Protected Lands Episodes

After the Dragon Bravo Fire, Grand Canyon trail staff warned that the North Kaibab Trail faced years of heightened danger from debris flows, flash floods and rockfall. Yet the entire trail reopened in May 2026. Journalist Joe Dana of Phoenix's 12 News joins 90 Miles from Needles to discuss his reporting on internal National Park Service recommendations, pressure to restore public access, and the decisions made before the deadly August 29 Grand Canyon flood.

Writer Morgan Sjogren describes the emotional and ecological stakes of renewed attacks on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante, connecting monument boundaries to rivers, cultural landscapes, resource extraction and everyday life in southern Utah.

Laiken Jordahl describes the unusually broad Big Bend coalition opposing border-wall construction, where ranchers, conservationists and local officials are defending wildlife, the recovering Rio Grande and cross-border community life.

Dr. Jackie Grant explains how a Congressional Review Act attack on Grand Staircase–Escalante’s management plan could destabilize public-land planning nationwide, despite extensive local participation and the monument’s ecological and economic importance.

Timbisha Shoshone leaders commemorate the Homeland Act’s 25th anniversary in Death Valley, recounting displacement, return and the continuing struggle for honest representation, cultural survival and respectful federal partnership.

Rick LoBello describes a lifelong effort to connect protected lands on both sides of the Rio Grande, using wildlife recovery, community relationships and environmental education to revive the vision of an international Big Bend park.

Chris explores desert quiet as an ecological soundscape rather than emptiness, showing how noise pollution masks wildlife, displaces animals and makes ecological loss harder for people to recognize.

Conservation biologist Nick Graver explains how climate change, invasive grasses and human-caused fire undermine Joshua tree recruitment—and why shutdowns and federal cuts obstruct the long-term research and coordination recovery requires.

During the 2025 federal shutdown, Chris urges visitors to avoid understaffed national parks because reduced protection increases risks to landscapes and people, while suggesting nearby public lands and local businesses as alternatives.

On the Dome Fire's fifth anniversary, Chris returns to Cima Dome to confront the loss of its vast Joshua tree forest, the spread of invasive grasses, uncertain restoration and his own enduring solastalgia.

Writer Morgan Sjogren reads from Path of Light, tracing the beauty of Glen Canyon alongside the lasting damage uranium mining has inflicted on Indigenous communities, wildlife, water and public lands.

Chris sounds the alarm over a Senate proposal to sell millions of acres of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land, explaining what privatization could cost Western communities and urging immediate action.

Parker Lloyd tours the Nature Center at Pia Okwai, where Tracy Aviary and West Valley communities are restoring former industrial land as wildlife habitat and an environmental-justice gathering place.

Diné leader Davina Smith explains Bears Ears as a living cultural landscape, the legacy of her grandmothers' resistance and the necessity of Indigenous leadership in protecting sacred lands.

Journalist David Helvarg revisits his 1994 investigation The War Against the Greens and explains how the Wise Use movement's tactics evolved into today's attacks on environmentalists, public lands and democracy.

Writer and photographer Josh Jackson discusses The Enduring Wild, his travels across California's BLM lands, the tension between exposure and protection, and threats from mining and agency cuts.

Season Four opens with the Los Angeles fires, the designation of Chuckwalla National Monument, and the emerging Moab-to-Mojave network of protected lands across the Southwest.

Some landscapes become part of who we are. Chris Clarke reflects on his relationship with Avi Kwa Ame, the southern Nevada landscape protected as a national monument in 2023 after years of Indigenous-led advocacy. Personal stories of desert exploration mingle with excerpts from the monument's designation celebration and voices from the campaign to protect it. The result is both a portrait of an extraordinary place and a meditation on how loving a landscape can change the course of a life.

The Chihuahuan Desert stretches across northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, encompassing extraordinary biological and cultural diversity. Chris Clarke talks with Janae Reneaud Field, Kathia Gonzalez, and Rocio Ronquillo of El Paso's Frontera Land Alliance about protecting this often-overlooked desert. They discuss community conservation, environmental education, and the campaign to protect Castner Range, while exploring what it means to build a conservation movement rooted in the communities that call the Chihuahuan Desert home.