S4E37: Desert Communities and United Fronts: Building a Cross-Desert Protection Movement

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. It's time for 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and this will be a little bit of a shorter episode than usual because I'm recovering from driving more than 1,600 miles in the last seven or eight days.

0:01:02 - (Chris Clarke): It was a great time getting out to El Paso for the Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta, and I'm really grateful to everyone that kicked into the Chihuahuan Desert Travel Fund. It was definitely worth the effort of fundraising and putting stuff together for it. I met a bunch of wonderful people in both Tucson and El Paso. We're going to get a few episodes out of this trip. Those of you who donated or even just gave a thumbs up to the idea of taking the podcast on the road, I believe you are owed a report on what happened and we'll get to that.

0:01:35 - (Chris Clarke): But first, I wanted to thank not only our most recent donors, namely our board member, Audrey Scheere. She's on the board of directors at the Desert Advocacy Media Network, Greta Anderson, who we've had on the podcast before, talking about wolves in Arizona, and Kim Stringfellow. You can check out Kim's work at the Mojave Project. Just Google it. You'll find her labor of love that she's been working on for quite a number of years to educate people about the Mojave and its social, cultural and ecological aspects.

0:02:09 - (Chris Clarke): In addition to thanking Audrey, Greta and Kim, I think it's important for me to thank the 22 people who donated to the Chihuahuan Desert Travel Fund, which we're going to quietly keep open because I've been invited back in November 2026 to take part in a conference on the Chihuahuan Desert in El Paso. In alphabetical order, those of you who have donated to the Chihuahuan Desert Travel Fund and made this last trip possible, you are Catherine Andrews, Antoinette Broadhead, Laura Camp, Nancy Cusumano, Sandra Dumas, Jacqueline E. Smith, Peter Frigeri, Marcia Geiger, Nancy Klein, Michael Landrum, Louise Mathias, Cameron Mayer, Julian Orr, Peter Ossorio, Bridget Sandate, Julia Sauer, Cindy Siegel, Naima Shea, Michael Stillman, Laraine Turk, Michael Wangler, and Davin Widgerow, all 22 of you. You made this trip possible and we're just really grateful.

0:03:13 - (Chris Clarke): And I will mention Audrey Scheere in here again because her donation was given to defray costs of food and drink that 90 miles from needles and its friends and listeners consumed in Tucson. Audrey played a really important role in this trip. She and I had been working together to set up an event in Tucson. We had a place in mind. They just kind of gave us the runaround. So we ended up meeting at a bar.

0:03:38 - (Chris Clarke): Audrey suggested a rooftop bar that overlooks the campus of the University of Arizona on top of a Hotel about 15 stories up. It's called the Moonstone and it had the best view of Tucson I've ever seen that didn't come from the top of a mountain. We had a relatively small but very nice get together. I met a couple of people who I am now following on social media. Adriana Bachmann at myclimateclarity on Instagram and Eli Heller, who is Desert Naturalist on Insta. It was lovely to meet both of them.

0:04:08 - (Chris Clarke): We had a great conversation along with Henry Brean of the Arizona Daily Star and his partner in crime, Sherry Brean. We have had Henry on the podcast before along with Audrey on our Saguaro episode a couple of years ago. Wonderful to meet everyone in person. We also had the opportunity in Tucson to crash the fourth anniversary party of the podcast and email newsletter the Border Chronicle, which you have heard me rave about in the past and I will probably do so in the future. Congratulations to Todd and Melissa on meeting that milestone. It's great to spend a little time with them.

0:04:44 - (Chris Clarke): There were a bunch of people at that party, a couple of whom are interested in coming on the podcast and talking about their work. I didn't go there to raid the partygoers for podcast ideas. Just kind of happened. Also, in Tucson, there is a little complication that is funny in retrospect. I put together a brochure that I'd hoped specifically to take on this trip. I sent it out to a printer early in September. They put it into the UPS's hands when they were done printing and then the UPS said oops, our delivery is delayed.

0:05:13 - (Chris Clarke): We will be getting the brochures to your house the day after you leave for El Paso. And that was clearly not acceptable. So I sent the PDF to an office store in Tucson. They printed it and I picked it up the next day. Had to spend some time folding it. And my venue for doing the folding was another significant donation to the Desert Advocacy Media Network. It was a donation in kind. Toadlet Farms on the south side of Tucson.

0:05:40 - (Chris Clarke): Proprietors Nick and Kate offered me a stay in their casita for three nights, two on my way to El Paso and one on my way back. And their casita is something they rent out on an Airbnb. They live on the same property, so it's Airbnb the way it was originally envisioned. Working. It's a really comfortable place. It is a working farm, so if you expect finely manicured lawns and edging, they don't have it. But they have a lot of wonderful things that include sheep and very friendly dogs and kitty cats.

0:06:16 - (Chris Clarke): I cannot tell you how grateful I am to Nick and Kate at Toadlet Farms. It was a really meaningful donation and I am just utterly grateful. It was a beautiful refuge to collect myself in both directions heading east and heading west. I was so thankful about it. I was a little tongue tied when I was saying goodbye to Kate this week and they did not say, we'll donate this to you if you sing our praises on the podcast. I'm just doing that because I'm moved to do so.

0:06:45 - (Chris Clarke): Anyway, I got to El Paso bright and early on Saturday morning. I arrived at the El Paso Zoo the morning of the Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta. I set up our canopy and table and then I was presented with a side quest because I was Frisbee throwing distance from a bunch of pronghorn running around in an enclosure and I can't resist looking at pronghorn. So when we had a little bit of a slack period in mid afternoon, I walked over to look at the pronghorn and noticed a sign saying they were Peninsular pronghorn, which is probably the most threatened subspecies of pronghorn. They're in even more trouble than the famous Sonoran pronghorn.

0:07:25 - (Chris Clarke): Peninsula pronghorn are from Baja and they've been having their habitat encroached upon by development, by ranching, by a whole bunch of different things. And there's a group working to preserve them. They have an enclosure in the middle of Baja that is, I think, good size, but probably rather smaller than the pronghorn would like. Remember, pronghorn are North America's fastest mammal. They evolved in the presence of cheetahs that then went extinct in North America. So they don't need to outrun cheetahs anymore, but they are still that fast and they like to have miles and miles and miles of wide-open spaces. So I was thrilled to see the Peninsular pronghorn at the El Paso Zoo.

0:08:04 - (Chris Clarke): It's a comfortable enclosure and it's probably 16 or 17 miles shorter than the pronghorn would prefer, but they are very healthy. They're being taken very Good care of. It's part of a program to boost their numbers, which is crucial work. It's just such a privilege to see them. But really I went to meet people from El Paso, Juarez, Las Cruces and talk to them about the podcast. And I had a great time talking with the people that were there.

0:08:31 - (Chris Clarke): Lots and lots of kids. And I definitely need to come up with some more kid friendly activities for tabling on behalf of the Desert Advocacy Media Network. Lots of people took copies of the brochures, they took stickers, we have bumper stickers and they were very popular. Met a couple of folks who are listeners. It was good to see John and Kylie Rezendes. John's been on the podcast talking about the Rio Bosque Wetlands preserve near El Paso.

0:08:57 - (Chris Clarke): He set up an episode with, among other people, Rick Lo Bello to talk about the Texas Lobo Coalition. And Rick Lo Bello happens to be the conservation director at the El Paso Zoo. So it was great to catch up with him as well. He will be coming on the podcast to talk a bit about the Chihuahua Desert Fiesta and other work that he's doing in West Texas. That'll be sometime in November. He's got a busy schedule.

0:09:23 - (Chris Clarke): There were a couple of listeners that came up and introduced themselves, Santiago and Kevin. And I am just so grateful that I met some listeners I had not talked to before. Far, far away from this little studio. It always makes my day to have people come up and say that they listen to what we put out here and that they find it valuable. We are going to have to do events like this a lot more often. Thinking about one in the Morongo Basin near Joshua Tree.

0:09:52 - (Chris Clarke): Really want to put something together in Las Vegas. Phoenix would probably be a good idea. I think people are getting really impatient with social media. Even though we're all stuck on it, it's really hard to connect that to our life without getting depressed. And not just because other people are seeming to have more fun than us, but also because there's just relentless bad news. And it's so hard to make that bridge between online and social media spaces and people's lives.

0:10:18 - (Chris Clarke): When you talk to people in person, you can get energy from each other. You can stoke a little excitement in that person, and their excitement stokes excitement in you and it builds. And it was certainly the case in El Paso. I did not get around to interviewing people for the podcast as much as I would have liked. It was pretty busy, and I was running the table by myself. We did do a couple of interviews.

0:10:40 - (Chris Clarke): They'll show up in an episode pretty soon. Anyway, great day in El Paso. Followed that up with a visit to Jean and Peter Ossorio in Las Cruces, who I've been talking to for decades but had never met. They fed me a fine breakfast. They made a very generous donation to the Desert Advocacy Media Network. Anyway, it was just loads of fun meeting people in other places in the desert, working on various things, everything from doing GIS work for land trusts to analyzing the convergence between the push for big data centers and the militarization of the border. Talking about bioblitzes in the Santa Cruz River in Tucson, which I actually saw full of water for the first time.

0:11:24 - (Chris Clarke): My first time seeing it full of water. Anyway, on this trip. You know, the deserts are different, obviously, because even adjacent valleys in the Mojave are really different. It's just hard for things to survive in the desert and hard for them to move around. There are some animals, like coyotes, that are ubiquitous across the deserts. And then there are other animals, Devil's Hole pupfish being the extreme example, that have more restricted ranges.

0:11:52 - (Chris Clarke): In the Mojave you have cat claw acacia, and in the Sonoran Desert you have whitethorn acacia, which basically fulfills the same ecological function, but it's a different plant. In the Mojave you have Joshua trees and Mojave yuccas. In the Sonoran Desert you have soap tree yuccas. In the Chihuahuan Desert you have a handful of species of yuccas. And they are all pretty much doing the same thing ecologically.

0:12:16 - (Chris Clarke): But we face so many things across all these deserts that are common threats, common issues. The ecosystems are fragile in the sense that they are slow to heal from disturbance. They can take centuries to recover. At times, sometimes they don't recover at all. Desert communities rely on limited water supplies, and we can easily overtap them, especially if the profit motive rears its ugly head. Deserts are biodiversity hotspots.

0:12:46 - (Chris Clarke): I can't tell you the number of times I've heard people say that the desert they live in is the most biologically diverse desert in North America. And, and who knows, maybe all of them are correct. Biodiversity is under threat across the desert through climate change, rising temperatures, differences in precipitation, invasive species like tamarisk, buffelgrass and cheatgrass that are more able to cope with a hotter climate, and they radically alter the ecosystem. Sahara mustard's another example.

0:13:17 - (Chris Clarke): They outcrowd the natives and they can catch on fire where there didn't used to be fires in the desert. The deserts are all of them facing industrial scale renewable energy siting Issues mining for lithium and rare earths, gold and some fossil fuels. The border wall is a common threat in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts. Public lands are being looked at for disposal, for sale, for liquidation by this administration.

0:13:46 - (Chris Clarke): We have a lot of things in common and one big thing we have in common across the desert is that people grow fiercely attached to the deserts, that they know best, that they live in, that they visit the most often. And I think the thing that I was most impressed by from mile one of this trip is the degree of passion that these places raise in their defenders. The communities that I visited are all pretty different.

0:14:11 - (Chris Clarke): Joshua Tree used to be a bohemian enclave and now it's facing pretty severe gentrification. There's an article in Forbes recently about visiting Joshua tree for the 1% that's so disgusting. Tucson is a little bit more cosmopolitan than Joshua Tree. Has a very distinct regional identity. And El Paso is a majority minority city. That is reflected in the people there that care about the Chihuahuan Desert and want to protect it.

0:14:42 - (Chris Clarke): There is a diverse group of people working on protecting the deserts and that's just getting into the cities I've been in in the last 10 days. But it's also true in Salt Lake City when I've been up there meeting the locals who are working on saving the Great Salt Lake and doing other Great Basin related stuff, working on water conservation and protecting local aquifers and the mountains that fringe the deserts that provide a lot of their water supply.

0:15:09 - (Chris Clarke): It's true in the Nevada section of the Mojave Desert where people are up in arms about renewable energy development and lithium mining and transmission lines to serve all that. In places in the Mojave, vocal supporters of the current administration are working with tribes and who you might call radical environmentalists to protect their homes. The more I travel, the more I talk to people from different parts of the North American deserts who are working to protect the deserts or who are at least concerned about the fate of the deserts. The more I think that there is room for a movement that is desert wide or continent wide even, that advocates for desert protection. I'm not talking about one big organization or one big umbrella group.

0:15:53 - (Chris Clarke): I'm not talking about anything like that. I'm talking about communication. I think it would be great for people in Las Vegas to be familiar with what people in El Paso are facing and vice versa. People can steal ideas from their colleagues, adapt them as necessary for local use, share mailing lists, share ideas about funders working on projects together, amplify each other's voices on social media.

0:16:17 - (Chris Clarke): When that becomes important, I think there's a lot of room for collaboration in a new desert protection movement that stretches across the entire desert, and we are here for it. It's kind of what we've been trying to promote from day one, and we still think it's a good idea. At any rate, look for a longer episode this time next week. We're working on a few different stories. Not sure which one will be ready by the time we need to put the next episode to bed, but there's a lot of good stuff going on in the desert and a lot of not so good stuff that we need to keep an eye on and speak up against.

0:16:55 - (Chris Clarke): And for those of you wondering if this government shutdown is going to mean that your federal job is discontinued rather than just being furloughed, I want you to know I see you Our household is in the same position. My wonderful wife has a federal job and for the last couple of years she has subsidized this work by paying the bills while I work on developing this nonprofit. And over the next couple of days, we're going to see if that business plan needs to be radically altered.

0:17:24 - (Chris Clarke): If she loses her job, it's going to make it a lot tougher to put this podcast out unless we suddenly get an influx of new donors boosting our annual budget by 50k or so. That could happen. Just something to keep in mind like 90miles from needles.com donate in the meantime. That's it for this episode of 90miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. And in addition to Audrey Scheere and Greta Anderson and Kim Stringfellow and everybody that donated to the Chihuahuan Desert Travel Fund, I want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martine Mancha, our podcast artwork guy.

0:18:06 - (Chris Clarke): Our nature sounds recordist is Fred Bell. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. And speaking of Fred Bell, let's go out with one of his recordings. This is Oak Creek in Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. It's one of the crown jewels of the Las Vegas area. Really popular hike for people in Vegas. It's so popular that there's a reservation system now, and the last three times I've stopped by to see if I could go for a quick hike, I was reminded by a sign that I couldn't get in unless I made a reservation first. That's how popular the place is. But Fred managed to get some nature sounds that didn't involve anybody talking on speakerphone.

0:18:47 - (Chris Clarke): That is probably a pretty rare occurrence. Thanks for taking us out, Fred. We'll see you all next week. And until that time, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and together, let's all take care of the desert. Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.