Coyote Crossing

Dianne Feinstein introduces her much-ballyhooed desert protection bill in the Senate today. Some desert activists have been working with her staff to craft the bill, working under a pledge of confidentiality. Other activists (myself included) have been waiting a bit impatiently for details. We’re still waiting for some of them, including specifics as to the actual tracts of land added to National Parks and the Preserve, etc.

The below is based on a note from Ryan Henson of the California Wilderness Coalition. I’m monitoring thomas.gov for text of the bill and will share that as it becomes available.

On the upside, the bill:

• establishes the 941,413-acre Mojave Trails National Monument in eastern San Bernardino County along the southern boundary of the Mojave National Preserve
• designates the 133,524-acre Sand to Snow National Monument that stretches between Joshua Tree National Park on the east and the highcountry of the San Gorgonio Wilderness in the San Bernardino National Forest to the west
• adds three areas encompassing 173,861 acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System, including the Avawatz Mountains Wilderness (86,614 acres), Great Falls Basin Wilderness (7,871 acres) and Soda Mountains Wilderness (79,376 acres)
• enlarges four existing wilderness areas by 172,247 acres, including the Death Valley National Park Wilderness (90,152 acres), Golden Valley Wilderness (21,633 acres), Kingston Range Wilderness (53,321 acres) and San Gorgonio Wilderness (7,141 acres)
• establishes the 75,575-acre Vinagre Wash Special Management Area in Imperial County where many ecologically and culturally sensitive areas would be protected from development and vehicle use, including 48,699 acres that would essentially be managed as wilderness
• enlarges Death Valley National Park by 40,740 acres, Mojave National Preserve by 29,246 acres and Joshua Tree National Park by 2,904 acres
• adds over 70 miles (22,400 acres) of stream to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System along the Amargosa River, Deep Creek, Surprise Canyon and the Whitewater River
• permanently prohibits the staking of new mining claims on approximately 10,000 acres of land sacred to the Quechan Tribe in Imperial County
• mandates the study and protection of a cultural trail and the features associated with it along the Colorado River that is sacred to several tribes
• makes it more difficult for developers to excessively exploit groundwater in or near the Mojave National Preserve
• transfers a 994-acre Bureau of Land Management holding in San Diego County to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and require the state to manage the land as wilderness
• protects land from development that has been donated to or acquired by the federal government for conservation purposes and
• requires the Department of the Interior to study the future impacts of climate change on the California desert, to mitigate these impacts and to identify and protect important wildlife migration corridors in the region.

On the downside, the bill

• withdraws protection from 33,571 acres of the Soda Mountains Wilderness Study Area
• withdraws protection from the 84,400-acre Cady Mountains Wilderness Study Area (however, all but 5,500 acres of the area will be included in the Mojave Trails National Monument)
• facilitates the transfer of isolated parcels of state-owned land that are surrounded by desert wilderness areas and parks in exchange for federal assets, potentially including parcels of federal land
• turns five existing administratively-designated off-highway vehicle (OHV) recreation areas into legislatively-designated OHV areas and requires the Secretary of the Interior to study the possibility of expanding them (though my DPC colleague Terry Weiner points out that this increases the likelihood of actual management plans for these areas to mitigate current damage)
• allows the expansion of a small airport in Imperial County.

Other parts of the bill not yet released involve energy development in the desert, and conservationists are quite concerned about those provisions.

I’ll report more as I get it.

6 comments on "First take on the California Desert Protection Act of 2010"

I’ve changed up the old CafePress store*, adding a preliminary logo for the site which is kind of cool even if you don’t know the site, and also including a test run of some things to benefit the Mojave National Preserve Conservancy. All proceeds from sales of the MNPC stuff will go to the Conservancy.

Suggestions of items you’d like to see, either in the main Coyote Crossing line or the MNPC line, are welcomed.

* which involved discontinuing sales of the Zeke product line, or at least it would have been a discontinuation if there had been any sales of the Zeke product line in the first place.

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There’s a scene in the 1998 film Passion in the Desert that does not appear in the Honore de Balzac short story on which the film was based. The short story focuses on the relationship between a man and a leopard: the film takes an entire act to get us to the beginning of the real story, a feat Balzac accomplished in fewer than six hundred words of text.

In the film, the protagonist — Augustin Robert —  is at first charged with guarding a character the filmmaker borrowed from contemporary history: the renowned, eccentric, aging and thoroughly difficult painter Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis. It is 1798, during Bonaparte’s campaign to conquer Africa. Venture has been commissioned by Napoleon to document the scenic and cultural wonders of Egypt, but had failed to ingratiate himself well with the French soldiers he accompanied through that occupied land. Augustin’s job is to protect Venture from his fellow soldiers.

Mameluks attack the company, and Venture de Paradis and Augustin are separated from the rest. They wander in the desert, the old man’s frailty slowing their progress. He persists in painting as they go, even using the last of their drinking water to thin his paint. At length Augustin leaves the man, promising to find help and return. He doesn’t, and the real story — Balzac’s story — starts shortly thereafter.

In life, Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis actually died of either dysentery or the plague in Paris in 1799, having been there for at least two years teaching. In the film, he dies soon after Augustin departs, blowing his head off when he realizes he is failing.

The scene that has been playing through my mind comes just before that. The artist is dying of heat and thirst, and remembers that he’s put the last of the water into his paint pots. He drinks his paint. It burns his throat horribly. Lurid streaks of color, yellow and red and cyan, plaster his beard to his chin. He chokes uncontrollably.

The film is pretty, to be sure, and fantastic in the original sense of the word. The short story is in many ways superior. It is more understated: it does not hit the reader over the head with leaden metaphor the way the film does. It does not strain credulity as much.

But there’s something about the paint-drinking scene from the film that haunts me. Words are my medium, not paint. They make a much lighter palette to haul out into the desert, but these days they burn my throat every bit as much, abrade my gut, tinge my blood and breath.

1 comment on "Ashen in the Desert"

I actually wrote and sent a response to Garrison Keillor’s anti-Semitic Xmas column, in which he says, among other things,

If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.

Unsurprisingly, my email — sent to the address given at the end of the column — bounced. I’m looking for other ways to get it to him. Perhaps he’ll print all the responses out and line them up on him mantel above the garlands.

In the meantime, thought I’d share. Happy Hannukah.

From:  coyotecrossing@faultline.org
Subject: Your appallingly ugly Xmas column
Date: December 18, 2009 7:24:23 PM PST
To:  oldscout@prairiehome.net

Sir;

Do you no longer pause to think before you unburden yourself of your bigotry by way of your keyboard?

You have done harm here, with no concommitant gain in anything of value: not humor, not understanding, not literary merit.

You are lucky enough to have a platform that affords you some measure of attention, one you have earned through your own hard work and good fortune. You are not obligated as a writer to use that platform other than as you see fit. You do, however, have an obligation as a human being to refrain from doing needless harm to others. This column fails rather stunningly to fulfill that obligation.

You owe your readers — all of them, Jewish and otherwise — an apology.

14 comments on "It all makes perfect sense when you realize that Lake Wobegon is a dystopia"

There was no time. The flow of time had ceased
as chill night air might check rose-petal jam
in flow across a sampled piece of bread,
or idle thought would make a fingernail
to tarry on its way along the curved
and gentle night topography of spine.
Our skin standing on lovely end, the breeze
had raised a thousand downy hairs, and then
there was no time. The honey-sodden air
had ripened into amber, you and me
held fast, skin upon skin, tangles of hair
and leg, whole dark eternities of eyes,
soft fingertips held close, tracing the curve
of warm, slight-parted lips rose-petalled.

1 comment on "Held"

The first edition of House of Herps, the blog carnival devoted to reptiles and amphibians, is up over at its home blog, which is sensibly enough called House of Herps. Started by Amber of Birder’s Lounge and Coyote Crossing regular Jason of xenogere, the HofH promises to be a great series, and there are some wonderful posts included in the inaugural edition. So go get your non-avian-non-mammalian tetrapoddy goodness.

1 comment on "House of Herps #1"

This must-watch video is simply the best introduction to the San Joaquin Valley water politics I’ve seen lately.

Toward the end, there’s mention of California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s intervention in the issue on behalf of a close friend and major political contributor, Stewart Resnick, who owns — among many other things — Paramount Farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Paramount, which farms about 120,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley, is allotted 480,000 acre-feet of water each year. That’s enough to cover every inch of the land they farm four feet deep. It’s also about 47,000 acre-feet more than the entire city of Los Angeles used last year. Resnick asked Feinstein to help him keep his sea of taxpayer subsidized water, and she’s done so: she has prompted a “reexamination” of the science that says salmon need water to survive.

Those of us in the desert conservation community are waiting as the Senator’s staff draft what’s being hyped as a major desert land preservation bill. Given Feinstein’s Bush-like ability to jettison science when the profits of her benefactors are at stake, I don’t personally hold much hope that her desert bill will protect the desert.

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