What are you doing on Tuesday?

Now is our moment to protect public access to desert wildlands for future generations to enjoy.   Tuesday is an important opportunity to tell government officials that we cherish the vast open landscapes that the California desert has to offer.  Our presence will send a message that we are tired of losing public lands to private, for-profit destruction.  At stake will be the White House's consideration of the Mojave Trails, Castle Mountains and Sand-to-Snow National Monuments.  Without these monuments, our desert will transition from a humbling, natural landscape to an industrial checkerboard. 


The desert that early inhabitants experienced was a lot more expansive than the desert we know today, and if we don't take action now, our grandchildren will inherit a landscape unrecognizable to us and preserved only in our photographs.  Since 2009, dozens of square miles of our desert wildlands have been bulldozed and converted into energy projects and subdivisions. The alternative to these monuments is to continue bleeding away our wildlands through a thousand cuts.  Allowing mining here, transmission lines there, and more energy projects over there.  Soon enough, the sense of solitude and the vistas that we cherished will be gone.

Please show your support for our desert public lands on Tuesday, October 13, 1:00PM at the Whitewater Preserve.  Government officials will be on hand to hear comments about our desert wildlands and discuss the monument proposals.  For more details and to RSVP, please visit the following link: October 13 Public Meeting

The map below shows the solar and wind energy projects proposed as of 2008, at the height of the renewable energy rush on wildlands.  It is illustrative of the extent of destruction that is possible if we do not take steps to protect our public lands.  At least 24 of the proposed projects fall within the proposed boundaries of the monuments, and the map does not depict other destructive proposals, including pipelines and mines.  Without monument status, these lands may be unrecognizable in another 30 years.

Comments

  1. PaulOctober 9, 2015 at 1:44 PM

    See you there, Shaun! And thanks for all your efforts.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MorongobillOctober 11, 2015 at 10:21 AM

    I think the president will take the safe route(as he perceives the political risks to his administration and agenda) and go with something small. I think the Castle Mountains NM will be signed in, up in the air the other two. I hope that I am wrong and he will pull a "Clinton" and sign them all. With his foreign policy in disarray and the economy going even farther down the tubes, I am thinking that his political courage is shrinking fast.

    But unless he does something bold and soon, he will be just another in a long line of lame ducks.

    But leaving a legacy that will last for hundreds of years may have a certain appeal to him as well. In either event, this will really show us what this man is made of.

    ReplyDelete

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