The Fight to Protect California’s Dead Desert--Is There a Better Way? : Environment: What’s needed is a reclamation plan to bring life back to the desert, not legislation to open some lands to continued destruction.

SANTA FE, N.M. —  The Desert Protection Act is a classic example of U.S. environmental politics gone wrong. It has something for virtually every interest group and entrepreneur, whether public or private. The problem is that the legislation offers little or no hope for bringing life back to the desert. Indeed, the Southern California desert it seeks to protect is functionally dead, “desertified,” if you will.

The act, sponsored by Sen. Alan Cranston, would empower a federal agency to protect 25 million acres, where more than 750 species of wildlife, some of them endangered, live. It would designate 70 “wilderness” areas, as well as placing 4 million acres off limits to “traditional” uses such as mining and grazing. And it would transfer an additional 3 million acres from the Bureau of Land Management to the National Park Service.

Sheep and cattle ranchers scream that the Desert Protection Act would destroy their “traditional way of life.” What they mean is that the politicians beholden to them have always seen to it that the federal government subsidized the costs of their operations through ridiculously low fees for grazing on public lands.

In opposing the legislation, miners, hunters, recreationists, vision-seekers, backpackers and off-road vehicle users say they see the desert as the last frontier, as the last place to be “free” to do what they please. What they really mean is that the desert is a place where it is easy to get Uncle Sam to subsidize lucrative uses and abuses. The California Mining Assn., for example, claims that passage of the act will cost 20,000 jobs in an industry that generates $1.2 billion a year. What it doesn’t say is how little of that money--earned on public lands--goes to taxes and how much goes to politicians and political fronts like the People for the West. Under our mining laws, designed in 1872 to promote the exploration of a West no one wanted, miners pay next to nothing for the “right” to exploit publicly owned resources.

What’s needed is not a desert-protection plan but a desert-reclamation plan. The dead desert that environmentalists seek to preserve did not evolve as a pristine wilderness playground or as a sand pile for the rapers and scrapers. Its vegetation co-evolved with certain populations of animals, including humans. Anyone wishing to reclaim the desert will have to understand this co-evolution and learn how to mimic it.

What we have today is not a living desert but desertification, a process synonymous with land degradation, whose endpoint is a dead desert. Who causes desertification? We do. What processes characterize desertification? Destruction of the vegetative cover, water erosion, wind erosion, salinization, reduction in the soil’s organic matter, soil crusting and compaction and accumulation of such substances as selenium, toxic to plants and animals.

Desertification resembles a patchwork of degraded spots on a landscape, where land abuse has become excessive. From those patches, land degradation spreads outward if abuse continues. The patches may coalesce to form a large degraded area. If desert-reclamation measures are to be effective, they must begin early in the degradation process, not after irreparable harm has occurred. In desert ecosystems, hurt dirt is forever.

A distinction between drought and desertification must be made. The former is a natural phenomenon in arid regions; the latter is man-caused. Drought can make desertification worse, but it does not cause it. The most pernicious combination is land abuse during “good” rainfall years, followed by its continuation during the inevitable dry years. Grazing is the best example.

How can the desert be reclaimed? Fifty years of government-financed erosion-control programs have been bitterly disappointing. Bureaucracies like the Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service primarily function as conduits for government subsidies to ranchers and farmers.

Should we despair? We can consult a growing body of scientific studies suggesting that the desert may still have a chance. Science can be used to determine what the spontaneous course of nature was, is or will be, to determine how far human alterations have and will upset it and how far we can restore the original course. Not all restored nature is faked, myth or ideology. We must maintain a relative sense of the natural, a natural history that is dynamic. We must admit that we are now responsible for the fate of what we once called “nature.”

The Desert Protection Act doesn’t do any of these things. In its simple-mindedness, it opens some lands to continued destruction, while closing others to man-made changes. Neither strategy will work. Nor does it matter which federal agency administers the areas set aside by the act. Federal resource-conservation managers are not stupid or evil. By and large, they are dedicated professionals whose work is misguided and distorted by the way our political system sets their budget priorities. However committed to their conservation mission, large bureaucracies are primarily devoted to whatever behavior brings bigger and better budgets, promotions and desirable assignments. In the California desert, that means giving everyone a piece of the action.

Breathing new life into the desert means that the pieces of the desert would have to be put back together. This means big blocks of habitat designed to enhance biodiversity and to control erosion within a reasonable period of time, before endangered species become terminal. The only way to achieve such ends would be to change the present incentive system of the resource management agency.

Given the values at stake, it seems absurd to sell public access for the nominal entrance and user fees now required. Instead of working through the congressional budgeting system, local park or resource area superintendants should be given incentives to assess the costs and benefits of long-term studies and experiments in reclamation. Then these costs should be passed along to those willing to pay. User fees should remain at home, thereby establishing some relationship between supply and demand, a relationship--called a “market”--that our society has found useful and healthy in other contexts.

For example, off-road vehicles, or ORVs, are considered by many to be the single most obnoxious and destructive abusers of the desert. Public lands are about the only place where these road warriors can indulge their noisy gasoline fantasies. If I want these pests eradicated, I should be willing to bid against them for the right to reclaim the desert. Our uses and values are simply mutually exclusive. So let money talk.

The alternatives are to zone the desert in ways that make no biological sense. In the “wilderness areas” designated in the act, for example, no use is not wise use. Doing nothing is not enough, and it is certainly not natural. We must avoid the folly of inviting the Park Service and its allies in the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society to love the desert to death. Without user fees high enough to limit access, the living desert has no more chance than a cut rose stuck in a children’s sandpile.

Tucson’s Desert Botanical Garden is the research home of ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan. He and other like-minded scientists can guide us in the art of desert reclamation because they understand the fundamental flaws of “wilderness” designation: it shuts out people who wish to live with and on the land. Nabhan’s work shows that there is a mean between the extremes of the wilderness freaks and the rape-and-scrape geeks.

Spring is a time for renewed hope. Let us hope that the living desert may rise again.