S5E30: Why Deserts Need Defending

Transcript

[00:00:00] Chris Clarke: This episode is made possible by listeners just like you and

[00:00:04] CMC Ad: Copper Mountain College is proud to sponsor this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

[00:00:10] Kimberly: For me, the desert has always been so generous with its secrets and its knowledge. So many people look right past it and assume there's nothing here.

[00:00:18] Kimberly: But for anyone who takes a moment to stop and notice, there are a thousand signs of animal life and traces of where and how water has moved through the landscape, and this is just fascinating to me. The ends of smoke trees with blooms on the end of their branches, or rabbit brush bursting from the edges of berms and washes, or sunflowers and mesquite trees that thrive where floodwaters were.

[00:00:43] Kimberly: The land is in this strange and intense conversation always between floodwaters and droughts, and life here can thrive despite the chaos that we live in in this environment. And from this perspective, I think it's really important that these patterns of extremes build a kind of interdependence between what sustains us and what devastates us.

[00:01:14] Joe Geoffrey: You think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again

[00:01:23] Joe Geoffrey: It's time for 90 Miles From Needles, the desert protection podcast

[00:01:35] Chris Clarke: Thank you, Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles. I'm your host, Chris Clark, and we have a bit of a milestone with this episode. This is the 150th episode that we've produced. 150 episodes kinda snuck up on us. We did celebrate our 100th episode last year with a public reading and discussion which, for purposes of publication, we broke up into six smaller episodes 'cause it was a lengthy public event on Zoom that we had.

[00:02:00] Chris Clarke: And we didn't set up anything like that this time around. But I thought it was a good occasion to revisit why we're doing this podcast in the first place. And we're not gonna talk much about the podcast itself and whether or not we lived up to what we wanna do, except that at the very end of the episode where we stick our Easter eggs these days, when we find Easter eggs and are appropriate

[00:02:22] Chris Clarke: Eh, maybe it's not an Easter egg if I tell you where to find it, but anyway, we'll do a short report after the closing theme song on what the podcast has done so far in those 150 episodes, counting this one. Maybe 5 or 10 minutes. But in the meantime, before we get to that closing theme song, I wanted to share with you some reasons why it's important that someone does this work.

[00:02:46] Chris Clarke: And that's not to say that no one is taking care of it besides us. There are certainly people in our niche that are covering one particular topic or one particular geographic area. But as far as bringing a synthesis of all the different desert issues, all the different geographies and localities across the entire arid lands of North America, I'm sad to say there's no one else beside us doing that.

[00:03:08] Chris Clarke: So we would really love to have some friendly competition in our niche, but as we speak, we are by ourselves. So coming up, four reasons why it's important that somebody do something like this podcast. Before we get to them, though, 90milesfromneedles.com/donate if you wanna help us get to our 300th episode, which I think is gonna be sometime in 2029.

[00:04:12] Chris Clarke: Reason number one: deserts are misunderstood. You've heard Joe Jeffries say it in the intro to our podcast for the last couple years, that deserts are not barren wastelands. They're not empty. They are not available space waiting to be turned into something useful. Why does it matter that people think that?

[00:04:33] Chris Clarke: Just this. If there's nothing worth discussing in a place, that place becomes fair game for landfills or nuclear testing or gigantic solar projects or mines. You get the idea. Now, I know I've said this before on the podcast, and in a lot of places outside the podcast, but there used to be a sign on Interstate 15 just northeast of Barstow, California, and it read, "The boredom ends in 150 miles."

[00:04:58] Chris Clarke: I don't remember the precise number, but it was talking about between Barstow and Vegas. And at the time, I had been coming to the desert for quite a while and found interesting stuff even along that relatively high-speed stretch of highway where people are routinely doing 110 miles an hour. Now, if you slow down to half that speed, you start seeing a lot You start seeing creosote and clonal rings that are hundreds, if not thousands of years old.

[00:05:26] Chris Clarke: You start seeing black brush and realizing that you're looking at some of its southernmost populations in North America. You start seeing the geology, the strata of sedimentary rock that have been uplifted, dark lava, tufa, salt flats. You see the desert processes in action, everything from the really short term like dust devils and flash floods to the slow creep of alluvial fans and bajadas, the slow expansion of creosote rings and Mojave yucca rings.

[00:06:00] Chris Clarke: If you slow down a little bit more, you can start seeing the relationship between the plants and animals. If you're at a walk, you can see the leaves of annual plants dissected by leaf cutter bees. There's a lot more interesting stuff going on between Barstow and Vegas than there is on the Strip, and I am one of those people that likes Las Vegas, but still.

[00:06:22] Chris Clarke: When I first started being interested in deserts in the 1980s, my model for an interesting desert was Arizona upland saguaro forest with the saguaros and the ocotillos and the ironwood trees and palo verdes, and that was the desert I wanted to get to. But I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and to get to the Sonoran Desert from San Francisco, unless you take a plane, you drive through the Mojave.

[00:06:46] Chris Clarke: I used to count the hours until I'd be on the other side of the Mojave because it... Mojave Desert didn't look like much to me. That was-- lasted for about a decade. Even after I started going to Mojave National Preserve and camping on Cima Dome among the eastern Joshua trees, I still thought the creosote flats were endless and boring and not much to recommend them.

[00:07:09] Chris Clarke: But on one of the first nights after I left the Bay Area and moved to the desert permanently, I was reeling from all the changes in my life, the loss of my dog Zeke and my looming divorce, the end of my life in the Bay Area, almost three decades there. And I was in southern Nevada, and I found a dirt road that I could walk up and try and shed some of the stress and dislocation feeling, some of the grief.

[00:07:34] Chris Clarke: I ended up sitting down in the shade of a creosote till the sun went down I felt sheltered. I felt welcomed. I felt like I was home. And that caused me to slow down and spend more time looking at creosotes. When you do that, you notice that any creosote of a respectable age, you know, 20 years or more, will have a mound of earth beneath it.

[00:07:58] Chris Clarke: That's a little more fertile than the surround 'cause of all the creosote leaves that have dropped on it over the years. And in that mound of earth, there will be burrows, little holes where rodents and lizards and snakes have chosen to live. It's a little bit cooler there than it is out in the rest of the desert.

[00:08:18] Chris Clarke: You'll see the galls on creosotes that are created by different species of gall-forming insects. You'll see desert blooms underneath the creosotes, like miniature California poppies or desert marigolds or five spot, and jackrabbits and cottontails and snakes of various kinds. When you start to actually pay attention to the desert, the desert comes alive.

[00:08:42] Chris Clarke: And that's just with a layperson's eyes like mine. If you have training in the sciences and you can identify, let's say, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi or different kinds of mammal teeth or whatever, paying attention just brings you into the desert. And it helps you understand that a desert is not a broken version of something else.

[00:09:05] Chris Clarke: I've said that before, but it keeps being true. A lot of the time, the very basic terminology that we use to describe an ecosystem has more to do with a forest or a river or a coastline or a wet meadow, and it isn't necessarily applicable to the desert. Sometimes terms carry with them connotations of other places that are jarring at first when we apply them to the desert.

[00:09:29] Chris Clarke: Old growth, for instance. If you talk about old growth, people will imagine Douglas firs, redwoods, spruces. The oldest pine we know of is roughly 5,000 years old. It's not exactly a trivial matter, but it's not that hard to find creosote clones approaching or even exceeding that age. Another assumption that comes up fairly often these days is the assumption that fire is a good thing.

[00:09:56] Chris Clarke: And that assumption is a healthy response to a century plus of fire prevention in the landscapes of the West. There are a lot of ecosystems that have evolved in the presence of fire, whether naturally occurring or set by people that lived here hundreds or thousands of years ago. Our suppression of fire in western forests has had a lot of catastrophic impacts.

[00:10:17] Chris Clarke: And to a large extent, the desert did not evolve in the presence of fire Big wildfires are possible now in the desert because of introduced species like cheatgrass and splitgrass and buffelgrass and Sahara mustard that have increased the fuel load in the desert. A lightning strike that a hundred fifty years ago might have burned one juniper and then gone out can spread for tens of thousands of acres.

[00:10:43] Chris Clarke: Here's another big one. The ecological value of a place is often equated with the amount of biomass on it. You tell somebody that a particular hillside in the Mojave Desert may have more plant species growing on it than the equivalent area in an old-growth redwood forest, and people look at you funny.

[00:11:00] Chris Clarke: But it's true. The more of those of us who love deserts can convey what deserts are really about, that many of the rules we take for granted in ecosystems around the world don't apply in the desert, and that deserts operate on different principles because of the lack of water that defines them, the better off the deserts are gonna be.

[00:11:21] Chris Clarke: Far from being places that need to be reclaimed or greened, deserts are functioning exactly as they're supposed to, and that function needs to be respected.

[00:11:31] Kimberly: My name is Kimberly, and this week actually marks one decade that I've lived in the Mojave Desert. I first fell in love with the deserts of northern Nevada, and within a few years I moved to Twenty Nine Palms, which is the ancestral lands of the Chemehuevi, Serrano, and Cahuilla people.

[00:11:49] Kimberly: Um, for me, the desert has always been so generous with its secrets and its knowledge. So many people look right past it and assume there's nothing here, but for anyone who takes a moment to stop and notice, there are a thousand signs of animal life and traces of where and how water has moved through the landscape, and this is just fascinating to me.

[00:12:08] Kimberly: The ends of smoke trees with blooms on the end of their branches or rabbitbrush bursting from the edges of berms and washes or sunflowers and mesquite trees that thrive where floodwaters were. The land is in this strange and intense conversation always between floodwaters and droughts. And life here can thrive despite the chaos that we live in in this environment.

[00:12:33] Kimberly: And from this perspective, I think it's really important that these patterns of extremes build a kind of interdependence between what sustains us and what devastates us. And in a time where extremity and extremism and excess shape so many facets of our lives, I think we all have so much that we can learn from the desert about how to weather extremes and how to bloom under duress.

[00:12:59] Kimberly: And I can't imagine a more essential place to preserve and to study

[00:13:04] Chris Clarke: Reason number two, deserts are not as well studied as they deserve. I used to spend time with a desert botanist who liked to tell people that if you're looking across a Mojave Desert landscape, 10% of what you're seeing has not been described by science.

[00:13:23] Chris Clarke: It used to be that 90 or 95% of what we knew about the desert botanically or ecologically came from studies within two miles of a paved road. Now, desert botanists and other biologists have decided to hike further into the outback, and so that is no longer quite accurate. But we still have a lot to learn about the desert.

[00:13:44] Chris Clarke: This is true of little annual plants, for instance, that require, let's say, abundant monsoon storms to repeatedly hit the same valley in August before they bloom in September. They might go 15 or 20 years without blooming. The seeds just wait. But it's not just the little-known species. This is true of much more conspicuous and familiar species as well.

[00:14:06] Chris Clarke: They just haven't been as well studied as a lot of other species in a lot of other places. Now, I talk a lot about Joshua trees. It's a long-term project, a life's work that I have, in my own unscientific way, pursued for decades Joshua trees are probably the world's second most recognizable desert plant after saguaros.

[00:14:29] Chris Clarke: Now, I first started paying attention to them in 1996, and at that point, there were, as far as I could tell, four substantial scientific works on Joshua trees. Two of them published in the 19th century. One was a 1978 doctoral dissertation by Peter Rollins. And the most recent one, in 1996 when I started looking into it, was published in 1983.

[00:14:58] Chris Clarke: And it wasn't until the 21st century that we started to get more scientific interest in Joshua trees. Two publications in 2002 and 2003, two in 2006. And then starting in 2007, we got at least one new publication on Joshua trees almost every year, and we now have 53 of them that we could find. 49 of them were published in the last 25 years.

[00:15:24] Chris Clarke: And I probably don't really need to say this, but Joshua trees are big. They're noticeable. They're visible. You can count them from space. In fact, one of the developments in Joshua tree science is a project that is counting every existing Joshua tree and making a map of where they live based largely on aerial and satellite imagery.

[00:15:46] Chris Clarke: Now, less obvious or less charismatic plants like milkvetches or buckwheats or calochortus or creosotes, they get far less attention. The desert seems barren to those people driving through it 110 miles an hour, and they take that barren appearance as a lack of life and consequently a lack of importance.

[00:16:06] Chris Clarke: And that attitude often means that landscapes get changed irrevocably before they're studied. It's really no accident that we find important and compelling and fascinating species within the footprints of proposed developments: lithium mines, solar fields, shopping malls, data centers, suburban sprawl.

[00:16:28] Chris Clarke: You know, if you haven't examined a place closely, of course you're gonna miss what's unique to it Deserts generate biological diversity. They are engines of evolution. They isolate populations until those populations evolve away from their closest relatives and become distinct species. And because deserts are less studied than other ecosystems, though that is beginning to change, we as a society keep putting more of the development we don't want near our homes and communities in the desert.

[00:17:02] Chris Clarke: In the popular imagination, until quite recently, and still to a large extent, deserts are suitable for one of two things. They're places to go in, extract a resource, make money, and leave. Examples being mining or solar fields or groundwater pumping. Or deserts are places to dump things we don't want near us, so waste disposal and data centers, transmission lines, military uses.

[00:17:34] Chris Clarke: And I say that last with the caveat that the military is often a better steward of the desert than many other agencies or organizations, but the military still uses the desert to train 19-year-olds to steer tanks or test artillery or, in the ultimate example of doing something far from population centers because no one wants it close to them, conduct nuclear testing

[00:17:57] Joe Geoffrey: Don't go away.

[00:17:59] Joe Geoffrey: We'll be right back.

[00:18:01] CMC Ad: Copper Mountain College is a proud sponsor of 90 Miles From Needles, the desert protection podcast. Located in Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert, Copper Mountain College serves the communities of the high desert with a broad range of programs, from desert studies and the popular Wildland Fire Academy to nursing, EMT, water technology, and many more programs.

[00:18:21] CMC Ad: Copper Mountain College provides direct transfer programs to CSU and UC universities, as well as career technical education. Learn more at www.cmccd.edu. Go Fighting Cacti.

[00:18:35] Chris Clarke: For this week's offering from our friend Fred Bell, nature recordist extraordinaire, Fred writes, "Woodhouse's toads and Amargosa toads dominate the nighttime soundscape around a spring at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge."

[00:20:08] Joe Geoffrey: You're listening to Ninety Miles From Needles, the desert protection podcast. In the desert, it might take a very long time for the ambulance to get to you.

[00:20:20] Nancy: My name is Nancy. I'm calling from Ithaca, New York. I've lived in New York my whole life, but I feel like desert is my home. I'll probably never get to live there, but I feel like protecting it is worth it for maybe someone who comes after me who feels the same, but does get to live there

[00:20:37] Chris Clarke: Reason number three, desert protection cannot be separated from justice.

[00:20:44] Chris Clarke: A very common image of someone who loves the desert looks a lot like me, grizzled old idiosyncratic disheveled white man, or sometimes old grizzled idiosyncratic and disheveled white women. And that is true of a portion of people that love the desert, but it also erases the existence of a whole lot of other people that live in the desert and care about it.

[00:21:10] Chris Clarke: And first in line there are indigenous people who have cared for these landscapes since time immemorial. Despite that tenure in everything from land preservation to water rights to understanding what plants grow where and when and what animals work with them, indigenous people's knowledge is routinely marginalized along with their sovereignty.

[00:21:32] Chris Clarke: The border wall divides habitats and watersheds. It also endangers migrants. It endangers border communities at the same time. The majority of people that live in the North American deserts live in cities. Cities are places where it's easier for most of us, especially the less affluent among us, to survive and make a living.

[00:21:55] Chris Clarke: Cities in the desert are also places where the urban heat island effect gets really ramped up. Air pollution gets augmented by traffic and industry and development putting dust in the air. There are places like Tucson where a legacy of military development equates to the continuing presence of dangerous toxic chemicals in the groundwater, in the soil.

[00:22:19] Chris Clarke: We had an episode recently about heat injury and how people in desert communities, whether they're cities or farm communities, are disproportionately vulnerable to heat injury. Rich people are safe from that kind of heat injury most of the time. If they get it, it's voluntary. But it's the rest of us, especially those of us who have trouble making sure our electric bill gets paid on time or forced to work outside or are incarcerated, that suffer the most from heat injury.

[00:22:49] Chris Clarke: And climate change is going to make that worse. Often enough when you read a story about how a community is coping with drought, that story will mention affluent water users who have found ways to keep their lawns green. Meanwhile, impoverished and frontline communities can run completely out of water and merit a 90-second mention on the news and not much else.

[00:23:11] Chris Clarke: And not everything I've mentioned here is unique to the desert, but all of these factors are disproportionately evident here As is true elsewhere, conservation that doesn't take into account the needs of working people, cultural differences among populations including race, disability, the needs of human migrants, or tribal sovereignty and native rights, that conservation is necessarily incomplete

[00:23:42] Diane: Diane.

[00:23:42] Diane: I live on the Oregon coast, and the desert is absolutely beautiful, and it's wide open. The colors are beautiful, and what better spot to see the glory of a nighttime sky? Oh, there's so much good about the desert. Yes, it's important, just as everything else is. We need it

[00:24:11] Chris Clarke: Reason number four, we love the desert.

[00:24:16] Chris Clarke: We're not objective about the desert. In fact, we doubt whether any reporter can really be objective about anything. We wanna be accurate, obviously. We don't want our lack of objectivity to cloud our view of what's really happening, and we wanna examine truths that don't support our worldview. That conflict doesn't make those truths untrue.

[00:24:36] Chris Clarke: But the reason we're doing this at all is that we love the desert. We love places people have dismissed or written off or been taught to see as empty, ugly, hostile, or monotonous We love the scale of the desert landscape. We love that we can stand on a ridge and see for 120 miles, but we also love the macro lens view: soil crusts and the springtails that live in them, moths and annual wildflowers, night sounds, petrichor, the smell of the desert after rain, animal tracks, brilliance of eye shine in the dark.

[00:25:13] Chris Clarke: Is that a coyote or a badger or somebody's house cat? It's hard to tell, and sometimes the mystery is as important as the identity. And to be sure, loving a place doesn't mean you swear it's harmless or comfortable. It doesn't mean that it's undamaged or pristine. I lived in downtown Palm Springs for a year and a half, and my home office window looked out over the roof of a bank branch.

[00:25:37] Chris Clarke: On that roof, I would look out, and I would see a roadrunner running across the top of the roof some days, or a desert spiny lizard sunning itself. I loved that view. And, you know, I would have loved it more if the bank had never been built, but that doesn't change the fact that I loved what was there. And love doesn't necessarily mean resisting every single change.

[00:25:58] Chris Clarke: I understand the impulse behind resisting every single change. A lot of times it comes up because there is so much change that is going on, it's obviously deleterious, and we feel like we don't have a say in it. But sometimes building a campground right in the middle of downtown is the right thing to do.

[00:26:17] Chris Clarke: But here's the thing about change. Loving a place does mean insisting that changes be made with as much knowledge as possible about what those changes are gonna do. What are we gonna lose? What are we gonna impinge on? What things we might not like will increase in abundance as a result of that change?

[00:26:36] Chris Clarke: People protect places for many reasons: their livelihoods, their sense of justice, their interest in science. But behind most of those reasons lies an immense love. The desert doesn't need to justify its existence because it is useful, even though it is, or scenic, even though it is more scenic than useful, or because it stores an immense amount of carbon, even though it does that.

[00:27:05] Chris Clarke: It doesn't need to justify its existence through recreation value or tourism dollars flowing into communities. We want the desert to persist because it is alive, because it's unique, because it contains distinct and irreplaceable places, and because we love those places. And after we have 150 more episodes under our belt, we hope that more people will agree with us and be working to defend those places.

[00:28:37] Chris Clarke: As we wind down this episode I note that the flash floods we've been talking about over the last few episodes are continuing to happen in the Southwest including some rather dramatic swiftwater rescues in Tucson and the evacuation of the entire town of Chinle on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona.

[00:28:59] Chris Clarke: Doesn't look like this stuff is gonna slow down in the next few days so please all of you who are faced with ominous clouds in the sky even if those clouds are on the horizon or just on the radar take care of yourselves please be careful

[00:29:19] Chris Clarke: Jack and Lara and I are gonna be hitting the mountains. By the time you hear this, we will be somewhere up above 5,000 feet in the closest sky island we have, namely Mount San Jacinto. It'll be nice to get a, a few different kinds of birds than what we're used to down here at 1,800 feet. Looking forward to some hikes in the trees.

[00:29:44] Chris Clarke: Sky islands are wonderful, and we need to do an episode on them. Look for that soon. Remember, applications are still open for the Fellowship for Desert Reporting. You can go to thedamn.org/fellowship for more information. Looking for people that have a story to tell about the desert, preferably something that we have not paid attention to, either because it is very local to your area of the desert or because it's just generally an under-reported thing that even we haven't gotten.

[00:30:22] Chris Clarke: We have some really wonderful applicants already, and we'd like for the choice to be a little harder. So if you are a wonderful potential applicant, just please go to thedamn.org/fellowship. That's the Desert Advocacy Media Network website. Take a look at what we're offering, see if you're interested, and even if you think you maybe, maybe aren't interested, apply anyway.

[00:30:47] Chris Clarke: It'll take five minutes out of your life Looking forward to planning the West Texas trip around the Chihuahuan Desert Symposium in El Paso first week of November. Any listeners in Marfa want to hang out and get a cup of coffee sometime after the 6th of November, let me know. Same goes for you, Alpine, and Marathon, and Terlingua.

[00:31:13] Chris Clarke: Here in the Mojave, we cooled down a bit after getting s- side-swiped by Hurricane Marie, got a little bit of moisture. Very nice, especially considering that 29 Palms where I live is running a drought. I mean, we really only get three and a half inches of precipitation in a typical year, and over the last six years, we're missing about a year and a half worth of precipitation there.

[00:31:38] Chris Clarke: So it's really nice when we get a little bit of moisture, even if it just is enough to make dots on the driveway. Does cool things down pretty nicely. And we are hoping for more of the same, whether it's wet or dry, some cooler weather would be great. Really looking forward to what happens in the desert because of the super El Niño that we're facing, which is not to trivialize the problems that this thing's gonna cause, and possibly including in the desert.

[00:32:08] Chris Clarke: But it would be nice to recharge the aquifers a little bit. And speaking of groundwater, I will see you at the next Watering Hole. And

[00:32:19] Joe Geoffrey: that brings us to the end of this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. You can find show notes for this episode, along with links and background, at ninetymilesfromneedles.com.

[00:32:34] Joe Geoffrey: We're also on social media. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, and Threads. Just search for 90 Miles from Needles. And if you'd like a more direct line, you can reach us on Signal at A90MFN.67.

[00:32:54] Joe Geoffrey: If you'd like to support the show, you can make a donation of whatever size and frequency feels right to you at ninetymilesfromneedles.com/donate. Listener support is what makes this podcast possible. Our voiceover is by Joe Jeffery. Podcast artwork is by Martine Mancha. Nature sounds are recorded by Fred Bell.

[00:33:17] Joe Geoffrey: Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Bright Side Studio, with additional music licensed from independent artists.

[00:33:27] Chris Clarke: Other music in this episode is by Score Wizards.

[00:34:24] Joe Geoffrey: Stories from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network

[00:34:36] Chris Clarke: Okay, here's that Easter egg I promised. We sort of coincidentally, with the emergence of our 150th episode, which you just finished listening to, I mean, unless you fast-forwarded, in which case maybe you just started listening to it. But at any rate, in the last couple of weeks, we also passed 75,000 official downloads.

[00:34:56] Chris Clarke: Now, that number is actually lower than it should be because we lost the records for downloads in January 2022. That was our first actual month of putting the podcast out, if you don't count the teasers that we did sporadically over the second half of 2021. But in any event, we didn't get that many downloads in January 2022, and so 75K is something like accurate.

[00:35:19] Chris Clarke: And that's pretty gratifying. Now, downloads are not the absolute best measure of how many people are listening to a podcast because you can download it and not listen to it, or you could have one download that six different people listen to. We really need a better metric. But generally, if you go a little bit more than half the number of downloads, that's a fairly reliable estimate for us of the actual unique listeners to the podcast.

[00:35:43] Chris Clarke: So half of 75K is still pretty nice. We're not in Joe Rogan territory, but we're also not Joe Rogan, and that is a blessing because I don't know what we would do with all the money he makes. We also have some data we've been crunching that has to do with where our listeners are. And since January 1st of this year, a bit more than 16,000 individual downloads, vast majority of those in the US, broken down by city, which is a little inaccurate because it's really where the local internet node is for your listening.

[00:36:18] Chris Clarke: So as an example, everybody that listens in Joshua Tree or 29 Palms gets counted as being in Palm Springs, so there's a fudge factor there. But it's relatively accurate as far as the general region goes. And so if we count down the top 10 cities listening to the podcast in 2026, at 10 is Pasadena, California, and then Portland, Oregon, and then Seattle, Washington.

[00:36:40] Chris Clarke: Now, none of those are particularly deserty places. But we get more deserty as we go along. Riverside, California. Now, Irvine, California, that's... Yeah, we should count that among LA. Don't @ me, Irvine residents. You know what I mean. And then the top five cities for downloads in 2026 are, in ascending order, Phoenix, Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, Los Angeles, California, which presumably includes the Antelope Valley, and Palm Springs, California, which again includes our home turf of the Morongo Basin, Joshua Tree, 29 Palms.

[00:37:20] Chris Clarke: Now, what other desert cities are we being heard in? Well, quite a few intermixed with, uh, large cities in the country We have San Bernardino, which will include some of the area around Victorville, Mesa, Arizona, Salt Lake City. There are some odd patterns that show themselves. You know, for instance, we have fewer listeners in Chicago than we do in Kanab, Utah, and that's not because we just have a couple listeners in Chicago.

[00:37:50] Chris Clarke: We have several hundred. I think that means we're doing something right. Nothing against Chicago. I mean, I hope more Chicagoans start listening, maybe learn to love the desert if, if you don't already. But Kanab, that's, that's a prize. I'm proud of that So that's who's listening to us. You know, we have 100 or so in Winnemucca and in Ely, Nevada, and it's just...

[00:38:16] Chris Clarke: We're pretty well sprinkled throughout the desert. El Paso's in there. That's who's listening to us, but when you look at the episodes we've put out, rather than who's listening to them, there are some patterns that emerge, and we find them interesting, a useful guide to where we need to focus some of our energy in the next months and years.

[00:38:34] Chris Clarke: When we started this podcast in 2022, we were pretty solidly based in California. This was something that I wanted to mitigate from day one, pretty much. And we've done okay in that regard. Out of the 150 episodes we've put out so far, one-third have something to do with California desert issues. This is not so bad, 'cause, you know, we Californians are a famously navel-gazing people.

[00:39:01] Chris Clarke: We have 26 episodes that have to do with places in Arizona, a little under 20%, one less episode about Nevada, 14 that take place at least in part in Utah, 10 in Texas, five in New Mexico, and one in Colorado. Now, some episodes are counted under more than one state, like the bucket list episode I did a little earlier.

[00:39:25] Chris Clarke: It's not necessarily the case that the one Colorado episode was entirely about Colorado. Also, there are more states than just in the US. We have been trying to develop our coverage of environmental issues and campaigns in Mexico. We have a long way to go on that. Four of our episodes so far have taken place in the Mexican state of Sonora, two in Baja California, one in Baja California Sur, one in Chihuahua, and one in Coahuila.

[00:39:55] Chris Clarke: Now, obviously, there are gaps here. We need to do more in New Mexico. I understand the powers that be in New Mexico just let a whole bunch of water out of the Elephant Butte Reservoir because the Rio Grande went dry downstream of Albuquerque. And I've been poking around to see if we can do an episode on that.

[00:40:12] Chris Clarke: And that would be, that would be a start, but it would be a good start. Mexico in general, we are not being fair to Mexico's rightful share of the amount of square miles of North American desert that are in that country. We need to do better. Suggestions are welcome. And in particular, Chihuahua and Coahuila are central to the Chihuahuan desert.

[00:40:33] Chris Clarke: But we've mostly talked about them in the context of the border, either in talking about transboundary conservation efforts or border issues like border wall construction currently being proposed for Big Bend National Park, which, if you're new to the podcast, we think that's a horrible idea We have more attention to pay to the desert lands in Colorado, the Colorado Plateau area there around Cortez and Grand Junction.

[00:40:58] Chris Clarke: And we definitely are lacking episodes in the desert portions of Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming. And in Mexico, similarly with Nuevo León, Durango, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí. So we've definitely expanded beyond our Mojave origins, and we're proud of that. But the archive still reflects where we have access and relationships and where the reporting resources have been easiest, and not unimportantly, the fact that my Spanish kinda sucks.

[00:41:28] Chris Clarke: So we have improvement that we can do. If you wanna break it down by desert, the Mojave Desert is the best represented place in the podcast, unsurprisingly, at just under 30% of the episodes. Sonoran Desert is second with 12%. The Great Basin Desert, the Chihuahuan Desert, and the Colorado Plateau are each around 7% of the episodes we put out.

[00:41:50] Chris Clarke: And there's four episodes that are part of the Madrean Archipelago and Border Grasslands, which are arguably part of other deserts, but they deserve being singled out 'cause they're a pretty wonderful set of ecosystems. Lastly, the topics that we've covered. More than half of our episodes have been about politics, law, governance, or activism.

[00:42:12] Chris Clarke: A little bit more than a third have been about wildlife and animal ecology. About a quarter have been about water, rivers, lakes, groundwater About a fifth have been about protected lands or about environmental and social justice, or about mining and other extractive industries. And then declining in percentages here a little bit as we go along f- with the rest of the list, botany and plant ecology is around 18%, climate, fire, and weather at 17%.

[00:42:44] Chris Clarke: The border is at 17% as well. Energy and major infrastructure is around 15%. Desert safety is a little over 6%, as is our navel-gazing discussion of milestones for the podcast like I'm doing right now, or operations for the podcast, appeals, things like that. And quite a few of the episodes are in more than one of these categories.

[00:43:09] Chris Clarke: That's the look at where we are. I'm really proud of what we've done with the podcast. We do have a long way to go before we live up to what we claim to be, which is a news media outlet that covers the entire breadth of North America's desert lands. There are two ways you can help us make that more real.

[00:43:27] Chris Clarke: One is to send us notes about potential episodes and places we haven't quite covered yet, whether they involve you or someone you know, or someone you've been paying attention to, or an issue that you've been tracking. And if that is the case, reach out. If you go to our website, ninezeromilesfromneedles.com, there are a couple ways you can get in touch with us, like leaving a voicemail or sending us an email.

[00:43:51] Chris Clarke: You can also email me directly at chris@ninezeromilesfromneedles.com. If you're old school, you can call 760-392-1996, leave a voicemail there. And of course, you can contribute financially, whether that's just general support, you go to ninezeromilesfromneedles.com/donate for that, or sponsoring an episode on a particular topic.

[00:44:16] Chris Clarke: Doesn't mean you get to determine what we say, but you can determine what we cover by ponying up for us to work on a specific issue. This is about community. We can't do this without you. And that's not entirely a fundraising pitch. It's really why we're here, to elevate the work that people just like you are doing in the desert to save the desert and to protect their own livelihoods, and to encourage people from outside the desert not to send their hedge fund money to make more hedge fund money by destroying the place that we love.

[00:44:50] Chris Clarke: That's really why we're here. And thanks for that.