Walking With Zeke is a moving naturalist’s journal about an aging dog, the people who loved him, and the wildlife-filled neighborhood in which he spent his last months.
If you wondered whether I might have been indulging in hyperbole of late in describing the solar energy barons’ plans with phrases like “paving the desert with mirrors,” I wouldn’t exactly blame you. Certainly it’s not the whole desert, you might reasonably have thought. A few thousand acres here, another few thousand there? There’s plenty of land in between. Surely the desert landscape would remain in the main unpaved, far less altered than the plowed and furrowed cotton lands of the Central Valley, or the terra-cotta-tiled carcinoma that is your typical southern California suburb.
This map is of the northern half of the Ivanpah Valley, north of Nipton and of the Mojave National Preserve, between the south end of Ivanpah Dry Lake and the long hill between Jean and Sloan, which is essentially the southernmost edge of Las Vegas.
The orange crosshatching indicates land covered under pending applications for building industrial solar power generating stations. Not “study areas” — pending projects.
That’s a majority of the land in the Ivanpah Valley right there slated for blading, paving, and heavy industrial development. It would be an uninterrupted swath of industrial facilities leading from the south end of the Strip to the verge of the Mojave National Preserve.
That southernmost orange splotch is the project closest to implementation: the Brightsource project. The rest of them — on the other side of the Nevada Line, east of the Dry Lake and northwest toward Goodsprings — are distinct and additional.
What would those giant mirrors displace? We don’t know, exactly. We know, because the site has been partially surveyed since the project was announced, that Brightsource’s Ivanpah project would pave the habitat of 70% of the known California occurrences of the rare plant Asclepias nyctaginifolia, the Mojave milkweed. There are ten other taxa on the site named in the The California Native Plant Society’s Inventory of Rare and Endangered Plants.
The Mojave, it turns out, is at least as biodiverse as a redwood forest. Here’s a slide from a recent slideshow put together by Jim Andre, desert botanist and director of the Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center:
A typical undisturbed Mojave landscape has about as many taxa — species, subspecies, and so forth — per hectare as a forest of mature Coast Redwoods. And we know less about the Mojave than we do about the redwood forests. There are many places in the Mojave that have hardly been botanized at all. There are plants that show up only after infrequent summer rains, and few botanists make a habit of collecting and cataloguing species when temperatures reach 110F. It’s a big country and many of the unknown plant species are going to be inconspicuous. Andre noted in the Winter 2008 issue of the Desert Report [PDF] that a new manzanita species was recently discovered growing on a ridge above his Desert Research Center. In our rush to pave the desert we will obliterate things we don’t even know are there, consign species to extinction before we realize they exist at all.
Near Primm, NV. If they ever get around to building the Ivanpah Airport — and who knows if they will, with Vegas’ economy still tanking — this will become satellite long-term parking or a Sbarros or something equally valuable.
Incidentally, that’s some good news about the Dubai debt collapse, though it translates to lost jobs for some innocent folks in Vegas: Dubai World owns a lot of MGM Mirage, and had about $8 billion in development in progress on The Strip. If that falters, the impetus for building a superfluous airport up against the Mojave National Preserve slackens.
It’s been a strange few months in my adopted and temporarily estranged home. A speculation-addicted emirate collapses and the Ivanpah Valley is affected. Antonin Scalia debates the future of the place where I camp. It’s enough to make a guy a solipsist.
I’ve joined the Board of Directors of the Mojave National Preserve Conservancy, a “friends of” group whose mission is to “preserve, protect, and promote the unique natural beauty, ecological integrity, and rich cultural history” of the Preserve.
It’s a new organization — founded this year — and as such is running on a very lean budget. No paid staff, all labor volunteered. Membership donations received this far have covered the costs of printing promotional material and a few other ancillaries.
We need to grow. We have a lot of work to do.
The Mojave National Preserve, at 1,534,819 acres, is the third-largest unit of the National Park Service outside Alaska. In the lower 48, only Yellowstone and the Preserve’s neighbor Death Valley National Park. The Mojave National Preserve covers very nearly as much land as Yosemite and Joshua Tree national parks put together. And yet the Preserve’s budget, in FY 2007, was less than $6 million. That comes out to a little less than four bucks to manage each acre for a year.
That land is not exactly easy to manage. It includes 695,000 acres of designated wilderness, 783,000 acres of designated desert tortoise critical habitat, a threatened species (the tortoise) and an endangered species (The Mojave tui chub), 1,300 archaeological sites, 3,500 open mine shafts, and all of it seen by between five and six hundred thousand visitors a year. The Preserve’s staff has performed admirably given the magnitude of their tasks, but as hard and efficiently as they work, they can’t get everything done without help. Across the country, National Parks have long relied on non-profit partners to help them get their work done, expand their reach, educate visitors and potential visitors, and preserve the land. But though it has been around for 15 years, the Mojave National Preserve hasn’t had a non-profit partner to help it out, until now.
I’ll be putting together a newsletter for the Conservancy, and welcome your submissions of artwork, photos, essays and poetry, and anything else you may have been inspired to create by your visits to the Mojave National Preserve. We’ll also be looking for volunteers to help in various ways.
And of course, we need your membership! Joining costs a mere $25, and brings privileges such as
an opportunity to participate in a hands-on mule deer study at Mojave National Preserve
an exclusive spring wildflower walk with Preserve Superintendent Dennis Schramm, a botanist by training
an invitation to a very special “star party” in April 2010, hosted by astronomers from NASA
an opportunity to participate in “Photograph Mojave Day,” a community arts event hosted in the Mojave National Preserve
A life membership is $500.
As you tally your tax-deductible contributions for 2009, please consider making a generous donation to the Conservancy. It’d be great to meet Coyote Crossing readers at the Conservancy’s get-togethers. When you do join or donate, drop me a line to let me know.
