Educational Bulletin #09-1

A publication of the Desert Protective Council www.dpcinc.org

Vox Clamantis in Desierto

By Chris Clarke

Have a useless, dangerous, massive or ugly project you want to put somewhere? The
desert is the ultimate vacant lot. Unused land. Empty space. A cipher, and not in the sense
of “a thing whose mysteries deserve to be fathomed” but in the sense of “zero.” Even
nuking it would be fair use. If you were to look for an image that encapsulates this society’s
relationship with the desert, it would be hard to find a more iconic and resonant one than
this:

That’s “Shot Fizeau,” an eleven kiloton nuclear “device” set off at the Nevada Test Site on
September 14, 1957.
Maybe I’m biased, given my particular botanical-arboreal affections, but when I look
at that image the word “uninhabited” does not exactly spring readily into my waking mind.
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“Deserted,” maybe. I know I’d desert it in a hurry if I saw that cloud, not that the k-rats
had that option. Desolate? Useless? Empty? None of those. Aside from the alpha particles
and the need for SPF 3E+12 sun block, it looks like home to me.
But that is how the desert is seen by the majority: mostly devoid of people and
therefore of little value, and therefore the rightful place for storage of the toxic leavings of
industrial society, be those leavings waste from nuclear reactors, or fallout from genera-
tions-old atmospheric nuclear weapons tests, or weapons tests and training of the non-
nuclear variety, or a metropolis’ trash, or violent ORV-riding lumpenproletarians. It’s a
blank slate that seems to compel scrawling.
The skies over Laughlin, Nevada, not far from where I sit right now, once turned
chocolate-colored on odd days. A power plant was responsible, fueled by coal mined from
Black Mesa a couple hundred miles east in Navajo-Hopi country. The coal was shipped by
way of slurry line: millions of gallons of the Navajo aquifer were mixed with ground coal
into a toxic sludge that was piped across Arizona to Laughlin. The aquifer receded. Desert
springs went dry and deep-rooted plants died, and of course there was the little matter of
the strip mine on Black Mesa, and the social crisis spurred by relocating people away from
the mine.
The Laughlin plant lies dormant now, closed by environmental and native rights
lawsuits, waiting for an initiative like “clean coal” to give its single giant pink stack an
excuse to smoke again.
The desert would pay for clean coal. Acid from clean coal would emerge from the
stack at Laughlin, eat away at the millennia-old petroglyphs uphill at Avikwame.
The grand planners can make the desert pay because on the whole, the desert lacks a
voice. The vox clamantis in desierto, the voice crying in the wilderness (and please note that
John the Baptist’s “wilderness” referred to in John 1:23 was indeed a desert) is an
archetypal synonym for “Cassandra”: a voice heard but unheeded. Despite the existence of
a burgeoning group of desert fanciers who’ve gotten to know these delicate lands, people,
in the main, simply could not care less about the desert. It’s unpopulated, mostly, and
that’s what matters. The desert is not someplace people imagine being for more than the
five or seven hours it takes to get to the Luxor. Otherwise, it’s sterile, empty, vacant land, a
place where you can do things like put your city’s garbage in a valley next to a National
Park (c.f. the proposed Eagle Mountain dump tucked into a pocket in Joshua Tree
National Park) or dump your low-level nuclear waste, some of which is highly radioactive
despite the innocuous-sounding descriptor, in unlined trenches and then forget where
those trenches are (as US Ecology did in Beatty, Nevada, and tried to do in Ward Valley,
California).
A few months ago, when the break with my marriage was even more fresh and my
future even less certain than it is now, when I was homeless and living out of a suitcase in
my Jeep, I walked out into the middle of the Ivanpah Valley at dusk until the red neon of
Primm was a blur two miles distant. Powerlines hummed overhead, and the Interstate was
a distant roar, but otherwise it was quiet: the wind had calmed and the crickets fallen
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asleep. I sat down for a while among the creosote, not sure what to do next or whether
there even was anything to do next.
At some point I realized the creosote felt familiar and comfortable. An odd sensation:
I haven’t spent all that much time in the creosote flats of the Mojave, aside from driving
through them to get to the uplands. But it suddenly felt just as much like home as the
Joshua trees and blackbrush. That feeling hasn’t gone away, these last months living in
Nipton, creosote country at 3,000 feet. Creosote has been home since that night in May.
Before, I didn’t worry much about commercial development displacing swaths of cresosote:
the stuff is as common as dirt. It’s still common, but I wince now when I see a bulldozer
uproot it.

There’s something there: The lush desert of Nevada’s Wee Thump Wilderness. Photo by Chris Clarke.

I wonder sometimes whether that unfamiliarity with the desert, that alienation that
fuels the lie of the blank slate desert, could be cured with a little sitting. If you could bring
them out here, the engineers and the bureaucrats who determine the fate of entire swathes
of desert, the offroaders who insulate themselves from the desert they trample with noise
and speed and dust and armor, the planners of airports and the reckless drivers desperate
to get to the casino bar, if you could bring them out here and park them in the outback
with a cushion and a bottle of water and just ask them to sit, would they feel a change
growing in them? Would familiarity breed contentment with the desert as it is, and reduce
the need to scrawl venom across its face?
And then I shake myself awake. I remember the seemingly endless human capacity
for maintenance and repair of that shell of apathy that protects most of us from actual
engagement with the world. I remember that each surveyor, each backhoe operator, each
off-road vandal and petroglyph defacer will claim to love the desert. I remember the old
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Gary Larson cartoon with the two loggers eating lunch in a sea of stumps, one saying that
he could never work in an office because he loves spending the day in the woods.
Men will follow bighorn rams quietly, sometimes for days, observing them and
learning the subtleties of their behavior, claim to reach new heights of respect for their
majesty and grace, and then they will shoot them.
The temptation is to give in to despair, to see the mound of shattered beer bottles
thrown in the face of the thousand-year-old desert pavement intaglio of Mastamho along
the Colorado River near Blythe and decide that there are in fact two species of human,
Homo sapiens and Homo phobiens, the latter characterized by its pathological, chronic fear
and resentment of anything it does not understand.
But to give in to that despair is to accept that spurious species division and then
choose the wrong side. For every hundred people who find the flimsiest pretext to defend
their ossified and cracking world view, there will be one or two who emerge from the shell
a little dazed and gaping at the new bright light. I’ve done it myself once or twice, though
not as often as I ought.
Last summer a friend and I had an exciting though uneventful meeting with a
Mojave Green rattlesnake in the Wee Thump wilderness in Southern Nevada. An hour
later, a woman in nearby Searchlight heard the
story and asked if we’d killed it. It hadn’t occurred
to either of us that that was an option. The snake
was a neighbor and was merely suggesting we stay
off its lawn. It had been a privilege to meet that
snake. Ed Abbey famously described his “human-
ism” as consisting of the fact that he’d “sooner kill
a man than a snake,” and while I don’t completely
agree with the first half I related the quote to the
woman anyway. She laughed and promised to use
the line.
You do find enough people like her, willing
to be flexible in their thinking, enough people
willing to notice the Joshua trees in front of the
mushroom cloud, to keep hope’s pilot lit. They
make up, a little, for those who reflexively dismiss
protecting the desert as an extremist pursuit.
They make the despair a little less tempting.
The author in the desert outside Tucson, with Zeke.
But only a little.

Chris Clarke is the author of Walking with Zeke: A Familiar Story. He has written and edited
environmental publications for two decades. His writing and photography can be found at
www.faultline.org. This essay was written while the author was living in the Ivanpah Valley in
Nipton, California, near the Wee Thump Wilderness.