Welcome to 90 Miles from Needles! Our inaugural episode

Transcript

Alicia: This podcast was made possible by the generous support of our Patreon patrons. They provide us with the resources we need to produce each episode. You can join them at 90milesfromneedles.com/Patreon. 

Alicia: And I'm thinking to myself “who would take the head off a dead big horn?” and I'm really freaking out and I'm calling my friends over. “You gotta see this. I found the dead thing. There's and it doesn't have a head” “It doesn't have a head?”

Chris: Wait! Um, we're live. Hey! 

Alicia: Welcome to 90 Miles from Needles. 

[SFX: musical sting]

Chris: Hello from Sand Draw in the Mojave Desert of California. I'm Chris Clarke 

Alicia: and I'm Alicia Pike. 

Chris: And this is the inaugural episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. 

Alicia: woo hoo!

Chris: A little bit about us. I live in the California desert with my wife, Lara and our dog Heart who is an adorable monster. And I've been working in both writing and environmental activism, especially in the desert, for longer than I can remember. I'm really glad to be crossing the streams of those two career arcs with this podcast. 

Alicia: And I live in the Mojave Desert with my husband, Tad and a small army of three German shepherds and one Baja street dog named Mr. Dos. (That’s Heart’s good old pal.) And while I'm a nascent desert activist, it is a profound pleasure and joy for me to learn more with my friend Chris here, and to help you guys learn more about the desert far and wide, there's a lot to learn and a lot we can do together.

Chris: and we can learn from you too. So please, check out our website at 90milesfromneedles.com. leave us a note. One thing that you will hear in this episode is a bunch of other folks.

We put out the word on social media asking people to leave us voicemail messages concerning why they like the desert and or why they think protecting the desert is important. And we got some great answers that really stimulated us to have some great conversations. So feel free to leave your own message. give us a call. (760) 392-1996. I remember 1996.

Alicia: I was 12 years old.

Chris: Shut up. 

Or! You can go to our website at ninetymilesfromneedles.com and click on the little thing on the right-hand side that says “leave a voice message.” We weren't able to fit every single voicemail we got into this episode, but we held onto them all and we plan to use all of them in one way or another. So check us out, give us a call.[00:02:56] 

Alicia:  We'd love to hear from you. 

[SFX: raven crowing]

Chris: Raven agrees. 

[SFX: theme song]

Bouse Parker: The sun is a giant blow torch aimed at your face. There ain't no shade nowhere. let's hope you brought enough water. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the desert protection podcast with your hosts, Chris Clarke and Alicia Pike.

Bouse Parker: Part One. in which Chris attempts to tell us what a desert is.

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller: Hi, my name is Sean. I grew up in Victorville, California, in the Western Mojave desert. I now live on east coast in Washington, DC, the desert is worth protecting because It's a large, relatively intact wild ecosystem with such a diverse array of species.

It's just an amazing place to go to admire the perseverance of life to find solitude, peace and quiet, get away from the daily grind of life. It's worth protecting and saving for future generations to experience.

The desert just deserves to live and to be left alone. 

[SFX: disconnection]

Chris: The desert is a place with almost no water. That's almost entirely shaped by water.

The desert is a landscape in which the most delicate of plants live for tens of thousands of years.These statements are literally true. And yet they seem to make no sense.

Here's a clearer statement. A desert is a place with its own integrity, its own intrinsic value. Here's another, the desert is often badly misunderstood. A third: the desert is worth defending. With this podcast, we intend to enlist you in that defense.

If you're a person who loves the desert, who is never happier than when you're seven miles off the pavement and 600 yards up a slot canyon. 

If your dreams are populated by coyote, songs and petroglyphs, if you have strong opinions about the relative merits of Mojave over Sonoran, over Great Basin over Chihuahuan, if seven of your hiking ten essentials are liters of water, we are pleased to meet you.

We hope you like what you hear. Glad you found us, welcome home. We're going to do our best to make sure you like what you hear. And we hope to become part of your routine.

We made this podcast because there are people out there who love nature, who need the blue sky overhead and the feel of breezes, raking their skin, who consider themselves most at home in nature with a capital N, and who don't find anything worthwhile in the desert. I'm talking about people like the environmental activist who told me a few years back with a straight face that he hated the desert.

I'm talking about green-leaning people who describe the desert with words like barren or sterile. I'm talking about people who confronted with a desert valley full of hundred year old cacti, and thousand-year-old yuccas and 10,000 year old creosotes think that its highest and best use is to scrape it down flat and put in solar panels with a 25 year lifespan.

You might well think I'm describing a sort of hyperbolic straw man. That's a reasonable suspicion. I wish it was true. The common perception of the desert is as a place that's a broken version of something else.

Think about this: there's a concept that has found favor among environmental experts in which human beings abuse a piece of land, trample the soil, pump out all the groundwater, raze the plants, poison the native animals until nothing can grow other than the toughest and most useless of introduced weeds. The land is now ruined. And environmentalists call this process “desertification.”

In other words, creating a desert. Even those of us who know and love the desert use the term.

Disparagement of the desert is baked into our terminology. We come to the desert laden with all the anti-desert cultural baggage society gives us. Even the most perceptive of us start our desert tenure using words like “sterile” and “wasteland” and “lawless” to describe the landscape, despite its fractal complexity. Truth be told, there are more laws to follow in a million acre, expanse of creosote with no other people in it than there are in downtown Los Angeles.

It's just that there are no desert cops lurking in wait to confiscate your tent.

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller: Hi, my name is Jenny and I live in Los Angeles, California, and I think protecting the desert is important for so many reasons. it's a critical home for communities, has incredible rich history, cultural diversity, and the life-sustaining ecosystem services that the desert provides are essential for our future.

Being able to go out to the desert from where I live is one of the things I most cherish about living in Southern California to find peace and solitude and connection with myself and the world around me. 

[SFX: disconnection]

Chris: If the desert isn’t a ruined, truncated version of some other landscape, a forest without trees or a prairie without grasses or a wasteland without laws, then what is it? That's a good question. The answer depends on what you're after. 

One common definition of a desert is a place where the amount of rainfall is less than the amount of water that could conceivably evaporate. That's an oversimplification it's close enough for now. A similar but less useful definition is a place that gets less than 10 inches of rain a year.

That's an arbitrary amount. Tucson, the archetypal American desert city gets the same amount of rain as San Diego, a little more than 10 inches in an average year. So technically by this definition, Tucson isn't a true desert, which is of course nonsense. Meanwhile, Bakersfield, California averages six inches of rain and change in a year, and few people think of Bakersfield as a desert city, though they should. 

Defining the desert as a place with less than a certain amount of precipitation can lead you into inconsistencies, contradictions, possibly bar fights.

These definitions focus on what the desert lacks and some of the reason a lot of us like the desert, as much as we do is that it does lack certain things. A lot of the time.  Crowds of people, Congested traffic, noise other than the wind and the roar of flash floods and the jubilant choruses of coyotes and the crack of thunder, light pollution.

But what the desert does have makes it unique.

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Hi, my name is Wendy Schneider and I live in Crowley Lake California. I love the desert because it is a beautiful, vibrant ecosystem that provides a home for many species of plants and animals. And I think that they deserve. Protection and that we should protect it for them. I also love the desert because it provides opportunities for solitude and quiet that are hard to find in other places in our busy world.

[SFX: disconnection]

Chris:The desert has incredibly old organisms living in it. Some of them are right under your nose, as you contemplate life from the parking lot of the local chain drugstore. that creosote bush and the vacant lot next door strewn with Mylar balloons and plastic shopping bags from 2003, might've germinated back in the 12th century.

The desert has history. People have been living here for at least 15,000 years. Everywhere you go in the desert, you can find the marks of people who came before, who hunted fantastical animals with six-inch claws and eight-inch teeth who built cities and then abandoned them who fished in lakes that dried up 8,000 years ago.

Their descendants are still here Keeping those same cultures alive.

The desert has variety. Every isolated valley seems to have its own complement of wild flowers of insects; of reptiles. Drive a hundred miles in a desert, and you might just cross one long valley. or you might visit six or seven distinctly different places. Dunes and volcanoes and dry lakes and wet rivers and granite boulders. And fractally layered sediments charting a billion years of the earth's history. 

The desert has beauty. 

The desert has integrity

the desert is alive.

[SFX: musical interlude]

Bouse Parker: Part two. deserts are worth defending 

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller: Hey there, this is Brian. I live in Bishop, California in the Eastern Sierra. And, I think it's incredibly important to protect the desert because a lot of folks overlook it.

They think it's just a wasteland, but really it's a place to be appreciated if you have keen eye and it doesn't take long for it to capture you. There's a certain magic out there. And I hope folks get out and experience it for themselves and get lost in the good way. 

[SFX: disconnection]

Chris: Hey, Alicia. 

Alicia: Yeah. 

Chris: Why do you care about the desert? It's awful and barren and spiny, and it's got poisonous and venomous things, and you can die from just being outside for a minute. Why do you like this place? Why, why is it important to you? 

Alicia: Well, I am the desert and the desert is me. As a human being. I'm part of the system. It's a symbiotic relationship that I'm inextricably linked to. And it's very important to me. 

Chris: You could say that about, just about anywhere on the planet though; meadows and forests and lakes and things like that. Why the desert in particular? what speaks to you about it?

Alicia: Well, the desert is home. Being raised in a desert environment and living in a desert my entire life it is extra special and close to me. I think anywhere I moved in the world, I could probably fall in love with the nature but the desert is home and growing up in San Diego where they completely altered and changed the environment to make it pretty, to make it a utopian garden of Eden, so to speak. It just always blew my mind why they changed everything. I mean, it was just fine the way it was, you know, growing up, climbing the rocks in the canyons and staring in tide pools. And these places are so stunning. And to see them being threatened to pave the way for progress. I found myself questioning what is progress? and defending the desert is important because people tend to view the desert as, as a waste of space. “There's nothing going on out there there's nothing alive out there. There's nothing special out there.” And it's just like any other environment. There's Keystone species out here that hold the whole thing together. And if they go the whole thing's gonna fall apart. We've got to be mindful of taking care of the earth that we live on because it's all we've got.

So that's why it's important to me. I see the desert as a living breathing thing that needs to be protected because it's at risk of being destroyed at the hands of capitalism and greed.

And that makes me sick to my stomach.

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller: This is Jim from Las Vegas. Deserts are special places to me in the beginning, they were just places to escape to, and get away from urban hassles. But the more time I spent there, the closer I got to them, exploring their canyons and hanging out among Joshua tree, creosote, juniper, saguaro the more alive and chatty these areas got. And the more I paid attention, the more I saw.

Perhaps due to this weird aloofness some of the most sublime experiences I've ever had have been while exploring and sitting with the desert spaces. Just because deserts don't wave back when you see them from the highway, doesn't mean they're not deserving of friendship and, when necessary, protection from bullies. 

[SFX: disconnection]

Chris: I feel the same way. There's this added sort of Resentful defensiveness that probably says more about my upbringing than it does about anything real politically, but I resent the neglect with which the desert's treated.

There was a sentiment that I ran into when I was a San Francisco environmentalist that people were impatient with hearing about the desert. They wanted to hear about rainforests they wanted to hear about mangroves and coral reefs. They wanted to hear about tidal wetlands. But people’s sentiment about the desert as a place that has its own character and integrity seems to have really lagged. California is supposed to be this place where environmental activists are really thick on the ground and everybody has at least some kind of marginal concern. And it was like the first place where there was municipal recycling and we're ahead of the curve on things like addressing climate change and protecting forests.

But a lot of times that doesn't apply to the desert. And I get defensive of places like that. And I feel like rooting for the underdog. 10 years ago, there was a sort of consensus within environmental communities that the desert could save us. If we replaced all of its habitat with solar. And people were saying “it wouldn't take much just a square 100 miles on a side, could power the entire country. What's wrong? Why don't you want that? What's wrong with you?”And you think about the different species that would be entirely destroyed by that.

And habitat for things like tortoises and relict populations of ice age plants somehow hanging on in the middle of the desert, and the unique cultural sites and petroglyphs, and all of the things that make this desert a place that is distinct and there just was no recognition of that.

Alicia: Let's just give a little leeway to people like that. And people that we… we’re referring to people as though everybody doesn't care. And I just want to give them a little credit because society, As a whole has been exploiting and using nature as a disposable resource since time immemorial, and that has been embedded and ingrained into human beings since we started doing it, cutting down trees to make shelter, paving desert to throw down solar fields. And that's, I find a sentiment that a lot of people carry is that, well, life is short and we've got to just enjoy our lives. And that's true to a degree. when you start to realize the bigger ramifications of what we've been doing for thousands of years it's not going to be anything left to enjoy.

Chris: Yep. 

Alicia: And whether or not you like the desert, whether or not you like the rainforest, whether or not you like the redwoods or wherever your favorite nature is it's all in peril at our hands. And it's it's a major disconnection because for thousands of years, we've been just, “do what you gotta do to survive.”

And now that we've met that bar and we've gone way beyond it, it's just a machine gobbling everything up and that's just accepted as a normal by society. And it's not okay. We have to think about what we're doing with the long view instead of being so short-sighted what “we need renewable energy. So let's cover the desert in solar panels. Nobody's using it anyway.” Well, who's “nobody”? anything That's not a human being. I think that’s Pretty shortsighted. 

Chris: Yeah. I'm flashing on what Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said at the opening of the Ivanpah solar energy facility. 

[SFX: background music]

Arnold: “There's some people that look out in the desert, and they see miles and miles of emptiness. I see miles and miles of a gold mine.”

Alicia: Yeah. That's the exact sentiment that society has been cultivating in our minds. that is precisely why I'm interested in doing this podcast and being an activist in general, because that's unproductive. It may be productive in a capitalistic society, but it is not productive for nature. 

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller: Hi, my name is Cody Hanford and I live in Tennessee and I think protecting the desert is important because it is the largest intact ecosystem in our country. I mean, how amazing is that? It's still intact, just like it always has been. So we gotta fight hard to keep it that way. And if I'm being honest and a little selfish as a former desert rat, I left a significant piece of my heart in the desert, and I would love for it to remain intact too, so I can come visit it from time to time.

[SFX: disconnection]

Chris: I think the desert really stands out from a lot of other different kinds of ecosystems, just in how intact it is, the deserts of north America; They're definitely impacted. There's a bunch of different ways that we have messed up the desert, but overall its ecosystem is intact over many hundreds, thousands of square miles. And where I grew up, none of that is the way it was.

There's places in upstate New York that have a lot of woods, many trees growing on them. Some of them a couple of hundred years old, but all that was completely logged and habitat converted. The prairies, there is maybe a few hundred acres of tall grass prairie left.

Alicia: Right. 

Chris: There’s probably no landscape in the US that is more completely converted than the central valley of California. And, here you can study things as they were, you can study things as they evolved, you can learn about them. It's so intact here that you can recognize the introduced species. They're not just blending in, as opposed to on the east coast.

We lost the Jaguar and we lost the Mexican Wolf and we'd need to bring them back. We lost the Sonoran pronghorn, out of the deserts of California. It's still hanging on in Arizona but it's still intact.

It's still, essentially the way it was. 

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller: Hi there. My name is Travis and I live in Yucca valley. I love the desert because it's real and it doesn't require any virtual artifice or adulation from humans. And while its size may swallow some and spit others out. It nonetheless gives itself freely to those who want to know it, but more than anything, I think I love it because it's always there for me. 

[SFX: disconnection]

Alicia: So do you have any other thoughts on why the desert needs protecting other than its life?

Chris: We're facing a climate future in which higher temperatures are going to be guaranteed in which in many places, less precipitation is going to be guaranteed. And the stuff that lives here has got a head start on adapting to that. Every species that's here is likely to be better suited to life in the West in 2200 than stuff that is growing in Western Oregon right now. If we play our cards, right, we might have Joshua trees growing in Fresno you know, we're going to have habitat in Wyoming, places like that, that is much more suited to desert Bighorn than to mountain big horn. We are likely to have creosote growing a lot farther north than it is now.

All the organisms that live in the desert, are resources, if you want to look at it that way, I don't like calling things resources necessarily 

Alicia: No! ‘cause it's exploitative!

Chris: but you could think of them as resources for ensuring that we have ecosystems that are functioning in the year 2355. 

Alicia: quality of life? For all things living? 

Chris: Yep. 

Alicia: Sounds like a pretty good reason. 

Chris: Yep. 

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller: Hello. My name is Ed LaRue and I live in Wrightwood, California I'm in my 32nd year of walking the Mojave Desert protecting tortoises. For most of that time, I've actually been a board member with the Desert Tortoise Council.

I think probably the coolest thing that I appreciate is all the other people who are dedicated to protection a few years ago, a young lady was saying, “what good's a turtle for?” We were talking about that. And I realized that the compassion that I've had for the last 30-plus years for the tortoise has grown compassion in me for many other things.

I've learned how better to respect myself as a result of respecting the resources that are vastly disappearing from the desert. 

[SFX: disconnection]

Chris: And we still haven't finished studying the desert. 

Botanists find new species in the desert all the time. Just think about all the plants that are unknown to science because they only bloom in years where there's a really abundant monsoon late in the year, and then a bunch of hot weather, or whatever conditions they need to germinate.

Alicia: That's something that the desert taught me that until I moved out to this more isolated section of desert, did I realize that there are greater cycles that are not yearly? They're not every other year, not every five years, there's nothing reliable about it.

It's all about environmental conditions. And when X, Y, and Z happen, you're gonna get this. And I was seeing things that I'd never seen before, bursts of praying mantis. Sometimes. it's only happened once since I've moved out here in eight years where it was just, they were everywhere. They were inside my windows in the house.

They were outside on the bushes, little tiny baby praying mantis everywhere. I remember another year where anywhere you looked, there were at least 30 different kinds of beetles scuttling across the sand. And they were everywhere for a small period of time. There was just a bloom of bugs. a bloom of spiders, a bloom of flowers.

And it's, I can't tell you what the conditions were that brought it there, but living out here has definitely put me more in tune with “wow. So the environment really does have its own formulas” There's just no way that we know everything. It's not just the deep sea that we're finding new species it's right here in our own backyard.

Chris: Last year, desert lilies! Coming up all over the low parts of the desert. And they're nowhere this year, they probably won't come up for the next five years again, but they were just everywhere. admittedly, we bought our place last year.

It was our first spring in that area, but nobody had seen the desert lilies for awhile. And then they came up and they were all through here. They were all through the next valley to the east and it was just, the conditions were somehow right for these things that are just sitting under the soil for years and years and years, that maybe send up some leaves every once in a while and photosynthesize and boost themselves a little bit. But they were sending up these 18-inch flower stalks that had these three inch wide, bright white flowers.

And that's the desert. 

Alicia: And I was fascinated by that because they weren't coming up at our house. They were everywhere else, but I don't. Let's see, I don't remember what year it was. You were still living over

Chris: in Panorama Heights.

Alicia: Yeah. You were over in that neighborhood And remember when I brought you that box of desert lily seeds? it was around that time that the conditions were right. And our whole valley was full of them. I'd never seen so many in my life and they were everywhere and there's, the air was fragrant with. it was like, Aphrodite's perfume. it was just like the utter perfection of a feminine smell. It was just soft. It was sweet. It was intoxicating. And it hasn't happened again since. Only once in eight years. And in Tad's greater dataset from 2001 has, have we ever seen lilies out and in our valley like that. And I know that they tend to come up annually out in the preserve east of here, but not in our valley.

It takes certain circumstances. And then they came up and that year was just like magic.

Chris: There's a word it's “irruption.” It's not like E R U P like a volcano does, it's I R R U P T I O N irruption. And basically it's when there's a sudden abundance of a particular kind of organism. It's used a lot for birds when there's just a huge population boost in birds and there's too many of them in one spot. And so they en masse flock to a different spot where they're not usually and the birders notice hey, there are eight times as many white pelicans here as there were last year or for the last 10 years. And I think there are irruptions of all kinds of different things here. We had the Hawkmoth larvae thing two years ago. We had a good couple of snows. And the conditions were really favorable in Joshua tree for Hawkmoth caterpillars, to not only hatch out, but survive in such numbers that the critters that eat Hawkmoth larvae were completely overwhelmed and probably getting really fat.

Alicia: I remember that was a great year for Primrose too.

Chris: yep. It was a really good Primrose year and there were so many big fat Caterpillars walking around eating them that it took us forever to walk a block because Lara, my wife had to move each of them off the road.

Alicia: You felt like you were committing genocide driving to the grocery store. There were so many on the road 

Chris: And there are just so many adult hawkmoths flying around a couple of months later. And I feel like every year the desert has something that's doing that. And maybe we don't notice it cause it's gnats or, 

Alicia: it has been bugs this year.

Chris: You can attest to that? 

Alicia: biting flies, like crazy this year. Little tiny shield beetle bugs that fly also. Gnats. what else have I noticed? The little green whistle little green bugs, little dragonfly looking wings. Cleaning the house. There's just so many bugs in the window frames. They're everywhere and everywhere this year. And for me, I have sensitive skin and the 🤬 are biting me. And it's painful. This year has been painful. I was bit since we've been sitting out here.

Chris: I appreciate your devotion to the podcast. 

Alicia: It's devotion to nature. That's stronger than anything else. I know. 

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller: Hi, I'm David Smith and I live in 29 Palms, California, and I love the desert because it is the great equalizer. It's big and awesome and powerful. And regardless of your wealth, each one of us has the right and privilege to enjoy it.

[SFX: disconnection]

Chris: What else could we say about the desert?

We've been complaining about the noise in this recording session because there's planes going overhead. There hasn't been one for about 15 minutes, which is really nice. We're in this spot that is really accessible, close to a very crowded part of the desert. And there's been nobody here since we got here a couple hours ago. just the opportunities for solitude are unbelievable out here.

And if you're willing to do even a little bit of walking away from your vehicle, you can get out here and just have an entire valley to yourself. even now with people in Joshua Tree complaining about the crowds and Joshua Tree National Park is getting pretty crowded 

Alicia:  nothing quite like waiting in a line to go out into the middle of nowhere. 

Chris: Yeah. But even with that, and even with the crowding in places like the grand canyon and the parks outside of Vegas, like red rock and valley of fire even with the crowds in Death Valley, right around furnace Creek it's so easy to be Miles away from the nearest person, unless you bring one with you. 

I like people, but I really value the ability to have that solitude and to collect my thoughts and to not accidentally bump into people for long enough that if I do accidentally bump into someone, I'm actually glad to see them.

Alicia: Yeah. It's kind of exciting. 

Chris: And I'll say, “Hey, what brings you out here?” And we'll have a conversation and it's just, that feeling is so rare for so many people in the world. There are people that grow up, live long lives, and die, and they're never. In a square mile of land that doesn't have several thousand other people in it, 

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller: Hi, my name is Robin Lewis. I live in Joshua Tree. I've lived here for 17 years now. I love and respect the desert. I love the dark night skies, the beautiful stars and the peacefulness that this beautiful place provides.

[SFX: disconnection]

Alicia: That reminds me of another good reason to protect the desert is a lot of people haven't had the opportunity to actually see the stars and the nighttime skies in the desert are among the best because there is not a lot of development out here.

So light pollution is scant and then there's no buildings. There's no trees. There's no, there's nothing in the way. The sky is just so big and immense, it feels like it's right there. You can reach out and touch the planets. 

Chris: I forget who said it, but it was one of those rip offs of a Jeff Foxworthy joke: if your social media feed is three quarters, photos of sunsets, you just might live in the desert. 

Alicia: Yeah. I've had some friends tell me, you know, “we have sunsets here too.” They're sick of me sending them photos of our sunsets. 

Chris: “I suppose you could call them that. Your neighborhood does. Okay. Bless your heart.

[SFX: musical interlude]

Bouse Parker: Part 3. meanwhile, BACK at SAND DRAW...

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller:  Hi, this is Patrick and I live along the banks of the Amargosa River on the edge of Death Valley in beautiful Shoshone, California. And I love the desert because I love water and water is life and there's nothing more precious on this entire earth than water in the desert. and the Springs and creeks and tanks and alkali, wetlands, and salt marshes and cienegas and mesquite bosques and riparian Woodlands, and other groundwater dependent ecosystems of the desert are the reason I get up in the morning. They harbor all sorts of cool critters, like toads and pupfish and spring snails and voles. And there's also the incredible world of groundwater dependent plants and and wetland species.

And so whether it's up in the Black Rock Desert hot springs at Soldier Meadows, or the alkali marshes of the Bonneville Sink in Wendover, the cottonwood gallery forest of the Virgin River, or my home right here on the Amargosa River, water in the desert is the love of my life.

[SFX: disconnection]

Chris: I love this place.

Alicia: Glorious. Here I am sitting in the middle of what feels like as far as deserts are concerned, a forest. It’s a woodland; we've got 20-foot trees all around. Some are taller, some are shorter, they're thick, they're dense. They're green. 

Chris: and green bark too. We have all these Palo Verdes. A lot of the year they don't have any leaves on them and they photosynthesize through their bark. 

Alicia: And they glow all the time. No matter what time of day it is, they're always, it's almost like you can see them photosynthesizing.

They're exuding this energy. It's such a vibrant tree. sitting in the middle of this big wash, that's very clearly, it's it's like the main vein.

It's the life source. There's water that flows through here. There's a lot of seed bearing plants in here that the animals survive on. just from my vantage point Right now I can see more than half a dozen active burrow entrances. This place is very clearly occupied and well lived in, and if you just step outside of the banks of where we are, it's creosote as far as the eye can see just creosote flats, and when you're out this far east of where we live, this is more wilderness than the average person is used to wrapping their head around and to see a vital life source flow like this.

Chris: It's just a really amazing special place. And the further upstream you go, the more intense and thick and broad the braided channels of this wash get. And there's just amazing trees. Really the best example of desert dry wash woodland I've ever seen in the Mojave Desert. 

Alicia: So dense, so green, so full of life. I find it very hard to believe that the federal government had in mind to destroy it and turn it into a solar field. 

Chris: Yup. That would have made it a very different place. Just a decade ago, it was on the verge of becoming the Iron Mountain Solar Energy Zone.

Alicia: So disturbing that these special life source nodes of the desert are the first to go in our exploitative adventures as humans. Oh, let's pump all the groundwater out of this spring that's out in the middle of nowhere that the animals are absolutely reliant on. Oh let's just pave over this woodland where all of these seeds and food and burrows, and there, there is no ideal place to just scrape away nature and install capitalism.

Chris: Yep. That was why a lot of people got together to fight the the federal government.

The reason that we came here is that we thought that this would be a really good place to to talk about just the concept of desert protection in general, because this was a fight that was won. in 2011, the federal government through the departments of the interior and energy put together a plan to promote solar energy in six Western states, including California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado.

And part of that process was Solar Energy Zones, which in the jargon are called "sezzes"; “SEZ” and iron mountain was just one of those zones. It was not even the largest. There is one closer to Joshua tree. That is the largest solar energy zone that was designated

Chris C: iron mountain SEZ was in the draft programmatic environmental impact statement. the PEIS for the whole solar energy zone program. (you get to know a lot of acronyms when you do environmental work in the desert or anywhere else.) there were some places that were just too precious to sacrifice even to renewable energy. And a lot of the places we weren't able to win on, like the Chuckwalla valley east of Joshua tree. The west Mojave north of Los Angeles. They've had their really wonderful desert habitat converted into solar monocultures. 

We were able to win on this one. And we are continuing to fight the most inappropriate of those proposals as the drum beat of developing renewable energy gets More and more intense and for excellent reason. we need the renewable energy, but it's just the lazy way out to put it on desert habitat. And we're going to regret it if we do that. we're going to regret it a century from now.

Alicia: I still don't understand why existing rooftops being used for solar is frowned upon.

Chris: It's hard to understand. really, the only way it makes sense is if people stand to lose money, if that happens,[00:42:47] 

Alicia: that's what really bothers me about this whole thing is that at the end of the day, it's about making money. We should be better than that. 

Chris: Yes, we should. Shouldn't we. 

Alicia: One would think. 

Chris: So you were alive in the nineties, right? 

Alicia: Just barely. Yeah. 

Chris: You remember Napster? 

Alicia: Yeah. Yeah. 

Chris: Napster was this technology that completely decentralized the power to distribute music. It allowed people to exchange Digitized music with incredible ease. There was no barrier to putting music online. And it could be shared everywhere. And the record companies saw this as a huge threat to their business model and their profit margin. Some of them decided to get with the times and adapt. Some of them decided to fight it. Napster doesn't exist anymore. But the face of how music is distributed is changed forever. And it's mostly been pretty bad for musicians.

But PV panels, photovoltaic panels, just the regular old solar panels that go on your house or on the carport or whatever? Those are like the Napster of power, a really accessible form of technology that completely decentralizes generating electricity.

And just like the record companies responded to Napster, investor owned utilities like Southern California Edison, like NV Energy, like Florida Power and Light, They're all panicking. They see a threat to their business model,

If people are generating their own power, it's like people recording their own MP3s from a CD and giving them to all their friends. people don't need the power companies' coal burning power plants, or hydroelectric plants at dams, or even giant utility scale solar power plants.

People don't need those as much. 

And that's why they are fighting rooftop Solar is because they would have to do all the hard work of figuring out how to make money in the new system. They're not willing to do that. And that is why we have all these attempts to roll back the incentives for people to put solar on their roofs, around their parking lots, or whatever it is. And it's also why we have this push for huge solar power facilities on public lands.

Places like this that are already serving a purpose, providing ecological services for everything that lives here, all the animals and the plants and the fungi, sequestering carbon in the soil, cooling the desert a little bit. I've been here in June and July and it is 10 degrees cooler here than it is a hundred yards over to the east.

And it's just because the profit motive is unquestioned. People are having this conversation. 

Alicia: Well, I'm questioning it, and I'm going to keep questioning it. And this podcast is a nice megaphone for a lot of angst I've developed over the years. I remember seeing my first electric car, that was a 19th century invention in a museum Once. wait, wait, wait. In the late 1800s, they'd figured out how to make electric cars yet. We're still driving gas powered vehicles around as the main option. How is this even possible? We know why it's possible because the petroleum industry wants to make that money. 

Money is more important than life. That's the message I've been hearing my whole life.

Chris: And it's not just that kind of incredibly crass Machiavellian attitude that we're up against in doing desert protection work. It's definitely there. It's definitely very much a factor, like with the Cadiz water project, which we'll get into in a later episode. that wouldn't be on the table for discussion, if it wasn't for the profit motive.

But, there are the people that really honestly think that putting a square mile of solar on a creosote flat is absolutely the best thing to do with that land. And they are good, ethical, concerned people who want us to do something about climate change and they want to build a better world. And they, they are really worried about leaving climate catastrophe apocalypse for their grandchildren. And the only problem is they don't understand the value of that square mile of creosote and what it's doing for us 

Alicia: It’s going to require some critical thinking from people who are very good, critical thinkers.

And I think at the bottom of that is it's easier to just clear that land than to fight the powers that be, that don't want to change. And that's what really bothers me is that people who are well-meaning just don't want to deal with the struggle to change the system as it is. And it needs to change. It's not an easy task. But we've got to do something every little piece that we put forward to fight against the machines that are just degrading and breaking down the earth, instead of building it up, renewing it and taking care of it is, a step in the right direction. We've got to do something. 

[SFX: phone ringing and connecting]

Caller: Hello, my name is Megan Bailey. I am affiliated with the Facebook group called California Campground and Trail Cleanup.

And I live in Palmdale, California. The desert is important to me because it is where. And it is where I play. And it is also where I make every effort to help with organized volunteer cleanups. It's really important to me that we spread the message of conservation and taking care of our lands.

[SFX: disconnection]

Chris: Just take some action. It doesn't have to be a huge amount. Even if you send a letter, even if you make a phone call, even if you get a group of friends together just one time, and talk about protecting the desert. Talk about desert conservation. There's this guy, Paul Loeb, who wrote a book called soul of a citizen. And we'll put a link to that book on our website. In his book, he talks about activism and the misconceptions that people have about who the activists are. There's this common idea that activists, especially the ones that we really know well in our history, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, whoever; there's this common conception that activists are possessed of some kind of superhuman commitment and stubbornness of purpose and clarity of vision and that's just wrong. 

Alicia: I was visiting Egypt with my dad. And we were outside of Luxor and in a rural area.And we had taken a horse cart ride through this small village. And when we got back to the bar at the hotel that night, I was distraught. I had seen horses bloated with parasites, still being used for work. And I know… I saw! that the animal shelters in a lot of these homes were in better condition than the shelters for the humans. They depend on their animals to survive and their animals are dying in front of them. And I had a humanitarian crisis seeing this stuff. Really real painful day-to-day life that I'd never been exposed to before. And I'm lamenting to my father that I've got to do something. I can't live with myself knowing that there's places in the world that are going to hell in a hand-basket. And nobody's giving a second thought.  

And he said, “Alicia, only every 50 years or so is someone like Martin Luther King come around and you're not it. So don't worry about it.” 

And it just blew my mind that my dad was not registering with me that there are bad things happening in the world. And I want to help. And he's telling me “you're only one person and you're not no Martin Luther king. So don't bother you're not the one to do it.” There is no “one” to do it. It is a group effort. Martin Luther king did not work alone.

Chris: Ugh! I am really sorry that he said that, 

Alicia: Oh, I can't get it out of my head. It's like a prerecorded message. And it's so hurtful that people really feel that way. I don't feel hopeless in that regard. I don’t. Just in taking my friends and family on walks through nature. I am an activist all the time. You can affect change in small conversations. It only takes one sentence to change someone's perspective on the world and effect change in the butterfly effect. That translates over and over again, and travels around the world. And I am not just going to not put out any waves. 

Chris: Yep. 

Alicia: And that's what this podcast is going to do. We're going to be putting out those waves. 

Chris: Well, I mean, on the solar issue 10 years ago, when we were facing the concept that places like this were going to be sacrifice zones for solar energy, it was incredibly unpopular to criticize solar energy in the desert. There were huge environmental organizations that just were not ready to sanction that kind of criticism of developing the desert for solar and during my work with KCET over some of that time, I wrote a bunch of stuff, and there were a few other people that just had that vision of the desert as a place worth protecting and they pushed it. Honestly, I doubt that there were 20 of us. And aside from the fact that we were all, really committed and we all really love the desert and had, the normal range of talents, there's nothing particularly noteworthy about any of us. We just really wanted to make that change. 

And now it's completely accepted at least that there are some places in the desert that are too important to sacrifice for renewable energy. We still have a ways to go. And with the Biden administration, actually having an interest in climate change we are going to have to fight all that much harder because the desert is the place of least resistance to put that giant solar.

But we changed the discussion. And there wasn't a famous activist involved in there, there wasn't a Martin Luther King. That's the thing that Paul Loeb talks about in soul of a citizen. It's just that the idea of an activist being a sort of avatar of social justice that comes down to our planet once in a hundred years, to show us the way? That's a bunch of crap.

Alicia: It sounds more like a psychological misinterpretation of what being an activist means. Sounds like our ego is getting in the way. Ego says “if you can't make a name for yourself and you can't do it all yourself and you can't take credit, sounds like you shouldn't do it,” which is pretty 🤬 stupid because teamwork makes the dream work.

Chris: to summarize what we've said today. The desert is important. It's facing serious threats. It desperately needs defenders. And you, yes, you are fully qualified for the job. 

Alicia: All right. That's all for this time. 

Bouse Parker: Next time, on 90 Miles from Needles. we talk with Patrick Donnelly from the Center for Biological Diversity about a conflict between a rare desert toad and a company that wants to build a giant geothermal power plant in the middle of Nevada 

Alicia: I'm Alicia Pike 

Chris: and I am Chris Clarke. 

Alicia: This has been 90 Miles from Needles

[SFX: end theme song]

Bouse Parker: This very first episode of 90 miles from needles was produced by Alicia Pike and Chris Clarke. Editing by Chris. Podcast artwork by the very talented Martin Mancha. Intro and outro music is by Brightside Studio. Other music by slip.stream. Follow us on twitter at @90mifromneedles and on Facebook at facebook.com/90milesfromneedles.

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[SFX: boop]

Alicia: …sounds like you shouldn't do it, which is pretty fucking stupid because teamwork makes the dream work.

Chris: Can you say that again without the fucking?

Alicia: uh, shit. What did I say?