Wilderness

A Desert Defiled
Is America's park system in trouble? In the Mojave, an unsettling answer.

By Jon Christensen

Out on the barrens of southeastern California, where Interstate 40 cuts through seemingly endless ranks of barrel cactus and creosote bushes beneath a bleached blue sky, there's a large white billboard standing next to the highway emblazoned with the words: "Available for Sale or Development." Glance to the right of this advertisement and you will spy, planted along a dirt road about 150 feet away, a small brown sign paradoxically referring to the same patch of desert. It reads simply, and with bewildering incongruity, "Mojave National Preserve."

Welcome to ground zero of America's undeclared war on its park system. Inside Mojave's austere, 1.6-million-acre preserve — which happens to be the National Park Service's third-largest parcel in the Lower 48 — lies an area more than twice the size of Washington, D.C., that is owned by the Catellus Development Corporation. A real-estate spin-off of the Santa Fe Pacific Railroad, Catellus controls one of the largest land portfolios in the West. And although this particular 134-square-mile swatch sits directly in the heart of an area that the Park Service is charged, by law, to protect in a manner that will leave it "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations," the land has been up for sale to the highest bidder since 1996. The prospect of blacktop, cookie-cutter housing, and permits for motorized access has piqued the interest of developers — and provoked the despair of those who consider this wilderness inviolable. "We can't put our guard down for one day because we might lose this wonderful resource," says Norbert Riedy, 41, a conservation director with the Wilderness Society and a desert rat who knows every canyon and crossroads in the area. "What's at stake is the future of Mojave."

The Catellus situation is but one of nearly a dozen ventures driven by urban expansion and industrial-scale tourism that, along with traditional claims upon the land by miners and ranchers, now menace Mojave. These threats, moreover, make the preserve an archetype of the chokehold currently throttling many of the 378 parks, monuments, and other parcels managed on behalf of the American public by the Park Service. "Mojave doesn't have all the problems, but it has darned near all of them," says Hal Rothman, a University of Nevada historian and author of Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West, published last October. "Internally and externally, these places are under threat like never before."

If Mojave offers any guide, the picture seems bleak indeed. Directly to the north of the preserve, a coterie of Las Vegas real-estate developers has submitted plans for a subdivision with several hundred homes, a lighted golf course, and an RV park. Just beyond that, the U.S. Army wants to expand its tank-testing range at Fort Irwin by an additional 193,000 acres, even though armored maneuvers have already left indelible tracks across more than 1,000 square miles of fragile desert while kicking up more particulate air pollution than any other single source in this part of the southwest.

Meanwhile, 15 miles east of the park, a casino and shopping mall are sucking up scarce groundwater. Another 15 miles beyond this complex, officials in Clark County, Nevada, are hoping, despite the failure of a recent congressional appropriations bill, to build a new airport for Las Vegas whose flight path would bring approaching jets directly over the preserve. And four miles to the north lies the largest toxic polluter in southern California, a mine where Molycorp extracts lanthanide (a compound used in phosphorescent tubes and computer screens). When a wastewater pipe burst in 1996, 200 gallons of radioactive effluvium spilled into the preserve, contaminating a portion of habitat critical to the endangered desert tortoise.

The preserve is also besieged internally by the demands of more than 1,000 mining claims and 175,000 acres of private inholdings. For example, at the Cima Cinder Cones, a group of lunarlike rocks that were declared a National Natural Landmark in 1973, the operators of one of the largest active mines in the park system has been hauling off 7,000 tons of volcanic rock each year and selling it as building blocks in Needles, California. "There are all the external threats, and then there's a host of activities inside that are tremendous problems," says Mojave's former assistant superintendent, Frank Buono, who retired in 1995. "The Park Service style of management has been to look the other way on all issues that might engender controversy. It's management by acquiescence, management by neglect."

As disturbing as this may be, the same threats that loom over the Mojave are chipping relentlessly at the edges of numerous other areas under the control of the increasingly understaffed and underfunded National Park Service. Some problems are well documented, such as the one at the Grand Canyon, whose managers are proposing to deal with its ever-increasing traffic (10 million visitors a year are expected by 2015) by constructing a "village" on the south rim that will offer more than 1,000 hotel rooms, as well as retail outlets and restaurants. Other cases are a bit more obscure: In New Mexico, a road is being built through Petroglyph National Monument to provide access to a new Albuquerque suburb; outside Joshua Tree, developers are lobbying to construct what could become the world's largest landfill; and in Florida, Miami wants to build an expanded airport on the threshold of Everglades/Big Cypress. Perhaps the clearest indication that the situation has reached critical mass is the fact that this April the National Parks and Conservation Association will, for the first time, present to Congress a list of the 10 most "imperiled" parcels in the park system and propose solutions for each. "If we neglect these problems," says NPCA spokesperson Jerome Uher, "they'll cost even more later."

In this context, however, it is interesting to note that Mojave, while offering one of the worst examples, may also point to a way out. Last December, Riedy was pleased to report news of the sort of deal that is becoming increasingly common in these instances. California's Wildlands Conservancy announced that it was brokering a $52 million acquisition in which the Catellus land, together with an additional 381,000 acres of inholdings in federal land from Joshua Tree to the Kelso Dunes, would be purchased and turned over to the Park Service and the BLM. Although the deal still hinges on congressional budgetary approval this fall, Riedy and others are understandably heartened by the buyout. "This is a very hopeful sign," he says. "Nothing is permanently saved. But an offer like this restores my faith that maybe we can protect these areas."

E A R   T O   T H E   G R O U N D

"Money well spent." — Search and rescue coordinator Wayne Inman, commenting on five snowmobilers who, trapped by deep snow in the Deschutes National Forest just north of Oregon's Mount Bachelor and forced to spend a night in 20-degree weather, survived by burning their cash, credit cards, and wallets.

Illustration by Campbell Laird