S5E23: Beyond Laws: Building a Movement to Save Our Deserts

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from 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.

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again.

0:00:34 - (Joe Geoffrey): it's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:45 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke and we have a lot going on in the desert these days. The Trump administration is ramping up its all-out war on environmental and cultural protection laws, which also means an all-out war on your ability to have a voice in determining what happens on our landscape, desert and otherwise. I'm going to talk about something that ties a lot of these seemingly distinct threats together and what we can do about it.

0:01:21 - (Chris Clarke): But before we do that, I gotta thank some new donors. Steven Gwainy. I apologize if I pronounced your name wrong. Stephen Aditya Guta. Thank you, Aditya. And Robert Begel, who has been a donor in the past and pops up every now and then with a generous gift. Thank you, Robert. And this is not a paid ad, but it is reciprocity. I also want to shout out a local arts-oriented business in the Morongo Basin, Joshua Tree area, Mazamar Pottery in Pioneer Town.

0:01:51 - (Chris Clarke): Now we did record an episode there a couple years ago this week. I went into custom order a piece of pottery. Okay, full disclosure, it was an urn. So I made that custom order and Thomas and Sheila from Mazamar handed me an envelope with some cash in it. They have been soliciting donations for the Desert Advocacy Media Network and this podcast for a couple of years. At this point, there is a tip jar on their counter next to the register with a beautiful 90ml from needles sticker on it.

0:02:23 - (Chris Clarke): And they've just been collecting money from us as the tourists come in. So thank you so much to the folks at Mazamar Pottery. I really like the work they do. They're on Mane Street in Pioneertown. Go check them out, see what they have to offer. In addition to tossing some change into the 90 miles from Needles tip jar, Sheila and Thomas, thank you so much. And with that, let's jump into the news. In our most recent episode, we talked to our friend Morgan Sjogren about attempts to shrink bears ears in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments.

0:03:23 - (Chris Clarke): The episode before that, we talked with Chance Wilcox of National Parks Conservation Association about a proposed rare earth mine adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park. Same company has a mine they have been developing, arguably illegally, inside Mojave National Preserve, a National Park Service unit. And they have been flouting the Mining in the Parks act for about five years at this point. In the same month, the Trump administration has proposed a reinterpretation of the Endangered Species act so that habitat destruction no longer constitutes harm in a legal sense, which if you know anything about wildlife biology or even just common sense, you know how crazy that is.

0:04:07 - (Chris Clarke): We recently have seen an attempt to weaken section 106 of the National Historic Preservation act, which requires that new projects look for historic and cultural resources that would be destroyed or affected by their project. At the same time, the Cadiz Company, which wants to plunder a desert fossil aquifer with water that was laid down in the Pliocene and the Pleistocene, got approval from the Bureau of Land Management to use a retired oil and gas pipeline to ship that water, allowing Cadiz to drain that aquifer and sell it for profit.

0:04:40 - (Chris Clarke): We have continued expansion of border wall construction in Big Bend national park, which we talked to Laiken Jordahl all about, and Oregon Pipe and Cabeza Prieta, which we Talked to Russ McSpadden about yesterday, we learned that the Interior Department is going to be doing a quote unquote review of wilderness, wilderness study areas, which are managed as wilderness, and lands with wilderness characteristics.

0:05:10 - (Chris Clarke): This review might affect as much as 200 million acres of our public lands. That attack on wilderness protection is an attack on the desert. I mean, it affects wildernesses throughout the U.S., but my back of the envelope calculation is that something like 2/3 of designated wilderness in the Lower 48 by acreage is in arid and semi-arid lands, which means about 2/3 of designated wilderness falls within our turf.

0:05:37 - (Chris Clarke): These rollbacks affect the entire country, but the effects are concentrated in the desert more than in any other ecosystem. So we have covered a significant amount of these attacks on environmental protection. And my inclination was that we needed to do an episode on each one and we might still. We're overdue for a Cadiz episode. It'd be really useful to do a Section 106 episode, I think, because people don't know about it. It's important law.

0:06:04 - (Chris Clarke): But rather than try and keep up with dealing with one of these issues a week, I wanted to talk about the pattern that these attempts make up. They're not isolated. They are part of a shift in how the administration is treating public lands and environmental protections. During Trump's first administration, this kind of thing affected individual projects that would be given the go ahead regardless of environmental protection laws. It wasn't that Environmental protection laws were necessarily watered down, with some exceptions, but just that individual projects would be improperly exempted.

0:06:40 - (Chris Clarke): What Trump and his administration are doing now is different. They are gutting the basic framework of environmental and cultural and labor and safety protection in the interest of the people that stand to profit more. Without those protections, the administration is reducing constraints on transforming public landscapes and private land for extraction of minerals or so called border security or infrastructure. They want to change the rules instead of just exempting individual projects.

0:07:12 - (Chris Clarke): Now, this didn't start in 2025. You could make an argument that it started 20 years before that with the passage of the Real ID act, which allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive environmental and historic preservation laws in order to allow border enforcement and border barrier construction. And that authority given to the Secretary of Homeland Security has normalized the idea that environmental protections can just be set aside because the government has other priorities.

0:07:43 - (Chris Clarke): The difference between the Real ID act and what's going on this month is that the policies we're looking at now extend the Real ID Act's approach well beyond the border area, just by weakening the protections that the law provides. Instead of asking, should this project proceed despite the protections, the government increasingly asks, how can these protections be gutted so that the project can proceed? And then projects like it.

0:08:08 - (Chris Clarke): One of the questions that people often ask in this kind of situation, especially with individual projects, they ask, who benefits from changing this place, from destroying this ecosystem, from mining next to this national park, or sucking this desert aquifer dry, or putting up a second border wall? Who benefits? And of course, different individual projects have different beneficiaries. The wall construction cronies of the Trump administration are obviously benefiting from border wall construction.

0:08:41 - (Chris Clarke): Foreign owned mining companies benefit from weakening of oversight of mining proposals, which are already pretty lax on public lands, to be honest. Mining companies and ranchers and logging companies and ski run developers and McMansion builders benefit from reducing national monuments and from eroding wilderness protections, eliminating wilderness study areas. So different beneficiaries for individual projects, but they all have a pattern in common.

0:09:09 - (Chris Clarke): Profits become concentrated by one party, and the costs are borne by the public. Now, how does the public pay the cost of those profitable projects? Well, for one thing, we pay those costs on April 15. For instance, the Mining Law of 1872, which allows foreign mining companies to come in, set up shop, mine for whatever precious ore or mineral they have in mind, and then essentially walk away without paying any royalties to the U.S. government and leaving the U.S. government, meaning us, to incur the costs involved. In remediating the mine, closing off deep shafts, which is still ongoing in the desert, revegetating strip mines that all comes out of our pockets. And the Canadian or the Australian or the other mining company from other countries walks away with 100% of the profits.

0:10:00 - (Chris Clarke): And the public loses more than money. We lose wildlife habitat, we lose groundwater, we lose archaeological and cultural sites, we lose wilderness, we lose places we can go, recreate, we lose scenic beauty, we lose ecological resilience. And perhaps most devastatingly, even though those are all pretty bleak, we lose future options to put the land to some other purpose. Whether it's holding up endangered trees or providing a place for people to hike, or protecting a watershed.

0:10:40 - (Chris Clarke): The public bears the loss and private interests collect the return. Now, one of the things I've been thinking about, especially in the context of this barrage of attacks on environmental protection laws, is that the environmental movement writ large, with some exceptions, has put a lot of effort into establishing federal laws over the last century. The Migratory Bird Treaty act, the Wilderness act, the National Environmental Policy act, the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, the establishment of the EPA, the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

0:11:12 - (Chris Clarke): Laws like this provide a sort of top-down protection. And I understand why this was a road we picked. Without those laws in place over the last more than half a century, a lot of places that we live would already be gone, paved or mined or developed. Those laws are really important. Federal laws are crucial to our work to preserve the environment and the people that live in it. It was absolutely crucial work that people did getting those laws passed. We need to fight to protect them now.

0:11:46 - (Chris Clarke): But there's a vulnerability in the federal law approach, and we're seeing the results of that vulnerability now. We're in a situation now where those wonderful federal protection laws can be erased or at least disregarded illegally with a stroke of a pen. And right at the moment, nobody is willing to stand up and say this is wrong, that has any power to do anything about it, except for those of us on the ground out in the world.

0:12:13 - (Chris Clarke): And that's not happening strongly enough, which exposes the weakness of the strategy. And again, it was a necessary strategy. If I was in a position to make decisions for the environmental movement in 1961, I probably would have gone the same route. But the other side built public support. They built a community of people that feel strongly about eliminating environmental protections. They want those protections eliminated.

0:12:41 - (Chris Clarke): Now, I don't mean that we should stop fighting for federal laws. As I said, quite the opposite. Federal laws are indispensable, but they shouldn't be the only line of defense for the environment in the desert or elsewhere. We should be filling the gaps with county ordinances, city policies, state laws, tribal protections, local conservation easements, planning commissions that understand what's at stake, all the different ways that communities can choose to protect the places they love.

0:13:10 - (Chris Clarke): A president can weaken federal laws. And if federal laws are the only layer of protection that we have for places that we love, then we find ourselves in this position that we're in right now. But with a complicated set of Russian nested dolls of regional and state and county and local ordinances that repeat and expand the protections granted by federal law. It's a lot harder to sweep away all those layers of protection at once.

0:13:35 - (Chris Clarke): And the political weight that we build by getting those local ordinances and state ordinances passed will make even the least democratically oriented president think twice before gutting federal law designed to protect the environment. Now, there is a big exception to my observation about the environmental movement focusing on federal or regional or sometimes state laws and not on building community like the other side has done.

0:14:03 - (Chris Clarke): And that exception is the environmental justice movement. By the very nature of the causes that the EJ movement works on, they are necessarily local. They're working with local issues, local people. They emerge from the sensibilities that arose in places like Kettleman City, California, or Times Beach, Missouri, or Love Canal, New York. They are necessarily local. And those local groups made alliances with other local groups, and they developed a set of broader strategies. But those broader strategies came out of an energized community.

0:14:40 - (Chris Clarke): And it's not just environmental justice groups. There are a lot of very locally based environmental conservation groups. Good example where I live is the Morongo Basin Conservation Association. They reach out to the local community and work with folks and have community events that locals will attend. But a lot of conservation efforts reverse that order, relying on getting laws passed and suing under those laws, but not mobilizing people other than to get them to sign a petition and send some money.

0:15:09 - (Chris Clarke): Again, both of those are important. I mean, we ask you to do one of those on the regular here, but starting on the ground level to build support for conservation of habitats, of landscapes, of species, of visual resources, of cultural resources. That seems to be something that we could accomplish fairly straightforwardly. And it's that kind of really local effort that I think offers us a way to protect against the possibility that future administrations can can just blithely eliminate our voices and our rights and our protections with a stroke of a pen.

0:15:42 - (Joe Geoffrey): Don't go away. We'll Be right back.

0:15:45 - (Chris Clarke): This week's clip from Fred Bell may seem a little incongruous for people expecting desert sounds. As with some of his other recordings, there's a significant component of water noise here. This is nighttime on the Amargosa River. And of course, in the desert, water becomes all the more important. So it's no surprise to hear a lot of interesting wildlife hanging out wherever there's water on the surface.

0:16:11 - (Chris Clarke): The Amargosa river, when it is above the surface, is no exception. Let's listen.

0:16:59 - (Joe Geoffrey): It. You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert protection podcast. Stay with your car. Search and rescue will find you a lot faster that way.

0:17:59 - (Chris Clarke): The pressure coming from industry is always going to focus on commodities. If something isn't a commodity yet, they'll do their best to turn it into one. In the desert, rocks become ore, springs become tappable, groundwater migration corridors become infrastructure corridors. The desert essentially becomes real estate. The things that live on this land other than people become game or pests or vermin, or if they're plants, weeds or alternately, valuable plants worth poaching and selling on the black market like white sage and people.

0:18:40 - (Chris Clarke): When the corporations train their commodification lens on people, those people are no longer individuals who have hopes and dreams and things that they enjoy and things that they fear. They're no longer treated as a way that the universe has of perceiving itself, of invaluable sparks of intelligence and soul that are possibly unique in the entire universe. Instead, people become labor or consumers or political constituencies or for that matter, anti-constituencies. Like migrants these days, they're political commodities because they are individually and en masse, very useful to people that want to wall us in and pocket the profits.

0:19:31 - (Chris Clarke): And anything that can't be commodified is ignored. Or people make strenuous but almost inevitably unsuccessful attempts to commodify them. In the desert, those intangibles include beauty and biological diversity and quiet, peace and ecological integrity and the sense that the entire landscape is a cultural resource. The Other side has spent decades building up cultural narratives that people have adopted that can appeal to rank and file Americans.

0:20:11 - (Chris Clarke): Those narratives concern things like jobs, economic growth, energy development, especially focusing on the costs of energy for households, property rights, government overreach. And if you remember our episode that talked about Ezra Klein's book Abundance, which is bringing the anti-environmental argument on government overreach to a more liberal audience, those kind of narratives have acceptance in a more progressive crowd as well.

0:20:43 - (Chris Clarke): So the Other side has built up this community since the 1970s, and while this is happening, environmental protection groups often relied more heavily on passing laws, with the notable exceptions I mentioned. In groups like them, they haven't done a lot of presence in communities or building narratives that resonate with those communities. They haven't gone into communities very much and talked in the first-person plural, saying we need to do this instead of you ought to do this.

0:21:14 - (Chris Clarke): And to be utterly clear, relying on Congress and agencies and the courts was absolutely necessary. And I'm not faulting any organization for focusing on those. But focusing exclusively on that strategy leaves a gap. One of the reasons that environmental groups of a certain size have left that gap open is because of a lack of bandwidth. Groups committed to protecting and expanding federal environmental protection laws often don't have the ability to reach out to the public and try and build communities other than on the national or state level.

0:21:50 - (Chris Clarke): Sure, groups will send out email blasts to people that have signed up, and they'll send out paper mail to people whose addresses they have. And sometimes those email mailing lists get fine-tuned so that they're reaching out to everybody in a certain zip code. Nonetheless, there isn't really a relationship there. The rare earth mine adjacent to Joshua Tree. If we can prevent it, there's going to be that organized public, that outraged public near the proposed mine that defeats it.

0:22:22 - (Chris Clarke): People are more likely to defend places that they understand and that they love. A lot of times that means that they live there too. Not always. I don't live in Big Bend. But when I visited in 2024 and saw the unfortified border around Boquillas Canyon, horses wandering back and forth across the national border without so much as a passport, that affected me very deeply. And I really care about that landscape now.

0:22:48 - (Chris Clarke): You defend what you love. The environment is very popular in opinion polls. Between three quarters and 90% of people in polls will say that they care about the environment, that they like the Endangered Species act, that they like environmental protection, there is political sentiment in favor of the environment. And that's great. But it's only step one. We need to build that political sentiment into political weight.

0:23:21 - (Chris Clarke): So here's what I think we can do. As a podcast and you as listeners, we can build cultural narratives around biological diversity and beauty and our commonality with other species, around protecting the landscapes, around understanding that logging in the headwaters means dirty water coming into your intake pipe, around community health as a public good. Now, we're not just in the business of documenting attacks on the desert, though sometimes that might seem like it.

0:23:53 - (Chris Clarke): Certainly seems like it to me sometimes. But we also take pains to look at the beautiful and the fascinating and the exciting and counterintuitive things about the desert and to elevate the work of people that are doing what they can to educate people about the desert. In each episode we bring you sounds that Fred Bell has recorded from the desert as an interlude to remind you that there is beauty here and that beauty needs our help.

0:24:17 - (Chris Clarke): I like to think that every episode that helps listeners understand why bears ears or organ pipe or Sema dome or a salt lake or a sky island matter, every episode like that adds to the community that would feel the loss if those places are damaged or disappear. We want to be helpful in creating that community that puts political weight behind the political sentiment. It wasn't a mistake to fight for federal protections. I want to be very clear about that was not a mistake in the slightest.

0:24:48 - (Chris Clarke): Those protections are crucial and they need to be preserved. We need to work to protect them. But it's time for us to devote equal energy to helping enough people fall in love with what those protections were created to defend. Just imagine if the environmental block within the public grew strong enough to have the same influence or even more influence than MAGA does. We could protect a lot of wonderful places in the desert and outside of it.

0:25:18 - (Chris Clarke): And all we need to do is start talking to our neighbors. Because those of us who love a place shouldn't just rely on Washington to defend it. We should be defending that place in city halls, county board meetings, state legislatures, tribal councils, and neighborhood organizations. That's how protections become durable. That's how defending a place becomes part of the bedrock of society. And that's really what we want, isn't it?

0:26:18 - (Chris Clarke): Thanks for listening to this episode. Before we check out, I want to again thank Steven, Robert and Aditya for their wonderful donations. You can reach out to us and make yourself similarly part of the Cool Kids Club by going to 90miles from needles.com donate and choose a size and frequency of donation that makes sense to you. Every cent we get goes to spreading the word about the podcast, making it show up in more places, and on occasion getting less creaky and newer equipment to increase our sound quality.

0:26:49 - (Chris Clarke): We are trying to think about ways to get ourselves onto community radio stations. If you have ideas about stations that might be interested, drop a line. Chris@90miles from needles.com we are going through what the Weather Service is referring to as a dangerously hot period here in Southern California and nearby states as well. Jack the Dog and I are hunkering, anchoring in the studio with a mini split, turned up a little bit or down?

0:27:15 - (Chris Clarke): Just down. Doesn't hurt too much to get into the car, but I wear oven mitts anyway. Don't forget that weather like this doesn't just dry you out and cause you to have heat injury, but it can actually give you first and second degree burns and third degree if you're really lucky. So please be careful. We've got a great few episodes coming up. Take care of yourselves because the desert needs you.

0:27:44 - (Joe Geoffrey): And that brings us to the end of this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. You can find show notes for this episode along with links and background@90miles from needles.com we're also on social media. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and Threads. Just search for 90 miles from Needles and if you'd like a more direct line, you can reach us on signal at HEY90MFN67.

0:28:19 - (Joe Geoffrey): If you'd like to support the show, you can make a donation of whatever size and frequency feels right to you at 90miles from needles.com noodles donate listener support is what makes this podcast possible. Our voiceover is by Joe Jeffrey. Podcast artwork is by Martine Moncham. Nature sounds are recorded by Fred Bell. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Bright side Studio with additional music licensed from Independent Artists.

0:28:52 - (Chris Clarke): Other music in this episode is by Eddie Honcha and the Rhinestone Cowgirls.

0:29:21 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.