If you want evidence that environmentalists as a whole really don’t care about arid environments, it’s instructive to look at a bit of jargon in use over the last few decades.

The jargon is used to describe this process: People abuse a piece of land. They overgraze it. They build houses and cut down trees and pump water from wells, drawing down the water table. They use that water to irrigate crops, poisoning the land with accumulating dissolved salts. They start fires, by accident or on purpose, and the fires rage across the countryside. The soil’s protective coat of humus blows away. Animals die. The leaves that are green turn to brown.

In the jargon to which I refer, this process is called “desertification.”

Desertification. The transformation of useful, pleasant, healthy land – an agreed good – into desert, which is assumed to be bad.

What happens to a land that’s been “desertified”? Fairly often, long-lived plants tend to die out and annual weeds, and their short-lived perennial associates, take over. Weeds are opportunists: they’ll grow in a hurry when moisture is available, set abundant seed, then die. They leave behind dry cellulose: fuel. Fuel feeds fires. Fires kill the remaining long-lived plants, the trees and rhizomatous herbs and such, clearing the soil for a new generation of weed seedlings.

Erosion gets ramped up as well. Water, when and where it makes an appearance, tends to gouge gullies in the landscape. Where a day-long gentle rain would have quietly soaked into the root-bound earth before “desertification,” now there’s nothing to hold it. The topography colects the gentle rain and turns it into flash floods. When the rain ebbs, wind carries away loose soil.

“Desertification” is a global problem, the official environmentalists tell us. It decreases the food security of the world’s most vulnerable people. “Desertification” is an important factor in the crisis in Darfur, in the collapse of the Mexican economy and consequent mass migration of displaced farmers, and a host of other global social crises.

Here’s a photo of “desertified” land.

Here’s another:

And another:

Pretty bleak stuff.

Way bleaker than most actual deserts. Here’s a desert landscape:

Here’s another:

And another:

There is a difference between land that has been “desertified” and an actual desert.

You may point out that I’ve deliberately sought out beautiful, lush photos to represent deserts, to contrast them unfairly with the trashed land currently referred to as “desertified.” Fair enough. Here’s a lush, beautiful photo of some bonafide “desertified” land, in the long-overgrazed Rio Puerco drainage in Arizona:

Gorgeous, lush compared to some actual desert landscapes, nice pronghorn ready for his close-up. And “desertified” rather than a desert. The Rio Puerco basin gets enough precipitation to be considered steppe rather than desert, and yet look at the monoculture of invasive grass there. There is no diversity to speak of in this shot, except for the pronghorn who can trot off to a more diverse landscape 50 miles away and get there in an hour.

Some people working on “desertification” are beginning to point out this difference between “desertified” lands and deserts, pointing out that deserts are actually diverse and more or less stable habitats with their own values to wildlife and to people, but those same activists tend to call deserts something other than deserts. “Drylands” is common. The fact is, it’s “desertification” that should be called something else. Badlandification. Dustification. Parkinglotification. Burningmanification. If we could actually turn land into desert, there’d be a lot less argument over the sites of things like massive corporate solar concentrating facilities in creosote-tortoise habitat. I’d be thrilled if we could truly desertify some of the land around Bakersfield, for instance, to take the worn-out, selenium-poisoned, groundwater overdrafted subsidized cotton fields there and grow cryptobiotic soil crusts on them, get some rabbitbrush growing and some barrel cacti and some Mojave ground squirrels established.

The problem is that actual deserts are the lands most threatened by what environmentalists call “desertification”: invasive weeds are raging through the deserts like the wildfires they spawn, water diversions cause subsidence and old tree death, and dust storms are more common in the Mojave now than they were during the Dust Bowl. To call this sterilizing of land “desertification” is to reinforce the notion that deserts are worthless, damaged things to be avoided, mended or improved upon, and certainly not places worth preserving when the alternative is cozying up to Big Green Energy.

Most chillingly, the remedy for “desertified” lands is usually referred to as “reclamation.” “Reclaiming the desert,” they call it.

Here is a photo of a reclaimed desert landscape:

Here’s another:

And another:

(This article was originally published at Coyote Crossing.)

The Riverside Press Enterprise reported Saturday on the increasingly widespread concern that in a century or so, Joshua Tree National Park’s namesake species might not grow there anymore.

The ancient plants are dying in the park, the southern-most boundary of their limited growing region, scientists say. Already finicky reproducers, Joshua trees are the victim of global warming and its symptoms — including fire and drought — plus pollution and the proliferation of non-native plants. Experts expect the Joshuas to vanish entirely from the southern half of the state within a century.

The article is erratic in quality. The reporter, Janet Zimmerman, says in one paragraph that Joshua trees are very likely to be wiped out in southern California; a few paragraphs down she quotes the Palm Springs Desert Museum’s former natural history curator Jim Cornett as saying the trees are reproducing well, and otherwise thriving, in southern California’s Mojave National Preserve.

There’s also a weird insinuation that saguaros are spreading throughout the southern range of the Joshua tree, which isn’t so: Californian saguaros are still restricted to the a tiny part of the easternmost tip of the Whipple Mountains across the river from Parker, Arizona, and saguaros are every bit as threatened by climate change, in the long run, as are Joshua trees, due to invasive-plant-fueled wildfires and threats to the species’ pollinators.

The article is good press for the beleaguered trees nonetheless, and touches on the main issues placing the species in peril, fire and drought chief among them. Zimmerman mentions assisted migration and revegetation of burned areas with blackbrush, Coleogyne, which acts as a nurse plant for Joshua tree seedlings, keeping them protected from marauding jackrabbits. It may be that the scientific models she mentions are too optimistic — I reported on that here last year — but whatever the caveats, the Press-Enterprise piece is worth checking out.

The desert is a barren wasteland.

The desert is unproductive.

There’s nothing there.

We’ve all heard these statements before, but those of us who have come to know and love the desert realize just how wrong they are.

The reality:

The desert teems with life, for those who know how to see it.

The desert is as lovely in its own way as a forest or a mountain stream.

The desert is home to plants and animals uniquely adapted to this harsh environment, making it an indispensable part of the diversity of life on our planet.

The desert stores as much carbon as some temperate forests.

A great set of photos and text on the Basin and Range Watch website captures the true nature of the desert perfectly. They were taken in the “old growth desert” of Ivanpah Valley. BrightSource Energy wants to replace this beautiful and biologically valuable, carbon-sequestering habitat with a 4,000-acre solar project.

It remains to be seen whether the project can achieve its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions when all of the following are counted:

• the loss of the desert’s carbon storing capacity
• diesel emissions from water trucks washing the mirrors every day
• additional greenhouse gas releases involved with expanding a nearby transmission line
• emissions from the on-site gas-fired turbine, used at start-up and on cloudy days
• emissions created by workers driving 100 miles round trip from Las Vegas

Beyond these energy accounting calculations, what will be lost if the BrightSource project is allowed to proceed in this location?

Just a few more rivets on this big ol’ jet airliner we call home. Sure they’re small, many people find these particular ones not very appealing, but how many can we afford to lose? No one knows, because the Earth and its ecosystems are vastly more complex than the simple machine used in this metaphor. What we do know is that we are losing the “pieces” of our ecosystems at a faster rate than almost any other time in Earth’s history, and certainly the fastest rate since humans came on the scene.

Rather than tearing out more rivets and hoping we’ve got a good parachute, the safest bet is to save all the pieces we can. That means choosing technologies and sites that don’t require vast areas of habitat destruction, whether it’s removing a mountain top or scraping a desert.

(If you’re wondering if there are better places for a project like BrightSource’s, you’re right. Check out this map showing better places for large-scale solar projects. For more answers on how we can fight global warming and still protect desert habitats like Ivanpah Valley, check out our Big Solar fact sheet.)

Photo: the blossoms of the Notch-leaf phacelia (Phacelia crenulata), by Kevin Emmerich/Basin and Range Watch. Go see more of this beautiful valley and its wildflowers at their website.

And here’s one more photo:

It may not be pretty, but it’s helping to slow global warming, at no cost to you. Why destroy it? (Dark cryptobiotic crust in gravelly soil, abundant in the Ivanpah Valley. That crust is just one of the components that make desert habitats valuable carbon storehouses, putting them on a par with some temperate forests. Photo by Kevin Emmerich/Basin and Range Watch.)

Occasionally we need to take a break from activism and get out and smell the flowers. Last Saturday, I took a hike from Grapevine Canyon, up Grapevine Mountain and back down Bitter Creek. Brittle bush was probably the most abundant bloomer, but the chuparosa in Bitter Creek were also spectacular. Lots of phacelia as well. And I found the fish hook cactus (right) to be the most charismatic of the bunch.

A full set of photos and a map from the outing are available on my Flickr page.

The Anza-Borrego Foundation and Institute’s website also has a flower alert page, as does the state park website.

And this photographer got some great shots on his first trip to Anza-Borrego, though not necessarily of the flowers.

Feel free to post your own flower reports in the comments section below.

Chuparosa and brittlebush in Bitter Creek.

UPDATE: Here are a few more photos from a hike up Harper Canyon in Anza-Borrego on March 29. Feel free to help me out on the identifications in the comments section.

Orange Mallow

Beavertail cactus blossom

Going by the Anza-Borrego Desert Natural History Association’s flower guide, I think this is a ghost flower (Mohavea confertiflora)

Creosote in bloom

So it’s not a flower, but this was a new lizard for me. Not sure, but could be a banded rock lizard.

Indigo bush

This month a friend and I sat bathed in moonlight on the fringes of a desert wilderness, enjoying a hundred-mile view. Eastward we saw towering thunderheads, illuminated from within by frequent and gigantic lightning flashes as they released their catastrophic rains upon the Grand Canyon. The storm was far enough away that we heard no thunder: just the calls of nearby coyotes and owls. When we awoke the air was clear, and the surrounding mountains — where we could see them through the thick Joshua tree forest — seemed close enough almost to touch.

Southern Nevada’s Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness does offer great views. At just 6,050 acres, though, the long views are outside the wilderness’ boundaries. Wee Thump isn’t a classic rock and ice wilderness in the style of Ansel Adams. But it is stunningly beautiful, a rare piece of relatively intact Mojave biome in a surprisingly accessible location.

Designated as wilderness in 2002, Wee Thump — the name means “The Ancient Ones” in the local Paiute language, a reference to the land’s aged Joshua trees — is a gently sloping alluvial fan in a roughly triangular valley between the McCullough and Highland ranges and the north shoulder of the New York Mountains, just west of Searchlight, NV. Though the wilderness contains only one designated trail, an old miner’s wagon track that stays frustratingly close to route 164, the constantly changing washes offer abundant opportunities for hiking into the heart of the wilderness.

And that wilderness has some heart. The Joshua trees are there in abundance, along with their cousins the Mojave and banana yuccas. (Wee Thump is in fact part of that narrow strip of desert in which the ranges of the latter two yuccas overlap.) The cactus family is well represented here, with red-spined barrel cacti surprisingly abundant, along with a healthy diversity of chollas and a number of other common (and less-common) Mojave species. Here and there throughout the wilderness the hiker can find incongruous single-needle piñons, growing well away from their usual mountain haunts at elevations as low as 4,500 feet. Junipers and a wealth of broadleaved shrub species, blackbrush and sage in the higher parts of the wilderness and creosote downslope, fill out the desert floor. The washes hold a staggering display of annual flowers in season.

With that diverse a flora, it’s no surprise the Wee Thump fauna is also rather diverse. You can’t hike for long down a Wee Thump wash without finding evidence of desert tortoise burrows, coyote and deer and (if you’re lucky) bighorn tracks in the sand, a ridiculous number of Audubon’s cottontails, black-tailed jackrabbits, and antelope ground squirrels, k-rats and packrats. There are at least four different lizard species here, five if my local informant’s report of banded Gila monster is to be believed. Those sinuous tracks in the wash sand may well have been made by rattlers, though there are plenty of red coachwhips here as well. And the birds dominate the landscape, or at least the aural landscape. Cactus wrens seem to call from every Joshua tree on summer days, giving the Scott’s orioles some competition. Sage and black-chinned sparrows flit from shrub to shrub. Seeing golden eagles here is not at all uncommon.

Sadly, the Wee Thump soundscape may have a new addition before long: Clark Country is attempting to build a major commercial airport in the neighboring Ivanpah Valley near Primm, and flight paths designed to avoid the nearby Mojave National Preserve will almost certainly send planes over this little wilderness. Hearing the daytime iambic call of a Scott’s oriole, or the romantic serenade of a coyote family, may soon be quite a bit more difficult. You can watch this space for more on the Ivanpah Valley airport project and how you can work to stop it.

But in the meantime, Wee Thump still waits quietly for your visit.

The Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness is on Nevada Route 164 — designated the Joshua Tree Parkway — between Searchlight and Nipton, California. From Southern California take Interstate 15 toward Las Vegas, leave the freeway at the Nipton Road exit about ten miles before the State Line, and turn right on Nipton Road, California Route 164.

Set your trip meter as you cross the railroad tracks in Nipton. In about two miles you’ll cross into Nevada. The route number stays the same on the other side of the line as the road winds up Big Tiger Canyon through a thickening Joshua tree forest. On the other side of a low pass, at around ten miles from Nipton, a poorly-marked parking lot offers trailhead access to the Wilderness. Don’t fret if you miss the turn. Just past 13 miles from the Nipton crossing, a well-graded dirt road will run into the forest to your left. A few miles off the pavement this road is definitely of the high-clearance-only variety, but even a low-slung rental car will find easy passage to a parking area near a windmill not far from the pavement. Get out and walk around, on the wilderness’ perimeter road or through some of the above-mentioned washes. Route-finding skills are important here, as the washes meander a bit confusingly and it’s easy to lose your bearings. (This is a good place for you to practice your GPS skills, in other words.) There’s primitive camping in spots along the south side of the access road, or you can take advantage of limited lodging and supplies in Nipton, or somewhat greater options in Searchlight, which is about seven miles farther east on 164.

Here’s an excerpt from Terry Weiner’s conservation column in the upcoming El Paisano. Join DPC today to receive your own copy of El Paisano in the mail, or read it online at our website.

The Mojave and Colorado deserts saw quite a wonderful bloom in spring 2008. In very early February in Shoshone, California, south of Death Valley National Park, the pink and purple cup-like blossoms of the desert five spots were already in profuse bloom in the pastel-colored mud hills. The high desert of our Mojave National Preserve in the Ivanpah Mts. at 5,000 ft. was ablaze as late as the first weekend in May with the newly opened flaming coral blossoms of the claret cup cactus. The ground between the cacti was sprinkled with the periwinkle blue of phacelias and mustard-yellow gold fields. The roads of the Preserve were lined with tall peach-colored blossoms of the desert mallow. The Algodones Dunes sprouted flowers like mad during February and March, ending with a good crop of the rare and odd-looking partly-parasitic plant called “Sand food” (Pholisma sonorae). The Desert Botanical Garden’s website has more interesting information about this plant, which is threatened by off-road vehicle use at the Algodones Dunes. 

This botanical excursion has been leading to the issue that is perennially on my mind and on my work plate: off-road vehicles in the desert. Have we made progress in 35 years in protecting the desert from off-road vehicle (ORV) impacts? Last weekend, I was camped next to pristine dunes within the Mojave Preserve, where only street-legal vehicles are allowed. Out of the blissful silence came the growl of engines from approaching non-street-legal four-wheel ORVs. Before I reached the dunes on foot, seven men on ORVs had driven up and down the sides of the sand dunes, previously marked only by tiny tracks of lizards and rodents. They made deep “donut” gouges and ran over dunes plants. After flagging them down and explaining that they were riding illegally, they did retreat from the dunes but drove cross-country across the desert to a dirt road where they were still riding illegally. California OHV regulations require registration stickers (green stickers) on ORVs. Only one of the seven ORVs was bearing one. 

The Desert Protective Council is taking an active role in the Alliance for Responsible Recreation, a coalition of property owners, citizens groups and conservation organizations working on strategies for crafting and gaining support for tighter regulations and more stringent fines for trespass and damage to public and private lands. We will have more information about the Alliance for Responsible Recreation on our website soon. Meanwhile, you can e-mail Terry Weiner at terryweiner AT sbcglobal.net for more information and to find out how your group can join the Alliance.

Photo of Pholisma from the Botanical Society’s website.

UPDATE

Here are a few flower photos Gidon Singer took on his hike from the Lagunas to Scissors Crossing, on his way to the May 12 Sunrise Powerlink hearings in Borrego Springs. And it’s not just flowers that are out this time of year. Can you spot the horned lizard?

We’ll have to get a Flickr account for DesertBlog to make posting photos easier. Meanwhile, enjoy these.

The annual wildflower bloom is about over in the desert, but other desert plants, especially cacti and trees, are taking their place in the yearly desert flower relay. Some of the showiest flowers are still on their way.

On May 12, this desert agave was just starting to bloom on a ridge above Hellhole Canyon near Borrego Springs.

Here’s a better photo of an agave blooming in the California desert. Some slopes with good clusters of agaves will be covered with these tall, yellow-capped stalks.

 (photo courtesy Wildflower Center Digital Library)

Other late spring to early summer bloomers include prickly pear and beavertail cactus, found on desert slopes, and desert willow, found in washes.

Later in the summer, willows and other small trees growing in washes will provide important forage for desert bighorn sheep.

(photo of desert willow blossom courtesy Wildflower Center Digital Library)

So, if you can stand the heat, it’s still a good time to enjoy the beauty and smell the aroma of these hardy desert plants, cacti and trees.

What’s blooming in your part of the desert? Leave a comment below.

Of course not. In addition to all their other values, forests act as carbon sinks. Yet according to a study reported in Nature Reports: Climate Change, deserts may store as much carbon as some temperate forests. The carbon is stored not only in desert plants, but also in biological soil crusts, which are easily damaged by surface disturbance. And at least some solar projects don’t just disturb the surface, they scrape it entirely, over areas totalling thousands of acres.

Hmmm… Maybe we ought to slow down on this rush to build solar farms in the desert, before we find out that big solar is really the next ethanol. At the very least, it seems wise to focus on urban-based renewable energy first, and confine solar farms to heavily disturbed lands near existing transmission lines.

Find more photos of the Mojave Desert at digitaldesert.net.

The Algodones Dunes, photo by Andrew Harvey.

The beautiful Algodones Dunes lie on the eastern edge of Imperial Valley. Besides being vast and magnificent, they contain a number of plants and animals that live nowhere else in the world, including the threatened Peirson’s Milkvetch and the Dunes Scarab Beetle. These creatures are threatened by off-road vehicles. Currently about half of this largest dune system in the southwest is open to off-road vehicle use and half is protected for conservation and for non-motorized recreation. The BLM is currently beginning the public process for revising the current recreation management plan for the Dunes and has scheduled 3 public scoping meetings on April 22nd in San Diego, on April 23rd in Phoenix and April 24th in El Centro.

If you love the desert and want to help protect these magnificent dunes, please attend one of these meetings and tell the BLM that the current situation of half the dunes being open to off-roading and half protected for conservation and other types of recreation is fair and is working. Tell the BLM that you want the Algodones Dunes National Natural Landmark with all of its special creatures to be preserved for future generations.

For more information on the Dunes Recreation Area Management Plan and for details on next week’s meetings, please visit our Algodones Dunes web page. To find out what these places are like when visited on foot, you can read this narrative of a hike through one of the interim vehicle closures.