NEWS & PUBLICATIONS

By Helen Wagenvord

   The desert is arguably California's underdog ecosystem, the last region in the state to be protected. A place sparing of water but lavish with sunlight and open space, the desert was initially dismissed by European settlers as a forbidding and hostile wasteland. "The desert is the opposite of all that we naturally find pleasing," author Joseph Smeaton Chase has said. "Yet, I believe that its hold upon those who have once fallen under its spell is deeper and more enduring than is the charm of forest or sea or mountain."

   It's a place where 500-pound rocks travel across mud floors leaving a tell-tale trail, where Native Americans left thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs chronicling hundreds of generations, and where some animals and plants have made incredible adaptations to an extreme and harsh climate, including a tortoise that can survive a year without taking a drink and the Gambrel's quail that in very dry years knows to eat locoweed as a form of birth control.

   Today, the California desert's shadowy peaks, pancake-flat playas, cactus gardens, startlingly green oases, and wind-sculpted sand dunes, and wildlife, including the threatened desert tortoise and bighorn sheep, annually attract millions of people from all over the world.

   What do they see? One part of the area, Mojave National Preserve, is rich with a wide variety of plants and animals at the intersection of three different deserts: the Sonoran, Mojave, and Great Basin. The preserve is filled with ranges of gritty space, humming sand dunes, and the world's largest Joshua tree forest.

Death Valley National Park, the largest national park in the lower 48 states, is a huge basin lined with mountain ranges, containing one of the lowest and hottest places in the world—Badwater, at 282 feet below sea level. Death Valley is a geologist's candy store, revealing a diversity of colorful rockscapes that date back as much as 1.8 billion years.

   Joshua Tree National Park—yet another part of the desert area—is named for its abundant signature tree, dubbed by Mormon settlers who somehow saw the ungainly and acrobatic flora as resembling the biblical figure Joshua, with prickly arms beckoning them westward. Overall, the plant diversity at this park's intersection of the Colorado and Mojave deserts led some to propose that the park be named Desert Plants National Park. And beyond the plant life, the piles of huge boulders punctuating the valley are a magnet for rock climbers.

   Nearly a decade ago, the public's growing affection for this arid region led to the passage of the California Desert Protection Act, the largest parks and wilderness legislation in the history of the continental United States. The culmination of a 20-year campaign, the legislation's passage was especially aided by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). This 1994 protection act established more than six million acres of new wildernesses and a new national park—the 1.6-millon-acre Mojave National Preserve—while at the same time it fortified the protection of Death Valley and Joshua Tree by expanding these national monuments and redesignating them national parks. The act outlined protection for millions of acres of diverse landscapes, including volcanic lava flows, sweeping sand dunes, high mountain ranges, conifer forests, high desert sagebrush plateaus, and vast lowlands separated by shadowy ranges. But for all the good the act has done, these protected areas are increasingly being challenged by two of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country: Los Angeles and Las Vegas. For the protection act to achieve its promise as a reality and not just a mirage, new solutions are needed.

   Consider Joshua Tree National Park, which is part of the Inland Empire made up of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, recently deemed the site of the country's worst example of sprawl. Right next to the park, a developer is currently promoting "Joshua Hills," 9,000 acres filled with 12 golf courses, a three-million-square-foot industrial park, 7,000 housing units, a university, three hotels, a convention center, and shopping centers. And while the public has gained a better appreciation of the intrinsic values of the desert, this region is still prey to being seen as a wasteland, literally. Next to the park's southeastern wilderness, the Mining Reclamation Company is trying to establish one of the world's largest landfills to serve seven southern California counties. The landfill would cover an area equal to 1,500 football fields a quarter mile deep, destroy critical wildlife habitat, increase air and light pollution, and throw the area's ecological balance into chaos.

   Such developments are not the only threats to Joshua Tree. With metropolitan southern California's air pollution making an inland commute, the park's air on some days is among the dirtiest of all the national parks in the country. It used to be typical to see Signal Mountain in Mexico from the Key's Point overlook; now that view can be seen only 10 percent of the time. "The California desert is one of the last places where you can see a quiet land in front of you for miles and miles, and that's important. But there is a generation growing up that does not know what a truly clear sky looks like and thinks a bad air day is just fine because that has become their status quo," reflects Judy Bartzatt, Joshua Tree's chief ranger.

Because of the variety of threats facing Joshua Tree, NPCA has identified it as one of the country's ten most endangered national parks for 2003. NPCA has also hired a desert campaign staffer to aid in efforts to protect the region.


   Joshua Tree's neighbor, Mojave National Preserve, was listed as one of the ten most endangered parks in 2002, but following a successful battle with the Cadiz groundwater mining project, the park is off the list—for now. However, a looming danger is Las Vegas' proposal to place a huge, commercial airport near the preserve. "There will be noise, light pollution, threats to wildlife, but the other problem is that this will bring Las Vegas down to the preserve. There will be such pressure to develop the private lands in and around the park," says Mary Martin, Mojave's superintendent.

   "What happens in Las Vegas affects us too as it is translating into a growing bedroom community in Pahrump," says J.T. Reynolds, superintendent of Death Valley National Park. "That combined with agricultural development in the Amargosa Valley—it's all taking its toll." In a Nevada-based satellite unit of the park, one of its natural wonders, the Devil's Hole pupfish, is already feeling the pressure. The pupfish are remnants from the last Ice Age and have adapted over time to life in a warm, solitary pool in Nevada, which is actually the exposed surface of the groundwater. Now the pupfish and the pool have started declining, and park managers fear this is a sign that regional development is draining the park's main aquifer. "Climate change is part of the mix, too," says park hydrologist Terry Fisk. "Springs and seeps, sites of the greatest biological riches in the park, depend upon a healthy aquifer. Now, the aquifer's fossil-age water, left over from the days of an earlier, wetter climate, is getting overdrafted. It's just not sustainable."

   Human encroachment is not the only danger to these areas. Like so many other national parks, the desert parks are also challenged with invasive species, their spread promoted by development and travel. Invasive grasses in Joshua Tree National Park, for example, created a tinderbox that led to an uncharacteristically hot and widespread 14,000-acre fire in 1999. Consider also the native ravens, which multiply around human developments. Ravens used to be a rarity in the desert, but between 1968 and 1988, their population grew by 1,500 percent. This is not good news for the threatened desert tortoise, which is losing its young to increased raven predation when it is already besieged on all sides by grazing, mining, recreational vehicles, subdivisions, golf courses, resorts, and disease, forcing it to crawl closer and closer toward extinction.

   Despite these continued challenges, the desert parks are better off than they were before the passage of the protection act. "I am faced with daily reminders that the [act] passed in the nick of time. It has made such a difference in stopping development and activities that would destroy these special resources," says Martin. 

   When Mojave National Preserve was established, for instance, cows were clearing out swathes of vegetation and knocking over Joshua trees in their sloppy struggle for forage on 75 percent of the parklands. Over the past few years, the preserve has bought out and retired 83 percent of those grazing allotments. 

   The park also came encumbered with 9,000 mining claims; those have been whittled down to a few hundred. Plus, simply cleaning up garbage in all the parks has been a huge accomplishment. Staff at the Mojave preserve alone have hauled out 68 abandoned vehicles and 300 tons of trash since the park's inception.

   Now the question is this: What do the desert parks need to gird themselves against outside development threats and successfully protect their natural and cultural resources into the 21st century? As Aldo Leopold explained, the first step in intelligent tinkering is identifying and keeping all of the pieces. "Too often, land managers lack the biological information they need to make good decisions. We may be losing populations or species without even knowing it," says Jim Andre, a principal investigator for the NPS Inventorying and Monitoring Program and director of the University of California's Granite Mountains Desert Research Center, located in Mojave National Preserve. Consequently, all three desert parks have started inventorying and monitoring their plants and animals.

   NPCA has been doing its own monitoring to help shape and update its campaign to protect the desert parks into the future. The association has conducted an economic analysis of Joshua Tree's fiscal management, as well as an inventory of natural and cultural resource management issues at Death Valley.

But to translate this information into effective management decisions, the parks simply need more funding. "These parks have leveraged shoestring budgets, but more is needed to truly protect the visitor experience and these fragile natural and cultural treasures," says Courtney Cuff, NPCA's Pacific regional director. "The parks need more rangers and monitoring of outside park threats. We also need to buy up the 200,000 acres of privately held lands inside the parks and make them whole while land prices are still within reach."

   A major advantage is that the parks are increasingly important to the regional economy, visited by more than three million people a year. This visitation translates into $200 million of tourism-related revenue for the area around Joshua Tree National Park alone, according to a study conducted in the mid-1990s. As Paul Smith, president of the Morongo Basin Innkeepers Association and operator of the Twentynine Palms Inn, explains, "Our businesses are valued by the usual list of assets: cash, inventory, equipment, and land, but we are blessed with another asset of inestimable value: a national park as a neighbor. It's a reliable asset and a cornerstone for a sustainable regional economy."

   As the desert becomes the spillover home to southern California's rapidly growing metropolitan population, these sanctuaries for plants, animals, and harried humans will only multiply in value. For thousands of years, desert tribes based their subsistence and civilization on the desert's plants: 350 native plant species were harvested by desert tribes for food, and the southeastern Cahuilla tribe alone used more than 200 plant species for medicinal purposes. Perhaps those who flock to the desert national parks for their starlit skies, sweeps of open spaces, and tenacious plants and animals are rediscovering something Native Americans recognized for thousands of years: The desert has an unexpected capacity to nourish and heal. As the tenth anniversary of the California Desert Protection Act approaches, it's worth commemorating a dream that citizens and politicians made into a reality even as we seize the challenge of staying true to its vision for the future.

Helen Wagenvord is a freelance writer living in Oakland, California. She formerly worked for NPCA out of the California office.