Managing and Preserving California Desert Areas

I have been a resident of the California Desert Conservation Area for over 10 years and wish to offer these comments regarding the Bureau of Land Management and San Bernardino County. Neither of these two government entities is capable of properly managing the California desert areas under their jurisdiction. They have both sold out to special interests. They both only see desert areas as fit to sell to the highest bidder.

Deserts are natural wonders, the last places on earth which are not totally exploitable by man. Yet, the developers, miners and cattle ranchers feel that they can do things which generations before were either too impotent or too wise to try. The desert has a beauty which one must live with, sweat in and suffer in to fully understand. It is home to a wide variety of animals and plants, which are little understood by experts on them, and totally discounted as “valueless” by developers, miners, cattle ranchers and the like.

Our San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors and its staff regard development of desert lands as a goal. They talk all the time about “responsible growth.” In Yucca Valley, this “responsible growth” is still going on even though the hydrologists tell us the area will run completely out of water in five years, at which time a pipeline will be completed that can convey only about two-thirds of the current overdraft.

Thus far, all I have seen at the county government is rubber-stamp approval of any exploitation of desert resources just as long as the county nets a fat fee for it.

Those of us with any sensitivity at all know full well the scope of the destruction our deserts have suffered during the reign of the developers, mining interests and cattle grazers. We have seen the smog encroach in areas that once were some of the finest for air quality in the U.S. We have watched as the developer’s bulldozers have scraped juniper and Joshua trees and creosote from the face of the desert and put up shoddy housing which the desert’s resources cannot long support.

A mentality which imagines man working wonders in the desert is a mentality which is only half developed--something like half-witted, nearsighted, junketing Interior Secretary Donald Hodel. I invite Hodel to take a trip with me and I will show him what kind of environmental rape his Bureau of Land Mis-management has given us.

The BLM is an advocate of off-road vehicle “recreational use.” It does not supervise these uses and does not enforce the limited use restrictions on its lands in the area where I live. Neither does the county. This has resulted in ugly scars on the land, some of which will never heal in my lifetime. I am speaking of whole valleys decimated . . . all in the name of “recreation.” There is nothing in “traditional American values” which sanctifies weekend destruction of desert wilderness through the use of foreign-manufactured motorcycles and weird-looking contraptions by hooligans who need a place to yell, get drunk and raise hell. Citizen petitions against this wholesale disruption of very delicate ecosystems to the BLM, San Bernardino County and other agencies never even get a public response.

Perhaps a good housecleaning in this November’s elections will help get this country back on track and at least working toward slowing the plague of environmental destruction and pollution we have experienced at the hands of Ronald Reagan, James Watt, Hodel and other sellouts.

RAY KIRKHAM

Twentynine Palms