Coyote Crossing

Last night a terrible thing happened at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society:

Breaking News:  In the early morning of May 20, a major fire destroyed a large section of our shelter.  We lost our entire cat sheltering area as well as laundry facilities and offices.  We are currently without water, electricity and phone service.

We lost 15 of our beautiful cats that were ready for adoption but all the dogs survived and are being cared for in our kennels and at a veterinary emergency service.

The Berkeley Humane needs donations of money, volunteer time, and temporary homes for displaced pups and kitties. You can check out the details at their website.

Berkeley Humane is where my dear ex- and I found Zeke. I’m a few hundred miles away and broke, but I can do this: from right now until the end of June, I’ll give one hundred percent of the proceeds from sales of my book Walking With Zeke to the Berkeley Humane Society. If it wasn’t for Berkeley Humane, I never would have met the best friend I’ve ever had.

Donate directly to the shelter if you can, of course: more of your money will get there that way. But for those of you who were planning to order a copy of Walking With Zeke, do it now and Berkeley Humane will get the proceeds.

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is the one I am privileged to work for. This is a transcript of my colleague Terry’s testimony in today’s Senate hearing on CDPA2010.

1 comment on "One group actually defending desert wildlands"

One more group says “We care about these intact desert wildlands, but not those over there.” Embedded here is The Wildlands Conservancy’s testimony, delivered this morning, on the California Desert Protection Act of 2010. The Wildland Conservancy’s goal has been to protect a certain subset of desert lands — the so-called Catellus lands — from development and destruction, and they have done a good job of that. Do they need to offer up other lands that are just as intact, just as important habitat, in order to achieve that goal?

The Wildlands Conservancy testimony on the California Desert Protection Act of 2010

1 comment on "Selling out desert wildlands"

This is a nice little video in support of the California Desert Protection Act of 2010. Watch it. I have a question I’ll ask afterward.

Who Needs a Desert? Solar Power in the Mojave from Peter Rhalter on Vimeo.

It’s a nifty little debunking of the notion that Feinstein’s bill blocks solar power development in the Mojave Desert. In fact, there are significant parts of Feinstein’s bill that accelerate solar development in the desert; just not on lands protected by the bill. But did you see what the filmmaker did immediately after showing the map of land affected by solar development and/or the CDPA?

The narrator says that there’s plenty of land still available in the Mojave for solar development even if CDPA passes. The landscape shown is a plain full of healthy creosote forest. The filmmakers could have shown an abandoned alfalfa farm, a decommissioned military base with building pads and runways, or a whole lot of warehouse roof space in Barstow, but they showed undisturbed creosote that could easily have been habitat for tortoises or fringe-toed lizards or Mojave ground squirrels. “Take all the healthy, intact desert habitat you want that’s outside the Monument Boundaries,” the film seems to be saying. “We won’t object. See? We’re not NIMBYs.”

The Ivanpah Valley is one of those pieces of land that would not be protected by the CDPA. So is the plain south of the Cady Mountains, where Tessera plans to level more than 8,000 acres of tortoise, lizard and bighorn habitat to install a huge amount of Stirling sun-catchers — an completely unproven technology. So is the stretch west of Blythe where Chevron and affiliates want to put solar on land now occupied by ancient geoglyphs. None of those lands matter to the filmmaker, it would seem. They’re a fair trade-off for getting the bill passed.

That’s a lot to read into one little scene: the filmmaker may not have intended to say that at all. The video may have just had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing what a number of huge environmental organizations are saying explicitly.

Take the Sierra Club’s national office, which recently sent out an email alert urging members to “protect the Ivanpah Valley” by urging Ken Salazar to choose an “alternative” design for the Brightsource solar project that was identical to a plan drawn up by the developer. The Club later claimed that was a mistake. The national office did not notify its members of that mistake. The national office has, however, withdrawn funding from both the Sierra Club’s Desert Committee — a network of grassroots members of many different chapters with an illustrious history of fighting to protect desert wildlands — and the Desert Report, an invaluable publication devoted to those same desert wildlands. Check out the Sierra Club’s new “resilient habitats” campaign, which urges people to work to “create resilient habitats where plants, animals, and people are able to survive and thrive on a warmer planet.” Notice something about the habitats they’ve selected? Aside from the “Greater Grand Canyon” ecosystem, which arguably includes a sliver of the Mojave, true desert ecosystems are nowhere included in the ten habitats the protection of which the Club has chosen to promote.

If that seems a small omission, consider this map of the southwest US, taken from Tom Patterson’s Physical Map of the Coterminous United States. I’ve added shaded overlays to indicate, roughly, the location of the four major North American deserts.

I’ve drawn the overlays somewhat conservatively, and omitted a couple semiarid regions often thought of as belonging to “the desert,” the Colorado and Columbia plateaus in particular. Even so, the desert I’ve marked off is a far larger amount of land than many of the biomes usually deemed complete and important enough to merit some level of preservation. Together, the four deserts are far bigger than the Sierra Nevada, far bigger than the Rocky Mountains, far bigger than the Appalachians or New England. In terms of sheer acreage, the only biomes in the continental US that rival the deserts are the Great Plains and the Mississippi basin. The deserts are far wilder and far more fragile than either of those beleaguered places, and yet the deserts are omitted from the Sierra Club’s consideration as potential “resilient habitats.”

Which is ironic, because if there was ever a place where the topology is set up to facilitate migration in response to climate change, it’s the American Desert. Take a look at this un-overlain section of Patterson’s map:

This section of the desert possesses what the geographers call “basin and range topography”: the landscape is made up of many distinct mountain ranges surrounded by broad, flat valleys. Most relevant for our discussion here is that the ranges and valleys tend to have their long axes aligned more or less north-south, especially in the Great Basin desert in Nevada but also in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts farther south.

Organisms that have adapted to the heights of the mountain ranges in the desert have a bit of a problem if the climate changes: in order to migrate northward, they or their offspring have to traverse the flats somehow. Many species, from endemic plants to small alpine animals such as the pika, are thus seriously threatened by climate change. The only way they can really migrate is up, and eventually, as it gets warmer, they will run out of up.

But for a lot of species not as strictly confined to the deserts’ “sky islands” — whether they’re alpine organisms that can cross the flats, or organisms that live in the flats to begin with —  those northish-southish-trending basins and ranges are almost tailor-made for migration in response to climate. Travel northward along the long spine of one of those mountain ranges, or plod along toward Polaris on your tortoise feet as the creosote follows you into what had been cooler lands, and there’s little to block your passage.

Until people come in and cover all the flatlands with industrial energy development, that is. If the flatlands are your migration corridor of choice, industrial developments are locked doors in the middle of those corridors. The Sierra Club’s goal of making landscapes more resilient to climate change is thus undermined by, well, the Sierra Club’s efforts to combat climate change.

I don’t mean to pick on the Club unduly. The Sierra Club has many wonderful activists working on national and local levels, many of whom care deeply about desert wildlands. Besides, the Sierra Club is not alone among big mainstream environmental groups in its seeming willingness to sacrifice desert wildlands to further the industrial development of non-carbon energy. Consider, for instance, this excerpt of a formal comment on the Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating System Project, offered by a pair of notable green groups. In the section of the formal comments dealing with the inevitable, massive and irremediable visual impact involved in paving 4,000 acres of wild desert adjacent to a National Park with mirrors surrounding seven 45-story-tall towers, each of which will be capped with a blindingly illuminated “receiver unit”:

[I]t is clear that there will be significant visual impacts from the construction of the ISEGS project. However, the construction of a six square mile industrial development anywhere on public lands will entail significant visual impacts, and the benefits which the ISEGS renewable energy project will provide may well outweigh the costs of the visual impacts from this development.

Let that sink in for a moment. I have to say, I’m not used to environmentalists taking this approach. Usually it’s the other side who insists that protection of the wild environment and its denizens be subject to a cost-benefit analysis, that Endangered Species Act reviews include an analysis of the economic costs of listing the Delta smelt or the gnatcatcher or the Furbish lousewort.

The comments subsequently note that Ivanpah is not the only such facility planned for the desert, and that the cumulative visual effect of massive development of the desert may be more than the sum of its parts:

The ISEGS project, however, is only the first of many projects that have been proposed for the CDCA. The PSA “identifies 76 solar project and 61 wind project applications with a total overall area of over one million acres within the CDCA. This figure [sic] does not include renewable projects within the Nevada and Arizona portions of the Mojave Desert. With this very high number of renewable energy applications currently filed with BLM, the potential for profound widespread cumulative impacts to scenic resources within the CDCA is clear. These impacts could include a substantial decline in the overall number and extent of scenically intact, undisturbed desert landscapes, and a substantially more industrial character in the overall CDCA and Mojave Desert Landscape.

True enough! What do the commenting groups suggest as a way to address this threat to the very nature of the desert?

Recommendation: In the case of the ISEGS project, the agencies should consider whether the benefits which the ISEGS renewable energy project will provide outweigh the costs of the visual and other impacts from this development.

You may be wondering which groups would put together comments so fraught with compromise of the environmental movement’s most basic tenet: that the living environment has intrinsic value which resists spreadsheet analysis. The answer: it’s the Natural Resources Defense Council and The Wilderness Society that have crafted this recommendation that our natural resources and our wilderness be tossed into the energy planners’ balance sheets.

There are important groups who haven’t gone quite as far. Some are working quietly to defend the desert. Staff at Defenders of Wildlife, for instance, have been writing tough-minded comments on desert industrial energy proposals, intervening in a few such projects. Though the Center for Biological Diversity took an emphatically wrong position approving the notion of public lands giveaways to the energy companies, its staff have been invaluable in fighting individual projects and the group as a whole may well come around.

As a whole, though, the mainstream environmental movement has gone AWOL on protecting our ancient deserts. I’m not sure precisely why, though the severity of the climate change threat certainly does lend our decisions some urgency. A cynic would likely point out that the foundations who provide Big Green Groups with their big green have jumped on the climate change wagon with a vengeance, and so this shift in emphasis away from protecting the planet that exists now, in favor of protecting some hypothetical climate-change-mitigated planet that we hope will exist in the future, may be driven more by development staff than by scientific staff. On alternate Tuesdays I am that cynic, and I find the argument persuasive.

Whatever the reason, those of us who find value in the ancient landscapes of the desert Southwest cannot count on help from the mainstream environmental movement unless we make our position irresistable and hard to refute.

Let’s start here: any sensible, ecologically relevant energy strategy must include a commitment to zero net loss of desert wildlands. This is the baseline environmentalist position, and any deviation from it, no matter how “sensible,” is necessarily a loss for our side.

9 comments on "A Call for a Standard: Zero Net Loss of Desert Wildlands"

4 comments on "A gift from The Very Silly Raven"

Morongo Bill and Scott Fajack have alerted me to a new development. Looks like I may have spoken unfairly as to the character of the person who took the Sunrise Rock cross from its site in the Mojave National Preserve. The Barstow Desert Dispatch has printed a letter sent to them indirectly by a person who claimed to have taken the cross. I reproduce that letter in full here.

The person’s choice of the Desert Dispatch says to me they were more or less local — they could have gotten a letter on the front page of the Los Angeles Times if they’d wanted. The letter itself is obviously conscientious and thoughtful. I still think the act was ill-considered, but if this letter is for real I now think better of the motives behind the act.

The letter:

1. The cross in question was not vandalized. It was simply moved. This was done lovingly and with great care.

2. The cross has been carefully preserved. It has not been destroyed as many have assumed.

3. I am a Veteran.

4. A small non-sectarian monument was brought to place at the site but technical difficulties prevented this from happening at the time the cross was moved to its new location.

5. The cross was erected illegally on public land in 1998 by a private individual named Henry Sandoz. Since then the government has actively worked to promote the continued existence of the cross, even as it excluded other monuments from differing religions. This favoritism and exclusion clearly violates the establishment clause of the US Constitution.

6. Anthony Kennedy desecrated and marginalized the memory and sacrifice of all those non-Christians that died in WWI when he wrote: ‘Here one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles — battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten.’ The irony and tragedy of that statement is unique.

7. Justice Kennedy’s words in particular and others like them from the other Justices caused me to act.

8. At the time of its removal there was nothing to identify the cross as a memorial of any kind, and the simple fact of the matter is that the only thing it represented was an oddly placed tribute to Christ. This cross evoked nothing of the sort that Justice Kennedy writes of, it was in the end simply a cross in the desert.

9. Discrimination in any form is intolerable, as is hatred.

10. Discrimination or hatred based upon religion should be despised by all Americans, and offering that this event was caused by hatred or malice is simply ignorance of the actual intent.

11. Despite what many people are saying, this act was definitively not anti-Christian. It was instead anti-discrimination. If this act was anti-Christian, the cross would not have been cared for so reverently. An anti-Christian response would have been to simply destroy the cross and leave the pieces in the desert.

12. We as a nation need to change the dialogue and stop pretending that this is about a war memorial. If it is a memorial, then we need to stop arguing about the cross and instead place a proper memorial on that site, one that respects Christians and non-Christians alike, and one that is actually recognizable as a war memorial.

13. If an appropriate and permanent non-sectarian memorial is placed at the site the cross will be immediately returned to Mr. Sandoz.

14. Alternatively, if a place can be found that memorializes the Christian Veterans of WWI that is not on public land the Cross will promptly be forwarded with care and reverence for installation at the private site.

15. In short this has happened because as Abraham Lincoln said: ‘To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men.’ Perhaps this was an inappropriate form of protest if so I humbly request your forgiveness and understanding for the actions that I have taken here.”

9 comments on "The Cross thief speaks"

I’m unnerved and upset by the attention the theft of the Mojave Cross has brought to the Mojave National Preserve.

First off, the basics. I recognize the importance of memorializing those who fell almost a century ago in the First World War, and the appropriateness of some sort of memorial at Sunrise Rock. I also understand and support those who feel the cross, as an explicit symbol of the Christian ideology, has no place on Federal land. I think the cross necessarily diminishes the sacrifice of those war casualties who were Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, or who adhered to some other metaphysical viewpoint not falling under the rubric of Christianity.

I think the caretakers of the cross are fine and sincere people. I think the cross site, if not the cross itself, is a facet of the history of the desert and could be argued to deserve preservation and interpretation by the Park Service. I think anyone who has an unconflicted opinion on the specific issue of the cross at Sunrise Rock is not as informed as they ought to be.

All that said, the cross is an ugly thing grafted onto a landscape that needs no enhancement. It looks entirely out of place at Sunrise Rock, about as deserving of siting there as would be a billboard or a giant pink flamingo. When I first started spending time on Cima Dome, in October 1997, the cross wasn’t standing: it had been lain in a cleft atop the rock by someone. The bolt plate was atop the rock. I have no idea whether it had been taken down by vandals or was in the process of being installed by the Sandozes: all I know is that it made me roll my eyes to think of the thing standing on the rock.

I think most of the people who are outraged about the theft don’t give a packrat’s ass about the place itself.

They certainly haven’t gotten many facts right in the reporting. The cross is described as being anywhere from 4 to 8 feet in height, set on a plain or a low pile of rocks atop a craggy peak (it’s actually on a tall pile of rocks atop a softly rounded dome), far from any routes of travel (it’s twenty feet from a relatively well-traveled road) made of rugged wood or PVC pipe.  Those outraged by the theft claim no one but the VFW ever sees the cross, when in fact it’s seen by a significant percentage of visitors to the Preserve. Even in the Supreme Court decision, Justice Alito described the cross as more likely to be seen by rattlesnakes than by people. (I hope his legal opinions are better-informed.) They claim the site was chosen because the rock resembles a WWI doughboy in repose, a claim made up out of whole cloth. They claim it’s explicitly a war memorial, when there is in fact not a single thing on site – no plaque, no inscription, nothing – to indicate that some church didn’t put it up in order to win souls. I have seen boxes of fundamentalist literature left at the base of the rocks onto which the cross was bolted, but I’ve never seen a single piece of literature there mentioning war, or soldiers, or Europe.

And in fact those who are the most outraged by the theft don’t hesitate to declare their outrage in fundamentalist Christian phraseology: take a look at this Facebook Page for examples.

Some people are pissed off for legitimate reasons. Our friend Morongobill is pretty angry at the theft for example, and I respect his anger. Still, I’d bet very few of the people professing outrage actually care about the site. I’ve heard people talking about reinstalling the cross and putting land mines around it, even.

You know something? I actually thought of taking the cross down in the first few years I visited Cima Dome. It’s an intrusion and an eyesore, a blister on a beautiful rock face, one more example of an obsolete human value system literally set up above all that is real surrounding it. The fact that it’s a Christian symbol only makes it worse. Christianity in this country is a force for ignorance, for hatred, against freedom, and obstructing sane stewardship of the earth. The fact that there are less politically powerful tendencies within American Christianity that are not as destructive doesn’t change the odious nature of the religion as a whole. Sunrise Rock just looks better without the cross. I wanted it gone then and I still do.

But I didn’t take it down, because I learned that there were people in the immediate community to whom it was very valuable. They had put it up for arguably laudable reasons, and had done so when my father was a toddler.  In the meantime, I learned that there were much greater threats to the landscape of Cima Dome than an ugly piece of public art.

Today I’d help the Sandozes put it back up just to shut the nation’s teabaggers up.

The thing that annoyed me about the theft — aside from the certainty that the right wing lunatic fringe would erupt — was that the thieves almost certainly came to the Preserve solely for the purpose of removing the cross. I may be wrong, but I’m betting that was their first and last visit to the place. The place didn’t matter to them: it was just a backdrop for their ideological act.

And the place doesn’t matter to the wingnuts, either. Most of them would be fine with installing a twenty-foot replacement, then scraping a hundred yards of perimeter free of all that pesky desert vegetation so that security cameras would have an unobstructed view. All this to glorify a god that doesn’t exist at the expense of a nature that does.

The cross itself was vandalism. The cross itself was desecration of a sacred place. It has survived long enough that it’s worthy of some sort of respect as a relic of early 20th century history, like the sheepherder’s carvings in the bark of Sierra Nevada aspens or 18th century settlers’ names carved into rock alongside petroglyphs, but that doesn’t make it any holier. If it were up to me the thing would be gone for good, perhaps replaced by a nonsectarian stone marker carved of native stone to honor war dead and explain the history of the site, perhaps replaced only by a small scar atop the rock. If it stays, I’ve gotten used to it: I don’t much care anymore.  I do care about a piece of land I love devoutly being used for rhetorical points by people who would just as soon let the desert burn.

It’s a couple of goddamned sticks, people. Put ‘em back or don’t, but get the hell over it.

10 comments on "A couple of sticks"