Beyond Laws: Building a Movement to Save Our Deserts

Hey, thanks for opening up the newsletter! We are all overloaded these days, and it means a lot to me that out of the several hundred unread emails you probably have waiting for your attention, you picked this one.

One of the reasons we're all overloaded is that the Trump administration seems to be having catastrophically bad ideas on a daily basis, many of which have direct and deleterious impacts on the desert. This is true to the point where I was having trouble figuring out which atrocious initiative of the last week we needed to focus on in the most recent episode of the podcast. But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that each of these bad ideas has been getting discussed in expert venues, and they pretty much have it covered. So instead of duplicating their efforts, I decided to do what I think we do best: look at all of the initiatives together and contextualize them. So that's what I did.

For a number of really good reasons, the environmental movement writ large has been focusing on getting federal laws passed to protect the environment and cultural resources, then working with agencies to implement those laws, and finally working in federal courts to force the government to follow its own laws. This has been an important strategy and it's given us many wins for the desert, and for precious landscapes outside the desert. But making it a main strategy has also left a gap in our work that our opposition has not been leaving on their side. Namely, we have been doing it top down, and they have been doing it bottom up. They have built a community that supports them in their efforts to strip environmental and cultural resource protections, which is variously called MAGA, or the Tea Party, or the Wise Use movement, or the Property Rights movement. 

Building that community has given ultraconservatives in government a base to support their attempts to gut environmental protection laws. And cultural protection laws. And the ADA. And worker protection laws. And everything else they are targeting.

We have some catching up to do, in other words. And I don't mean to oversimplify this. There are wonderful groups doing community building on a local or regional level, like the Morongo Basin Conservation Association, or the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or the many land trusts working with their communities to protect local precious places. And of course the environmental justice movement provides an example for us all to follow in working with communities across the country. They are doing important work. We need to amplify that work and duplicate it in all the communities facing erosion as the protected landscapes around them face threat after threat.

So that's what this episode is about.

In other news:

It turns out that the survey we had in our last missive didn't embed in the email for everybody. If you could take a couple of minutes to click the button below and take the two-question survey, it would be really helpful in determining what this email newsletter becomes in the months to come.

As always, if you want to support the Desert Advocacy Media Network and 90 Miles from Needles, you can go to 90milesfromneedles.com/donate and pick an amount and frequency of donation that makes sense to you. But there are plenty of other ways you can help support us as well, and some of them don't involve handing out your hard-earned cash. You can:

·       Forward this e-mail to people you think might value a desert protection podcast

·       Follow us on social media (search for 90 Miles from Needles on whatever venue you like) and repost our messages

·       Tell people about us! In person conversations where you mention us are actually the absolute most effective ways of increasing our audience and bringing us new friends and supporters!

Let us know what you think about the episode! It makes a difference. And lately we've gotten a couple suggestions of topics for new episodes, which we're going to follow up on. If you know somebody somewhere in the desert that's doing awesome work to protect the desert, put us in touch.

Thanks for reading;

— Chris