http://town.hall.org/environment/wild_soc/ca-fact.html (World Wide Web Directory, 06/1995)
Desert National Park
"All that the deserts have in common is an affinity of dryness and loneliness, an essential sense of the haunting, unformed power of the universe. We need these places, badly. They are...the essential West. They are worth a fight."
--Marc Reisner, Wilderness magazine.
The California Desert encompasses 25.5 million acres of the southeastern quarter of the state, an area of some 39,000 square miles, or a bit more than the state of Indiana. The desert's boundaries are the Nevada state line and the Colorado River to the east, the U.S.- Mexico border to the south and an imagined north-south line east of the urban strip from San Diego to Bakersfield.
Principal landforms include America's three great deserts: the Great Basin ranging westward from southern Nevada; the Mojave across most of southeastern California; and the Sonoran sweeping up from Mexico's Baja California and southern Arizona. Temperature varies from below freezing in the high desert during winter to a summer average of 116รป F in Death Valley. Altitude, typically 2,000 feet across the desert, soars to 11,000 feet in higher mountains and dips 282 feet below sea level at the bottom of Death Valley. There, rainfall averages a scant 1.7 inches annually, elsewhere 11 inches on average.
The desert is host to extraordinary biological diversity and has been called "one of the richest natural biological laboratories on earth." Some 90 mountain ranges harbor some 2,000 plants, 600 animals. Important examples include: Creosote ring, 10,000 to 12,000 years old and thought to be Earth's oldest living thing; the ubiquitous Joshua tree and Mojave yucca; the rare desert bighorn sheep; the threatened desert tortoise; the chuckwalla lizard and the nocturnal kangaroo rat that neither sweats nor drinks water.
Time's mark on the desert is everywhere. The desert pupfish, a tiny salt-water fish, lives on in Soda Springs as a relict of the Pleistocene (glacial) epoch some 25,000 to 50,000 years ago. Elsewhere, volcanic deposits showered down within the last 1,000 years. Rock paintings and carvings, some dated to 9000 B.C., note the passage of an ancient, nomadic people who vanished by the 16th century. Their descendants were fragmented bands or families, the Koso, Kawausa, Serrano, Chemehuevi, Mojave and Yuma.
Europeans arrived with Melchior Diaz, a Spanish cavalry captain dispatched by the explorer Coronado in 1540. But the desert was harsh and off-putting, and the first instinct was only to cross it, along the Spanish Trail in the late 1700s, by the first transcontinental railroad in the 1870s. Mining, symbolized by the famous 20-mule wagon teams of the Pacific Coast Borax Co., brought the first serious, often abusive, development pressure that confronts the desert even today.
Remote, isolated, but no longer alone, the desert is buffeted by strain that jeopardizes its resources, beauty and fragility. Mining's scruffy detritus--access roads, helicopter pads, quarries, leach piles, refuse dumps--scars and stains the land. Two centuries of vehicles, from settlers' wagons trekking the Barstow road to tank maneuvers and legions of off-road motorcycles and 4X4s, have carved ruts indelible for all time. Livestock trample fragile desert soils, eradicating grass and shrubs critical to hosts of wildlife such as the threatened desert tortoise and bighorn sheep.
Since 1976, conservationists have pressed for legislation to protect the sweep and diversity of the California desert.
The California Desert Protection Act, legislation offered by California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer along with Reps. Richard Lehman and George Miller, would set aside four million acres of desert as wilderness under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management. A combined total of about 1.5 million acres would be added to Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Monuments, and both would be designated national parks. The BLM's East Mojave National Scenic Area would become a new national park under the Feinstein-Boxer bill; the Lehman-Miller bill designates it a national monument.
The proposal is a compromise in that it provides for continued mining, off-road vehicle access and livestock grazing in the desert region while protecting pristine wildlife habitat and recreational land. By preserving a portion of America's heritage, this visionary legislation provides both recreational and economic development opportunity for generations to come.
The California Desert Protection Act is essential to secure an enduring heritage of wilderness as well as a priceless legacy of archeological, cultural and ecological values. A Bureau of Land Management study team concurred in 1979 when it reported the Mojave portion "readily qualifies for national park or monument status." No other major urban area in the country has so much wilderness-quality land accessible to so many--an estimated 20 million people by 2000. The Feinstein-Boxer and Lehman-Miller bills both take vital steps to achieve these goals.
Public support has been consistent. Field Institute polls conducted as long ago as 1975 and as recently as 1992 show overwhelming public majorities favor more protection of the desert. Some 14 counties, at least a dozen of the state's major newspapers and 37 city councils have endorsed these bills. So have 1,600 scientists and educators, including directors of major botanic research centers.