S4E9: DEI and Desert Protection

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 think the deserts are barren wastelands. It's time for 90 miles from Neil's the Desert Protection Podcast. Thank you Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clark, and today we're going to dive into a topic that might seem to you like it actually belongs in some HR meeting somewhere.

0:01:01 - (Chris Clarke): But trust me, this is entirely relevant to desert protection, even though it might not seem so at first glance. We are talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, as it's known lately or by the acronym dei, and why Donald Trump and the right wing's relentless attacks on DEI aren't just bad for people, but bad for the desert as well. But first, I want to remind you that this podcast does not get put together without help from people. Just like for instance, Adrian Slade, who is our newest donor, came in just after the last episode.

0:01:40 - (Chris Clarke): Adrian, thank you for your very generous donation. This is a grassroots effort. We're not going to turn down foundation grants, but we don't have any yet. So if you want to see us grow and continue, head over to 90miles from needles.com donate and you can pick your amount and your type of donation, whether that's a one time or recurring, recurring, monthly or yearly. It's people just like you that are making this happen.

0:02:11 - (Chris Clarke): And we are extremely grateful to all of our donors. 90 miles from needles.com donate or you can text the word needles to 5355 now let's get something straight right off the bat. DEI isn't just a buzzword, nonsense thing cooked up to make white guys feel uncomfortable. That's just a side benefit. Kidding, Kidding. DEI is really about fixing a system that has been rigged for a long, long time. A system that has let white men, regardless of their qualifications, rise to the top of society, while folks who are just as capable, or often more so, get shut out.

0:03:54 - (Chris Clarke): The right wing likes to say that DEI is opposed to meritocracy, but in fact, it makes meritocracy possible. It helps tear down the advantages that have propped some people up, kept others down. You ever meet one of those guys? He's usually some older white dude. And I can say that being one myself. Some older white dude who insists he got where he is through hard work and pulling himself up by his bootstraps. And nobody helped me.

0:04:22 - (Chris Clarke): I've met plenty of those guys. Some of them were born with the boots already on and somebody else doing the lacing for them. They say they started from scratch, but most of them benefited from a long list of perks. Some of them visible, some notes. Maybe their great grandparents bought a house and started saving generational wealth back when redlining kept people of color locked out of those same neighborhoods.

0:04:50 - (Chris Clarke): Maybe they got into college because their father or grandfather or grandmother for that matter, went there. Legacy admissions are affirmative action for white guys. Hell, maybe they got hired for a job because they looked like they'd fit in, which usually translates to being a white man in a room full of other white men and those self made end quote entrepreneurs who brag about starting from nothing.

0:05:16 - (Chris Clarke): Turns out a lot of them had family money to fall back on or a network of business connections they inherited without even realizing it. Possibly. Meanwhile, women and people of color and indigenous folks, LGBTQ people are out there grinding just as hard, if not harder, without any of those head starts. DEI is not about giving anyone a handout. It's about removing barriers that face extremely well qualified, creative talented and hard working people because of who they are.

0:05:51 - (Chris Clarke): And if you need proof that unqualified white men still have an unfair leg up, look no further than the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump, a man with more indictments than coherent policy ideas, steamrolled his way to the Republican nomination while his highly qualified woman of color opponent suffered accusations of having gotten to where she is through deceptive and manipulative means, which I thought was a little bit of projection on their part.

0:06:20 - (Chris Clarke): What I'm saying is that we do not have a meritocracy in place. Now, if the guy who failed upwards for decades, who is widely seen as not particularly competent, keeps getting the top job at this point, you might be wondering when I'm going to start talking about the desert. Well, the idea of dismantling unfair systems that preserve inequity is not just about jobs or electoral politics. It's also about protecting the desert Landscape protection campaigns have kind of a reputation for being a playground for old white environmentalists.

0:07:26 - (Chris Clarke): This lack of representation among the big groups is not new. Back in 1990, the Southwest Organizing Project, a grassroots group based in New Mexico, wrote an open letter to this so called Group of 10 mainstream environmental organizations calling them out for racism and exclusion of people of color. The letter pointed out how these big green groups would swoop into communities of color, push their agendas, and ignore the voices of the people actually living there.

0:07:56 - (Chris Clarke): Groups like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, the Wilderness Society and others got an earful. And if you ask me, deservedly so. The letter asked why the leadership of these environmental groups was so overwhelmingly white and male, despite the fact that environmental issues hit communities of color hardest. That letter got sent 35 years ago, and let's be honest, it's still pretty valid.

0:08:22 - (Chris Clarke): We are still working on correcting the flaws that were identified in that letter. The truth is, desert activists are a bit more likely to be people of color than in just about any other corner of the land conservation movement. Indigenous activists, Latinx communities, African American communities, other marginalized groups have been fighting for the desert, not just because they love the landscape, but often because their history and their culture and their very existence is tied to it.

0:08:51 - (Chris Clarke): And when Trump comes after dei, he's going after the very people who have the most at stake in the fight to defend the desert. And at the heart of it all is fear. Trump's entire shtick is fear. Fear of change, fear of losing power, fear of voices that aren't oozing out of his own face. He spins DEI into this big, scary thing, like it's coming for your job, your family, your way of life. He tells his followers that DEI means giving so called unqualified people a handout.

0:09:30 - (Chris Clarke): What he's really talking about is that people who've been locked out of the system will finally get a fair shot and show they are every bit as capable, if not more so. And the fear Trump and people like him have of the specter of a brown planet is pretty close to the same fear people have of the desert. The desert gets written off as empty, hostile, useless, something to conquer or pave over or ignore.

0:10:02 - (Chris Clarke): And that fear fuels destruction. And just like this artificially promoted fear of dei, it's based in ignorance. Let's talk a little bit of history. That came before that 1990 letter from the Southwest Organizing Project, because we really can't understand the present without it. Despite what some school boards across the country would have you think, the North American deserts have been a stage for some of America's ugliest chapters.

0:10:33 - (Chris Clarke): Indigenous genocide is baked into the ground out here in the California deserts, the Chemoevi and the Mojave and the Cahuilla, the Shoshone, the Paiute were driven from their lands, communities shattered. Same story in Nevada with the Paiute and Shoshone, with the Apache in Arizona and New Mexico. The list goes on. Native peoples lands got turned into military bases and mines, sometimes even into playgrounds for rich tourists.

0:11:07 - (Chris Clarke): And now as we talked about in the last episode about Plan Sonora, sacred sites are being turned into solar energy facilities, extracting sunlight as a resource for profit. I remember standing out in the Ivanpah Valley 15 years ago, watching the bulldozers kick up dust on old Chemoeviland and thinking, is this what progress looks like? This is a place where families once lived their lives and non human families did the same thing.

0:11:41 - (Chris Clarke): And now it's the site of a failed attempt to extract profit from sunlight. And nobody even blinks. I mean, except when they're looking at the one tower that's still working. Fast forward a little bit to World War II and the US government, using the same law that Trump used to justify his sending innocent people of color to death camp in El Salvador, locked up tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry in desert concentration camps.

0:12:17 - (Chris Clarke): Let's call those camps what they were. Places like Manzanar and Poston are relatively well known. But there were more. The Gila River Camp in Arizona, Topaz in Utah, Tule Lake in Northern California. The desert wasn't chosen by accident for these concentration camps. The government put people there because they saw the desert as a punishment. A punishment for being who you are today. There's a similar story continuing to unfold in the borderlands. The U.S. mexico border cuts through some of the most ecologically sensitive desert terrain in the world.

0:12:55 - (Chris Clarke): The border Wall, a centerpiece of Trump's anti immigration platform, doesn't just block people, though. It doesn't do that nearly as effectively as advertised. But the wall also blocks wildlife migration routes. It disrupts water flows, slices ecosystems in half. Endangered species, like the Sonoran pronghorn and the desert tortoise, find their habitats divided, while sacred indigenous lands, including those of the Tohono o'odham nation, are bulldozed and blasted apart.

0:13:27 - (Chris Clarke): The wall, like so many other policies targeting migrants, isn't just an anti immigrant tool, it's an anti desert tool. The human toll of this border policy is devastating. Indigenous people living in the borderlands face harassment from ICE agents, despite the fact that many of them belong to nations that predate the US by centuries. Tohono O'odham citizens, for example, are regularly questioned about their legal status on their own ancestral lands.

0:13:57 - (Chris Clarke): The very people who have lived in harmony with the desert for generations are treated as outsiders, their connection to the land dismissed. This relentless scrutiny and harassment are born from the same fear that fuels Trump's anti DEI agenda. The belief that people who look different, speak different languages, or hold different cultures are a threat to the Status quo. Now, I imagine some people are probably thinking that Trump doesn't actually believe what he's saying. He's probably not actually afraid of these people. He's just using it cynically to activate his base.

0:14:34 - (Chris Clarke): But it really doesn't matter whether you sincerely are a racist or just pretend to be one for political advantage. Anyway, back to the main point. Environmental protection and social justice are inseparable. Protecting the desert means protecting the communities who live in and around it, many of whom are among the most marginalized. Climate change, pollution and resource extraction disproportionately affect indigenous Latinx, African American and other low income communities in desert regions.

0:15:13 - (Chris Clarke): By fighting for social justice, desert advocates create stronger, more resilient communities that are better equipped to defend the land. Now, all this being said, I don't want to give you the idea that I'm claiming the desert protection movement is some kind of multiracial paradise. Our movement is not immune to the inequities of the society it exists within. Many desert advocacy groups still reflect the historical exclusion of marginalized voices, even as or if they strive to do better.

0:15:46 - (Chris Clarke): You only have to go back to the year 2000 to see what a lot of desert protection groups thought about the Timbasha Shoshone Homeland act that returned self determination to people who were almost displaced from their land by the National Park Service in Death Valley. Now, we all mean well in the desert protection movement, but good intentions are not enough. True desert protection in a just society demands that we continually examine our own groups, that we ensure diverse leadership, and that we listen to those who've been ignored for too long.

0:16:21 - (Chris Clarke): To defend the desert is to defend all of its people. Now, I don't want to seem like I'm pointing a finger because the whole saying about when you point a finger, if four fingers are pointing back at you really has some validity. But we reflect this shortcoming at 90 miles from Needles as well. We are still a product of the society that we came up in. We strive to amplify marginalized voices. It's really important to us and we want to tell stories that might otherwise go unheard.

0:16:55 - (Chris Clarke): But this is still a project started by an old white guy. Our guest list still lacks the diversity that we want to champion. I mean, it's better than it could be. We've had 41 guests so far in the last four seasons. Fifteen of them have been people of color. That's a little bit more than a third one of them has appeared four times. Twenty of them have been women. That's roughly on par with proportions in society.

0:17:23 - (Chris Clarke): That's better than nothing. But it's only a modest start and we are committed to improving those numbers and continuing to report on organizing efforts by people of color, women, LGBTQ activists, and this is difficult for an entirely volunteer run operation, but we are also aiming to diversify the people that are working on this. We're working on raising funds for paid positions. That's not entirely selfless because I can't afford to do this if we don't. But an important part of that goal is to be able to hire other people who have different life experiences, different perspectives than I do.

0:18:05 - (Chris Clarke): And until we get to that well funded place in the near future, we also welcome volunteer co hosts. Whether you want to do a one time appearance or a recurring role, let us know if you're interested. To sum up, fear thrives on ignorance. It always has. That's true for opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. It's true for people who want to damage the desert, and it's true for social attitudes toward the people fighting to protect both.

0:18:37 - (Chris Clarke): We can't let that fear win. The desert deserves better, and so do the people who call it home. And that wraps up this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Thanks again to Adrian Slade for their generous donation. Again 90 miles from needles.com donate thanks also to the Southwest Organizing Project for raising the alarm 35 years ago and for continuing to do good work. You can see a copy of the letter that they sent in 1990 to the Big Ten groups if you go to our show Notes.

0:19:23 - (Chris Clarke): I would also like to thank our voiceover person, Joe Jeffrey, and our podcast artist, Martine Mancha. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Bright side Studio. Other music in this episode is by Silence Art. This is an interesting spring, to be sure. Here we are four days into spring and my wonderful wife and I just spent an hour this morning up on our roof getting the swamp cooler ready to go for the summer because it's getting up toward that critical mid-90s temperature that reminds you that you are in the desert and it's just going to get hotter in weeks to come. Starting with next week, we're going to have the discussion of layoffs among BLM land management staff. That's Bureau of Land Management getting a lot of attention on the National Park Service, which is great, but there are other land management agencies too.

0:20:21 - (Chris Clarke): In addition, we're going to be talking about the National Environmental Policy act in an upcoming episode, and I'm still working on putting together that road trip to talk to people who have been involved in building the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor, starting with Chuckwalla National Monument. I was at a demonstration this past weekend, Saturday, March 22, in downtown Palm Springs, of people that were there to speak up for Chuckwalla National Monument. It looked for a couple hours like there was going to be some attack on Chuckwalla National Monument by the administration. They seem to have backed off on that, at least put it on the back burner for a few days.

0:21:03 - (Chris Clarke): We are tracking that situation and we will be bringing you the updates on that and other national monuments should any come under the withering gaze of our new Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum. That said, I think probably the best thing you can do with national monuments right now is to go hike in one of them before the weather gets too hot. Just carry more water than you think you need. Sunblock is your friend. So is a broad brimmed hat.

0:21:36 - (Chris Clarke): Take a bunch of food. Take a friend who knows how to find their way around the desert. Even if you know how to find your way around the desert, get out there and enjoy yourselves, folks. We appreciate you and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocate Media Network.