexico's Nexos. Her reporting on migrant deaths in South Texas won the 2019 Scoundrel Time Summer Literary Seminars nonfiction contest, and she's written in a lot of other places. Caroline holds a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley, and as she will reveal, she's working on a fascinating and I think very promising new book on salt lakes.

0:06:21 - (Chris Clarke): Please welcome Caroline Tracey.

0:06:36 - (Chris Clarke): We are very lucky to have Caroline Tracey with us here in 90 miles from Needles Virtual Studio. Caroline, thanks so much for joining us.

0:06:46 - (Caroline Tracey): Thanks for inviting me.

0:06:48 - (Chris Clarke): One of the things you've written about recently for the Border Chronicle is the increasing tendency for renewable energy related development to pop up in northern Mexico and particularly in the state of Sonora, which you covered recently. There's a lot of lithium mining at issue, a lot of solar and even natural gas development that's going on in the borderlands or the southern part of the borderlands. Anyway, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about you're reporting on planned Sonora, hopefully starting with what is planned Sonora for those of us who don't know.

0:07:23 - (Caroline Tracey): Wonderful. Absolutely. So Sonora, as many of you probably know, is a state in the northwest of Mexico, just across the border from Arizona. And it is the most important mining state in Mexico, even though it's very remote and very sparsely populated. It accounts for, I believe, over 30% of Mexico's mining production. And so it's had this extremely important role in the Mexican economy centuries. But it also has abundant sunshine, wind and these other factors that now are becoming very crucial to the energy transition. And so right now, the state government is promoting a plan that is called Plan Sonora that is basically an energy transition energy development plan.

0:08:12 - (Caroline Tracey): It has basically four key components. One is the largest solar array in Latin America, which has been built at Rocky Point, which is on the northern coast of the Gulf of California. Some, some of you may be aware of it or even have visited. It's a very common tourist destination for Americans because it's just about, I think, four hours from Phoenix. And with that, they for the first time built transmission lines that connect the electric grid of Sonora, which is connected to the rest of continental Mexico, to the electric grid of Mexicali and northern Baja California.

0:08:51 - (Caroline Tracey): And that's really significant because first of all, it's significant for the people who live in Mexicali because they had always been isolated from the Mexican electric grid. But it's also significant from an economic development perspective because of the laws in the state of California USA, California, that are requiring 100% renewables by 2045. So it really sets up Mexico to be selling a ton of solar and wind energy to the US and so there is definitely ambivalence among people in Mexicali and in Sonora who are feeling like there's all this development, but is it really going to benefit people in Mexico?

0:09:36 - (Chris Clarke): Sounds a little bit like colonialism there.

0:09:38 - (Caroline Tracey): Yes. Yeah. Some of the geographers, especially who have been theorizing this development have called this green colonialism, which is also a term that gets used in the US with regard to the energy transition. Especially like indigenous communities in the US who have seen solar and wind being developed on their lands, or things like the cultural resources protocols and assessments being skipped over with state government condoning those emissions.

0:10:08 - (Caroline Tracey): That's a term. Yeah, it's getting used on both sides of the border with regard to the energy transition. And so, yeah, the solar development is one really key part of the plan. Sonora. I think they plan to build a couple other solar plants that are of similar size. Another part of the plan is that there is a large lithium deposit. Large in a. In sense of. In the geographic sense. It expands over a large part of the desert. It's unclear if that extension really means that there's a ton of lithium or if it's just very dispersed in the rock of the desert.

0:10:42 - (Caroline Tracey): That lithium deposit has a very interesting history in the last few years because it was going to be developed by a Canadian and Chinese company. And in the middle of their kind of process of developing it, the Mexican government stepped in and nationalized lithium reserves. Now the Mexican government plans to do all this development itself. And, you know, if you talk to people in the area, they feel like it's just completely stalled. There were these Chinese representatives coming in.

0:11:11 - (Caroline Tracey): People were moving to the town ready to exploit the deposit, and now it's dead again, that they don't feel like there's a ton of movement. But the Mexican president has touted plans to make a Mexican electric car, a really cute small car that I recommend Googling just because it is so cute. It's called Olinea O L I N I A and that's from a Nahuat, the indigenous language word referring to movement. So those are two key parts of the planned. Sonora.

0:11:41 - (Caroline Tracey): Another one has to do with natural gas development. There's a plan to build a pipeline from the Permian Basin of Texas to the shores of the Gulf of California that's been very, very controversial. There is a lot of activism against it in Mexico right now. And for various reasons, it actually appears that it is at least paused. There are five legal challenges to it that have it currently suspended. Those, those challenges could get resolved in its favor, in which case it would continue, except that also it appears that the American company funding the project is trying to sell its shares.

0:12:17 - (Caroline Tracey): So it seems as though there's, there's really movement in the activists favor, but it's still very much in the air. And the confusing thing about this, right, is that it's natural gas. It's a fossil fuel. It's not, it's not a renewable energy source. But the natural gas industry has done a very good job of kind of selling natural gas as a transition fuel, or they call it a bridge fuel, something that can burn while we get to more renewable fuels. And that's a narrative that activists been really pushing hard against.

0:12:47 - (Caroline Tracey): And so that, that is called the Saguaro Energy Project, that pipeline that ends in a terminal that the Mexican activists say is 70 times the size of the Aztec Stadium, the largest soccer field in Latin America. It's in Mexico City. It's going to have a footprint that's 70 times that. And really impactful to the Gulf of California, which is a really pristine and biodiverse ecosystem. And then the fourth component of the Plan Sonora logistics development.

0:13:15 - (Caroline Tracey): So that includes expanding the port of Guaymas, which is also on the Gulf of California in the state of Sonora, building a train that goes from Guaymas to Nogales. That's also been very fought by activists because it goes through culturally and ecologically sensitive areas. But it's being built by the military. And there's really very little, it seems, that can be done to stop it. Expanding highways and this sort of the green logic that officials will explain behind this is that they're improving efficiency, they need to transport things.

0:13:48 - (Caroline Tracey): But I think there's also ways in which this is just straight economic development that isn't really about the energy transition. Right. They, they want to make Sonora be a little kind of tech hub for, for the country and take advantage of the fact that there's going to be this lithium and renewable energy development to have other industries too. So those are the four components of the, of the Plan Sonora.

0:14:12 - (Chris Clarke): Right. So in California, we got a little familiar with some of the development, energy development going on in Baja Norte. In particular, the wind development in the Sierra Juarez, which for listeners is a different Sierra Juarez than the one across the road from El Paso. It's in northern Baja California, near the Imperial Valley. But also natural gas Power plant in Mexicali. There was a lot of discussion when San Diego county was building the Sunrise powerlink transmission line that despite the claims that this was being built to move solar and wind from the Imperial Valley to coastal California, that it would actually hook up with a thermoelectric plant in Mexicali and just distributing fossil fuel energy.

0:15:03 - (Chris Clarke): I'm wondering if either of those larger projects are connected with Plan Sonora.

0:15:09 - (Caroline Tracey): Yeah, there's, I think that that Sierra Juarez wind plant is going at least according to people in Mexicali. That's really just like serving directly Silicon Valley. I haven't personally confirmed that or verified it, but that's, that's what people say is that this is really. There's this renewable energy kind of boom in the northwest of Mexico in large part because California wants to consume the energy, but it has environmental protections regarding where you can build the solar and wind plants.

0:15:41 - (Caroline Tracey): And so they cannot build enough wind generation to meet their needs. And Mexico has become the place that you can do that. So I think that those particular projects are not necessarily directly part of the Plan Sonora, but they're very much in the same mode. It's just the Plan Sonora was a way of putting a, putting a border around a certain group of projects. Certainly though the like connecting Mexicali into the power grid.

0:16:08 - (Caroline Tracey): I think those, those projects are part of the same program. Mexicali had a really strange situation where they were both an importer and an exporter of electricity. Right? So basically the, the one government funded power plant in Mexicali because in Mexico the electricity company is a state company and it's the one company for the entire. There was one. CFE is the name of the commission power plant in Mexicali that was not sufficient in the summer to meet everyone's needs because it gets so hot that people needed air conditioning.

0:16:43 - (Caroline Tracey): But also they, they had sort of given all the other electricity development to private concessions who instead of selling it to consumers in Mexicali, wanted to sell to California. And so Mexicali had this one limited power plant that wasn't enough to serve its needs. All the other energy development was going to California and they ended up in the middle of the summer buying energy back from California at much higher prices than they could generate it themselves. So Mexicali for years has been in for about, I mean since the early 90s, which is when the sort of privatization impulses started in Mexico has been in this very confusing situation of being both an importer and an exporter to the detriment of people living there because they have to pay very high prices to energy. For them, it felt important that they were hooked into the Mexican electricity grid, that they could get electricity from the rest of the country when they needed it in the summer. But at the same time now it also makes it possible to sell even more to the US So I think that's something that people are really keeping an eye on there because it will impact their lives.

0:17:46 - (Chris Clarke): That's fascinating and thank you for indulging me on that slight westward tangent there. You mentioned the Mexican National Energy company, but I'm curious which other corporations are.

0:17:57 - (Caroline Tracey): Involved, at least in Sonora. The, the company that's really been the object of the most activism is this company called Mexico Pacific that's based in Houston, that is the one that plans to build a pipeline from the Permian Basin in Texas to, to the Gulf of California. And that company has, interestingly, an Australian CEO and it has this funder that's the one that appears to be trying to sell its stake, which is called Quantum Energy, which I believe is also based in Houston.

0:18:29 - (Caroline Tracey): And I think there's an interesting dynamic which is that activists all over the country have been protesting the actions of that company. At the same time, Mexico had a change of administration in the fall. It's the same party, the party is called Morena, but it changed from the previous president whose name was Lopez Obrador, to Claudia Sheinbaum, who famously, right, is a, is a climate scientist.

0:18:53 - (Caroline Tracey): Right at the end of Lopez Obrador's administration, he passed some really major reforms, first to the judicial system and second to the energy law. He wanted to make it so that the cfe, the National Energy Commission, was even more important in the, in the energy production economy in Mexico. And then with regard to the judicial system, he framed it as a kind of an anti corruption measure. But what the sort of major change was that was that all the judges would be elected.

0:19:28 - (Caroline Tracey): And that's been something that's been very concerning to international companies doing business in Mexico because they feel like it's going to open the doors actually to more corruption, paradoxically, that the judges will all be from the party, they will be like loyal to the party's needs. And Claudia Sheinbaum, the new president, the new climate scientist president, hosted a CEO forum in October that was designed to assuage the fears of international companies who might be worried about doing business in Mexico now.

0:19:57 - (Caroline Tracey): And the sort of star of this CEO forum was the CEO of Mexico Pacific that she was Photographed with Claudia Scheinbaum said, this is going to be the largest foreign direct investment ever in Mexico. And so now I think there's this paradoxical situation, which is where you have tons of people across Mexico, and not only in Sonora and Baja California, but there was a big protest in the Zocalo, which is the plaza in front of the palace of Government, a few weeks ago at the end of January.

0:20:25 - (Caroline Tracey): People all over the country are protesting this development in the Gulf of California on climate change grounds. And at the same time, the sort of climate scientist president feels like this is the project that she can use as the sort of proof to international companies that Mexico is a good place to do business. And so I think those things are coming to a head right now because Claudia Scheinbaum is having to make decisions about whether to tell the Natural Resources Secretariat to cancel the project or not.

0:20:52 - (Chris Clarke): How much does the current chaotic monitoring of the Trump administration with regard to its relationship with Mexico, how much does that play into this whole situation with deciding whether or not to go ahead?

0:21:05 - (Caroline Tracey): It's a really good question. There haven't been energy tariffs in at least a decade. Right. And previously they came from the Mexico side. Right. So this is, it's something that could be a really new and really impactful change. The, the selling of electricity between California and Baja California, I think, is a state of California to Federal Electricity Commission transaction. But if there were tariffs, it would cost a lot more money, and probably those costs would be passed on to California consumers, is my guess.

0:21:36 - (Caroline Tracey): Maybe it would mean that they could buy less and that would leave more for Mexicans to consume. But my guess is that because they have these legal standards to achieve by 2045 and interim goals in between, I'm guessing they'll still buy at a higher price, and it would just mean higher prices for Californians. With regard to natural gas, I think it's even a little bit more complicated because you never had exportation of natural gas until the Obama era. So in 2016, after the sort of fracking boom, Obama started to allow natural gas to be exported.

0:22:10 - (Caroline Tracey): And concurrently, the president of Mexico at that time, whose name was Pena Nieto, started making policies that allowed for that gas to be freely imported. And they've put Mexico in this situation where they, I want to say, between 60 and 70% of Mexico's electricity generation, energy generation, comes from this imported natural gas. It's a really big dependency for Mexico. And then at the same time, so there's this internal national dependency on US Gas. And then at the same time, There are these projects for export.

0:22:43 - (Caroline Tracey): So this, the Saguaro Energy project that Mexico Pacific wants to develop that I mentioned, there's another one also in Sonora, in Guaymas, which is called Amigo. There's one in Tamaulipas and there's one in Veracruz. There are like four pipelines that are being developed right now. And I think that it's very likely that if there were to be energy tariffs, those projects that are under construction would just fail because it would be no longer economically advantageous or even viable to do them.

0:23:13 - (Caroline Tracey): That that oil would just be better shipped out of the Gulf of Mexico and Corpus Christi. But the real problem I think would be for Mexican consumers that suddenly they would be paying a whole lot more for electricity and gas. I think that, yeah, I was listening to a presentation by an energy economist at the unam, the National University of Mexico, and he called a brutal dependency that Mexico has on gas from the US So in the short term, I think it would be impactful for Mexican consumers. In the long term, perhaps it would be better because it is, it is probably not a good thing to be so wholly dependent on this cheap and free flowing gas from the US.

0:23:52 - (Chris Clarke): So.

0:23:52 - (Chris Clarke): What does the opposition look like that's based on habitat concerns or viewshed or whatever environmental issue might have arisen for people that are opposed to this project would.

0:24:04 - (Chris Clarke): What does that all look like?

0:24:06 - (Caroline Tracey): Yeah, I think each component has had a little bit of a different opposition in regard to, for instance, the logistics development that I mentioned, that they're building this train from the Port of Guaymas up to Nogales to the US Mexico border where it can go either on other trains or on highways northward that had a lot of local opposition from people who were living in the area. And for instance, and they put up like strings showing where the impacted area was going to be so that people could see just how big it was going to be and how many cultural, important cultural sites were in its way.

0:24:40 - (Caroline Tracey): And then there was also a lot of local investigative journalism that was looking at why did that train get approved so fast, what sort of protocols were omitted? Unfortunately, I think sort of the revelation of that journalism was that, that they were just going to steamroll all the protocols. And then in terms of the solar array, a major impacted community was the Tohono O'odham, which is the indigenous nation that spans the U.S. mexico border in Arizona and Sonora.

0:25:13 - (Caroline Tracey): They have a sacred site at these salt flats that are on the northern Gulf of northern coast of the Gulf of California. And the transition lines Ended up crossing those salt flats which are sites to which the Tohanopha historically have done a yearly pilgrimage. And so I think that there was awareness, of course by the tribe on about what was happening. But I think as with the so called Ghost train, the development happened really fast. It was done by the Mexican military, who is currently doing a lot of these infrastructure projects, which means there's not as much transparency as maybe there should be or would be in other cases.

0:25:50 - (Caroline Tracey): And they just got built. So the project that has had the most successful activism is this saguaro energy project. That's the gas pipeline and terminal. And what that has looked like is there's a campaign that is a coalition of 30 organizations. It's called Bayenas, or GAS, which means whales are gas. And they have done a lot of work to try and raise awareness about what the impact of this project is going to be on the entire Gulf of California ecosystem, but especially the whales. Because people in Mexico are really proud of how many of the world's whales. It's something like 2/3 of the world's whale species appear in the Gulf of California either as residents or migrants.

0:26:36 - (Caroline Tracey): It's something that Mexico is very proud of. It was designated as UNESCO World Heritage Site, but in recent years was moved to the World Heritage in Danger site because of projects like this. And so that activism has included volunteers going into schools and drawing pictures of whales and other marine creatures with students so that they can engage. And then bringing those at the Zocalo at the, at the plaza in Mexico City. That where they did a protest. They did kind of like a clothesline of those kids drawings.

0:27:09 - (Chris Clarke): Nice.

0:27:10 - (Caroline Tracey): Yeah, they, yeah. So getting kind of people that aren't always thought of as environmental activists involved I think is one of one of the strategies. They are about to launch kind of like a business solidarity network like in like little local stores. They can put up information or host events and teach their clientele about the project, no matter where in the country they are. They also collected over 200,000 signatures. They then delivered to the Secretariat of Natural Resources.

0:27:39 - (Caroline Tracey): They had a meeting, they asked for and had a meeting with the sub Secretary of Natural Resources. And then they have this sort of legal side that is also unfolding in the U.S. there has also been some activism in Texas about the pipeline concerns. There's town called Van Horn, Texas, that there's a reporter named Martha Piskowski actually who published an article about the activism and concerns in Van Horn that you can look up.

0:28:06 - (Caroline Tracey): But I think that the folks in Mexico would really would probably really love to see some organizing in California and Arizona. Especially because people in California and Arizona go on vacation to the Gulf of California. It's also a place that's very beloved by a lot of people who live in the Southwest. And so I think that they do feel like there's a little bit of a gap in knowledge and activism on the US side by people who also ultimately be affected because they also love it off.

0:28:34 - (Chris Clarke): Aside from trying to generate some activism in California, Arizona, what other things can us Nortenos do to have an impact on this?

0:28:44 - (Caroline Tracey): If anything, you can follow the account of the coalition of organizations that have this campaign on. I think Instagram is where they're most active and I guess you would just put into the search bar Ballenas O gas, which is B A L L E N A S O just a letter gas the way we spell it in English. The organization that is overseer of this coalition is called Coniciones Climaticas, which is Climate Connections.

0:29:14 - (Caroline Tracey): They have a very significant presence online and have some really great infographics that they've developed alongside this campaign to help with the diffusion of the campaign. I think that, you know, if for those who are really enterprising and creative, translating some of that information or repeating some of the types of actions that they've done in Mexico would be one thing. Could there be this like sort of whale school method in schools in the U.S.

0:29:44 - (Caroline Tracey): for instance, because it is a cross border project, it is relevant even if the Gulf California isn't itself in the US that's one thing. I think also the question of pipelines is something that spans the entire North American continent, right? So these, these multiple pipelines, not only the solar energy pipeline are coming from the Permian Basin or in other cases there are pipelines that go from the northern Midwest.

0:30:13 - (Caroline Tracey): And so I think that there's an effort. I was recently speaking with, with an indigenous activist in Oaxaca, so in the far south of Mexico who told me he's trying to make like a continental alliance of like indigenous anti pipeline activists like from Canada to the US to Mexico, because these are such hemispheric kind of infrastructure and people are united on the opposition. Right. So I think that seeing what's closest to your area helps the cause even if it's not directly this project.

0:30:46 - (Chris Clarke): I will say as someone that spent a decade working at Earth Island Institute, which was pretty much home to the Free Keiko the Orca movement, I can say that organized groups of school children are terrifying to those in power.

0:31:02 - (Chris Clarke): And it's just a wonderful Wonderful approach.

0:31:05 - (Caroline Tracey): Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I agree. And I just thought of something to add with regard to the pipeline that I feel like 10 or 15 years ago there was this sort of mantra of keep it in the ground was was this sort of climate fight mantra. And I think you're just at a very different political moment. But it's still like a core idea to be thinking that if indeed we're going to transition to renewable energy, that means first of all, that means stopping new extraction projects.

0:31:33 - (Chris Clarke): Where can people find your work on this? And I'm saying that because it'd be really nice to have another voice besides mine. Plug in the Border Chronicle I'm happy.

0:31:43 - (Caroline Tracey): To plug the Border Chronicle and there will be more reporting about this coming down the pipeline soon. The non gas pipeline soon. The the first article, which is called what is Plan Sonora? Appeared in the Border Chronicle, which you can access@theborderchronicle.com and there will be more installments in this series about Plan Sonora soon. That's the main place that I'm, I'm publishing work about this. But I will make a plug for my own work, which is I have a book about salt lakes coming out next year from W.W. norton, so.

0:32:13 - (Chris Clarke): Oh wow.

0:32:14 - (Caroline Tracey): If you are interested in salt lakes, I encourage you to check that out.

0:32:17 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. We are definitely going to have to have you back a little closer to when that book comes out because that's totally in our wheelhouse right there. Yeah.

0:32:25 - (Caroline Tracey): I feel like your location. Yeah. You've got a number of them around you.

0:32:28 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. Caroline Tracey, thank you so much for joining us.

0:32:33 - (Caroline Tracey): Thanks for having me.

0:33:25 - (Chris Clarke): And that's a wrap on this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Huge thanks to Caroline Tracy for joining us. You can find her work on Plan Sonora and other topics over at theborderchronicle.com or at cetracy c-e t R-A-C-E-Y.com Also again, big shout outs to Lynn Buckner, Andrew McDonough and Rebecca Ward for their generous support. Y'all are marvelous and and you help keep this thing going. And of course, as always, thanks to Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy and Martin Mancha for our fantastic podcast artwork.

0:34:08 - (Chris Clarke): Our theme song, Moody Western is by Bright side Studio. Other music in this episode is courtesy original soundtrack, which is a pretty killer band name if you ask me. It has been a rare treat in my corner of the Mojave lately. Rain. Ah, rain. It is so wonderful to wake up to water dripping off the car with that dry square of pavement underneath it. I mean, we're not talking a lot of rain. This is the desert, folks.

0:34:40 - (Chris Clarke): But that rainy desert smell, you know? You know that smell. Desert rain is magic, my friends. And we're going to need some magic because we've got a lot of work to do. If you want to reach out, and I hope you do, you can find us at 9zeromiles from needles.com or T H E-D-A-M-N.org both of those websites will have a way to send us a note. If you're feeling old school or you have nice handwriting, or if you have bad handwriting and you need to practice, send us a letter snail mail at P.O. box 127, 29 Palms, CA 92277.

0:35:25 - (Chris Clarke): Things are changing fast out there in the world of politics, and it's way too easy to get lost in the doom scrolling. How about you take a minute today to reach out to somebody you haven't talked to in a while just to say you miss them? It might make their day, you know, it might make yours, too. And with that, I am off to do exactly that. And I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now.

0:35:55 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.