S4E44: Why the Desert's Sounds Matter More Than Ever

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.

0:00:34 - (Joe Geoffrey): It'S time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:44 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you, Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and before we jump into this episode, you may have noticed that we didn't have an episode last week or the week before. And I had warned you all at the end of the most recent episode that I was going to take one week off. I ended up taking two weeks off and I didn't really want to, but we had some technical problems and just because the universe likes to make up my mind for me, I also had some voice issues last week which wouldn't have been pleasant to listen to. Although people do listen to RFK Jr.

0:01:24 - (Chris Clarke): So maybe I'm expecting too much of myself there. At any rate, we missed the first episode of December and I am sorry about that. I didn't want to miss that. But as the year winds down, I keep coming back to the same thought. Because December is when you look back at the year before, right? And the desert's been asked to take a lot this year, between the erosion of environmental law and the absurd escalation of crimes against humanity targeted at migrants carte blanche to the mining and data center industries and people making decisions about water use and conservation based on ideology rather than whether or not the water's actually there.

0:02:08 - (Chris Clarke): But this season, season four, our fourth full year of putting out this podcast, felt a little bit like standing in a slot canyon and having not one, but half a dozen different flash floods heading your way. I think in most episodes we traced some version of the same tension between extraction and protection, between ideology and science, between indifference and compassion. And the desert wasn't just a backdrop for this.

0:02:39 - (Chris Clarke): It was the stakes that we're playing for now. We began the season in January, fully anticipating that government dysfunction would be turned up to 11. As we remember the last Trump administration, we were looking at how political paralysis in the face of abuse of power puts desert, public lands, and private lands in the desert for that matter, at risk in ways most people don't have the opportunity to see.

0:03:08 - (Chris Clarke): Park staffing disappears. That means vandalism increases. Whether it's deliberate vandalism or just people not knowing how to act in the desert, not having a ranger there to gently correct them when oversight Collapses. Fragile places like desert parks absorb the damage, usually without people noticing. The shutdowns, which took their toll on this household as well, were a reminder that neglect can be every bit as destructive as bulldozers can be.

0:03:36 - (Chris Clarke): And the year only got more dramatic after January. From the new administration getting used to their cavalier approach to morality and law, we moved deeper into the collision between wildlife science and politics on the state and federal levels. We spoke with advocates fighting to bring peer reviewed biology back into wildlife governance, which should be the way it's done. But wolves and desert bighorn sheep, migratory species of other kinds, jaguars, desert fish are now symbols in an ideological war.

0:04:11 - (Chris Clarke): Many of those consequences land in the desert. And there's the border. An unavoidable topic throughout this season, as in seasons past, but especially with the ramped up, inhumane, illegal and atrocious activities of ice. Reporting that we and other folks did on border infrastructure surveillance, expansion and enforcement revealed a hard truth, which is that on our way to violating the human rights of people coming into the country, we are fragmenting habitat, endangering human life, and damaging ecosystems. In the very long term, the desert pays the price. The walls, the roads, the flood damage, surveillance towers.

0:04:56 - (Chris Clarke): Long after the political headlines move on to something else. Mining and industrial development were a central conflict in Season Four, and nowhere was that clearer than in the fight for Arizona's San Rafael Valley. In our most recent episode, a story we are told over and over again is simple. Copper and lithium, gold are critical minerals. Therefore anything in the path of exploiting them is expendable.

0:05:26 - (Chris Clarke): But reality is messier. Despite the rosy rhetoric, the resource extraction industrial complex changes grasslands and desert plains into wastelands. It drains aquifers. It turns rural communities into sacrifice zones. And in season four, we followed that story as a lived conflict, not an abstract issue. And throughout the season, we kept returning to the people who refused to write these places off.

0:05:56 - (Chris Clarke): Wildlife biologists, humanitarian volunteers, ranchers protecting water, tribal advocates defending sacred ground, grassroots organizers challenging impossible odds. Heroes are thick on the ground in the desert. But 90 miles from Needles has never really been about heroes. It's always been about networks of care, networks of resistance, knowledge, and stubborn persistence. In season four, it became unmistakably clear that the future of the desert is being decided right now, usually by people who will never have to live with the consequences.

0:06:37 - (Chris Clarke): Those decisions can ruin migration corridors, river systems, night skies, sacred sites, and the basic survivability of species that we share these landscapes with. And I hate to do this to you because that's a load of bad News in the recap. But we can look forward to more of the same in 2026. The pressures on the desert aren't fading, they're intensifying. Every indication is that 2026 will bring more political fights, more industrial proposals that come out of left field and seem insane, more groundwater crises, more border militarization, more weakening of environmental safeguards, and more attempts to bypass those remaining safeguards.

0:07:20 - (Chris Clarke): And season five promises to be full of all that kind of stuff. We are going to have to work even harder. We're going to have to have more reporting on the ground, more conversations with the people living these battles, more days and weeks just out in the field. And to do that, you knew this was coming. We need a much larger donor base than our current 120ish, wonderful and committed supporters. The kind of independent desert journalism we produce is resource intensive. Travel costs are up, production needs have grown.

0:07:58 - (Chris Clarke): And yet if we extrapolate out from our current bank balance, we start running a deficit in around May of 2026. And that's assuming that we don't have any unanticipated major expenses come up. At the same time, the demand for the work we're doing has never been greater. So to carry this work through 2026, we are going to be exploring the possibility of getting smaller grants from foundations that are like minded, always a little bit of a risk because you give up a little bit of your agency doing that, depending on the foundation.

0:08:34 - (Chris Clarke): But we're also going to need more listeners to step forward as supporters if we're going to make it through to the end of 2026. So here's what all this comes down to. If you believe that the North American deserts deserve a place where all the voices that are out there advocating for the desert can find new ears and new audience. And if you believe that this podcast fills that function, now is the time to help strengthen us and help us contend with what we're going to have to deal with in 2026.

0:09:04 - (Chris Clarke): If you go to 90 miles from needles.com donate, you can pick an amount and a frequency of donation that makes sense to you and we can work with you. We accept ACH transfers, we accept donations from donor advised funds, or if you've just got an ATM card and then an extra five bucks a month, we can work with you there. We think what we're doing here is very important and we hope you do too. And we hope you think it's important enough that you can help us out.

0:09:35 - (Chris Clarke): Just like Kat Talley Jones did our one donor on Giving Tuesday. Thank you, Kat. Owe you a cup of coffee on either side of Giving Tuesday. We also got a wonderful donation from our friend Sara Lee and a couple of anonymous donations that really lifted my spirits. So you know who you are. Thank you for those. And with that, let's talk about quiet in the desert. It's a gorgeous day in the desert. A late autumn breeze, warm For December at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, rustles the dry leaves of big galleta grass.

0:10:46 - (Chris Clarke): A half mile down slope, a cactus wren announces itself in song that echoes off the rocks. It seems loud even from that distance, but that's just how quiet everything else is. I close my eyes. I listen for more. The hum of a passing dragonfly, the skitter of a ground squirrel, even the faint pulse of my own blood in my ears. I breathe deeper. My shoulders loosen. It's been too long since I was in a place this quiet.

0:11:27 - (Chris Clarke): And then the dirt bikes show up. That contrast, the abrupt intrusion of human noise into a soundscape built on quiet stays with me because the desert has always been quiet. But lately I've been hearing a different kind of quiet. People talk about desert silence as though it's a blank canvas, the same way they talk about everything in the desert as a blank canvas, a void, a backdrop for their thoughts.

0:12:22 - (Chris Clarke): But while the desert is quiet, it has never been silent. Real desert quiet used to be full of small, astonishing sounds. The low hum of insects working creosote blossoms, wing beats sketching patterns between sun and shade. And at night, frogs at springs, owls on the hunt, coyotes whistling in the dark. Can always tell when someone's new to the desert. They talk too loud. It's not always out of rudeness.

0:13:11 - (Chris Clarke): They just haven't learned yet how far our sound carries. Here, longtime desert dwellers lower their voices unless the situation really calls for yelling. It's not just reverence. It's an adaptation. And here's the irony. We bring so much noise into the desert. Engines, recorded music too loud chatter about nothing. But we rarely notice when the desert's own music begins to disappear. You don't hear that absence all at once.

0:13:50 - (Chris Clarke): It accumulates. I've been spending time in the desert longer than most podcast listeners have been alive, and I'm starting to recognize when something's really missing. Bird populations across North America have dropped by 3 billion individuals. Some desert species are down by more than half of their previous population. Insects worldwide are declining by roughly 2% each year. That seems like a trickle, but it becomes a flood in a human lifetime, and you Feel that in the desert soundscape, a canyon that used to bubble with birdsong now has one lonely singer.

0:14:39 - (Chris Clarke): Springs, once loud with frogs, fall silent. Creosote still blooms, but the hum of pollinators that once surrounded those creosotes are thin or gone. About 35 years ago, my ex-wife Becky and I were camping at Pyramid Lake, deep inside the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation, miles from pavement, and took a short walk from camp after lunch and heard a soft, rhythmic thrumming. Whoa. Whoa. I couldn't place it.

0:15:23 - (Chris Clarke): There were no engines nearby. All the generators were 20 miles away on the other side of the lake. It was just the desert afternoon. Womp, womp. Then I saw it a mile away. A raven gliding with slow, confident wing beats. Womp, womp. That sound traveled straight across the desert plain and landed in my ears as though it was meant for me. It wasn't loud. It was the desert speaking its truth in a stage whisper that you couldn't help but pay attention to.

0:16:19 - (Chris Clarke): And that's the kind of authenticity and truth we're losing. Noise is one of the least recognized forms of pollution we create, and we create a lot of it. A National Park Service study a few years back found that human activity has reshaped the soundscape across half the lower 48 states. East of the plains, it's hard to find places where ambient noise drops below 40 decibels. That's about as loud as a typical refrigerator.

0:16:50 - (Chris Clarke): And we're always told as podcasters to unplug the refrigerator before we record in the house 40 decibels 24 hours a day. It's a subtle background noise, but it's still noisy enough to interrupt sleep, raise stress, contribute to cardiovascular problems. When wildlife struggles to hear predators, mates, or prey, sometimes they abandon a habitat altogether because the noise never stops. Out west, we're luckier.

0:17:26 - (Chris Clarke): There are still pockets of deep, quiet places where background noise falls to 26 decibels or below, quieter than a whisper. But those places shrink a little more each year, and in part, that's due to the modern flavor of desert noise, the noise visitors bring to the desert without realizing what they're doing a lot of the time. With a surge of popularity in places like Joshua Tree and Moab, more and more people arrive with a genuine desire to immerse themselves in a desert and to learn about it and to experience it, but without understanding how fragile desert quiet really is.

0:18:10 - (Chris Clarke): I keep thinking about a young man I saw by the side of the road in Joshua Tree National Park. Nice looking guy. Clearly here for some personal desert revelation. But he brought an electric guitar and a battery powered amp, pulled into an illegal turnout set up on the roadside, and started playing. Loud enough that I could hear him clearly inside my car, my windows up, my own music on, but low enough not to bleed outside.

0:18:43 - (Chris Clarke): I'm sure he meant well. He probably thought he was doing something beautiful and creative. But sound travels here. And when you fill the desert with your personal soundtrack, it takes over everything. And it's not just random guys with battery powered amps. There is a noise industrial complex at work every few months near Joshua Tree, and from what I've heard, near just about every other desert park that's popular.

0:19:16 - (Chris Clarke): Another proposal pops up for a desert event venue. Stages, amphitheaters, outdoor movie screens. Almost every big glamping proposal that's coming to this neighborhood includes an event area where they expect to bring dozens or hundreds or sometimes even thousands of people to listen to music. Pitch is always about bringing people closer to nature, but what they're actually selling is noise in a place that relies on quiet for its very nature.

0:19:54 - (Chris Clarke): I think part of this comes from city life and misunderstanding of what noise is all about. In Los Angeles, for example, to pick one place that I've lived that's not the desert. Loud music can be a defense mechanism. There's LAPD helicopters, non-stop traffic sirens, leaf blowers in the morning, a shifting wall of unpredictable noise. And when you turn up your own soundtrack, you're taking control of your audio environment.

0:20:25 - (Chris Clarke): It's a kind of sonic armor. And then people come to the desert for a weekend, set up a boombox on the picnic table outside their vacation rental, and the sound carries two miles. They don't know that. Why would they? Nothing in their daily lives outside the desert teaches them that sound can travel that far or that it can erase something irreplaceable. And the tragedy is, with both the artificial noise we introduce and the natural sounds that are fading, most people still won't know anything is wrong.

0:21:02 - (Chris Clarke): Unsurprisingly, for people that know me, I keep thinking about Cima Dome after the dome fire. A million Joshua trees gone in a few days. I posted a photo afterwards. It was a color photo, but it might as well not have been. Black, white and gray. Ash scars, standing trees that were dead. People who knew what had been there before, what had been lost reacted with expressions of grief. But mixed in were comments saying, beautiful shot. Where is this?

0:21:40 - (Chris Clarke): It wasn't that they didn't care about the damage. It was that they didn't recognize a wound when they saw one, the damage had become invisible to them. Normal. And it's the same with folks whose entire experience of the desert is Coachella or Burning man or a vacation rental party that's annoyed the neighbors for the 400th time. They come away thinking that's the desert. That volume, that energy, that soundtrack.

0:22:15 - (Chris Clarke): And when the real desert goes quiet in ways it shouldn't, they won't know what they're missing because they never heard it in the first place. Scientists now use sound to measure ecosystem health. A diverse soundscape, even a quiet one, means life. A thinning soundscape means something's wrong. But you don't need a decibel meter to know this. You just need to stand still long enough for your brain to shed its armor.

0:22:45 - (Chris Clarke): First, you'll hear your breathing. Then maybe your pulse in your ears, the slight feathery rasp of your clothing. Then maybe the clatter of a lizard seeking shelter or the faint wing beat of a bird half a mile away. Quiet reveals itself in layers, and every layer teaches you something. Listening becomes a form of witnessing. And from witnessing, springs protection. But if we don't notice what's missing, we won't fight for what remains.

0:23:23 - (Chris Clarke): I still love the desert quiet. I still seek it out when the world gets too loud. But I don't mistake quiet for health anymore. When I stand in the stillness now, I listen for ghosts. Echoes of wings, vanished choruses, voices the desert used to carry. What did ground sloth sound like? Or saber-toothed cats? We're living in a desert that is depauperate of the creatures that formed it. A juggernaut of extinction that continues to roll downhill.

0:24:04 - (Chris Clarke): The desert is still speaking. Wind still shapes the dunes. Flash floods still cut canyons. Life still thrives in places where it might be thought impossible. But some of the desert's voices are fading. Some are gone. And if we want to keep the ones that remain or restore the ones that we still can restore, the first thing we have to do is listen. It. And what better way to wind down an episode on noise and sound and desert quiet and desert music than with our friend Fred Bell's work, this recording was Springtime dawn chorus on the Point of Rocks boardwalk at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in the Amargosa Basin. If you've ever heard red winged blackbirds before, you probably recognize that they were some of the chorus there.

0:26:15 - (Chris Clarke): Wanna thank Fred for making this season much better? So far we have a few episodes left. Couple. Also wanna thank Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martine Mancha, our podcast artwork creator. As well as our Giving Tuesday rock star Kat Talley Jones, Sara Lee it's been too long since I've seen you, Sara! and a couple of generous anonymous donors that made me happy. Our theme song, Moody Western is by Brightside Studio.

0:26:46 - (Chris Clarke): Other music in this episode is by Denbass. It's going to be a crazy couple of weeks here. I think a lot of people are going to be traveling, going to be thinking about putting parties together, dinners, things like that. If you happen to find yourself doom scrolling and looking for something to do over the next couple of weeks, you can find us on social media. Just go to your favorite social media outlet other than X because we are not there.

0:27:16 - (Chris Clarke): Search on 90 miles from Needles and you will find us. We're on Instagram bluesky threads, though we don't do a lot on threads as well as the Big Blue Monster. Again, quick search 90 miles from Needles on any of those social media apps will get you to where we are. I talked about financial support earlier in this episode. One of the things you can do if you're not really up for financial support, or if you're already doing it for that matter, is to follow us on social media, share our posts there, and spread them around to your friends.

0:27:49 - (Chris Clarke): And if you have friends that you have no idea what to get them for holiday gifts, go to 90miles from needles.com merch and we have a number of provocative t shirts that can make your friend seem way more militant about desert protection than they actually are. In about 10 days, the days are going to start getting longer again on the solstice, or at least the illuminated portion of each day will get longer. And honestly, I can't wait.

0:28:18 - (Chris Clarke): This whole Getting dark at 4:30 thing is starting to get a little old for me. I mean, I've done it a whole lot of times in my life so far, so you'd think I'd be used to it by now. But I like the sunlight. That's why I moved to the desert. Anyway, months to come. Early 2026 we have a lot of good stuff coming up. We have the Trinational Sonoran Desert Symposium in Ajo, Arizona in March. I will be there.

0:28:43 - (Chris Clarke): We are working on putting together a slate of events to take to various desert cities. So if you're in Salt Lake or Reno or Vegas or El Paso or Las Cruces or Tucson or it actually doesn't have to be a big city. It could be Moab, could be Price, Utah, could be, I don't know, Gila Bend. Just let us know we'd be happy to come and harangue the folks in your local neighborhood about desert protection and not only introduce them to our podcast and to the Desert Advocacy Media Network, but also hopefully work with local groups to promote the work they're doing too. So, yeah, keep that in mind.

0:29:21 - (Chris Clarke): Enjoy the countdown to the end of the year and the holidays, and we will be back next week, I promise, with another episode. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. And remember, listen.

0:29:41 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocate Media Network.