Sage and Sand: I Need a Few More Years Before the Next Catastrophic Drought
The rivers are flowing and Death Valley is an inland sea, but what's lurking on the horizon?
Greetings friends, and welcome to another edition of Sage and Sand. Thanks to an incredible atmospheric river that dumped more than 2.5” on the southeast side of Death Valley, the Amargosa River is flowing and Lake Manly on the floor of Death Valley has been resurrected. I ruminate on this and rain and drought for the bulk of this newsletter.
Which brings me to a housekeeping note. I’ve gotten a bunch of great feedback about the past two newsletters, both of which were very detailed deep dives on esoteric policy issues. I thought they’d be too technical for folks but I’ve heard more positive feedback about them than I have in a long while. And yet in this edition, I take a left turn into ruminating on rain.
I guess the point is, I pretty much do this newsletter “for me.” Nobody at the Center for Biological Diversity is making me write it. And it certainly in no way represents the policies or doctrine of the Center. It’s just one man’s ruminations on conservation and the extinction crisis, the things I deal with from 4 in the morning until 6 at night nearly every day of my life. So I rarely am considering my audience in writing this thing - it’s just what strikes my interest and what comes out when I put pen to paper. This also explains why this newsletter is 4,000 words long and it’s unclear how many people read the whole thing.
That said, I’m soliciting your feedback. Drop me a line and let me know what you enjoy reading, what you could do without, is the damn thing too long, etc. I’m interested to know what you think. Most of you have my email address, but if not, it’s my first initial and last name @biologicaldiversity.org. Now, onward…
I Need a Few More Years Before the Next Catastrophic Drought
I joined the Lake Manly Yacht Club this weekend, and boated on the floor of Death Valley. The recent atmospheric river dumped over 2 inches of rain on the Amargosa Basin, and for weeks our beloved Amargosa River has been flowing across its length, dumping billions of gallons of water into Badwater Basin. My boat trip across the hottest, driest, lowest place on the continent was honestly a life changing experience. The reconstituted Lake Manly spans some 20 square miles – it is extremely impressive. And with the snow-covered Panamint Mountains towering above, it is a stunning scene. I will never view the desert the same way. And is this just a manifestation of climate whiplash? Perhaps. I’m just trying to let the feeling of all that water cleanse the palate after what was a seriously traumatic drought from 2020-2022.
I live in the hottest, driest place in North America. We get 3.5” of rain in a good year, and those good years are coming a lot less often these days. So it was unsurprising that the drought of 2020-2022 hit us as hard as anywhere in the country. In the period from late April 2020 through late July 2022, we received 2.1 inches of rain, or some 25% of normal. Even after the respite in summer of 2022, when we got 1.5 inches, we still only got less than 4 inches in almost three years, up until early 2023, when we had a few >1 inch months; then Hurricane Hilary last summer, which brought us to 6.73 in water year 2022-2023, or almost 200% of normal. Point being, summer of 2022 broke the direst grip of the drought, we started to see a little greening up, and winter 2023 broke the drought altogether, and we started seeing signs of life again in our beloved desert.
And now this… We’ve received a stunning 2.58 inches of rain in February, or 74% of our total annual average rainfall, almost all of that from February 4-7. This was significantly more rain than we got out of Hurricane Hilary, and it fell over a four day period so it didn’t run off as fast or as much. The upshot: we got serious, serious ground penetration of the moisture. I dug a pit last week two feet deep in the carbonate rock bajada behind my house, and the soils were still completely saturated two feet down. After a normal rainstorm of a quarter inch of rain, it will soak in less than six inches. Just remarkable.
You can see from the precip maps that the Death Valley region is 200-300% above normal since Hurricane Hilary; and interestingly the bullseye of very high precip is even more concentrated here on the water year (since Oct 1), which only accounts for the atmospheric river. We took a direct hit while some around us, especially to the southeast, got nothing.
We are of course expecting one hell of a bloom. Hilary primed everything – we had a weird overwinter bloom of desert gold and desert five-spot and some notch-leafed phacelia, but now as soon as it warms up we are off to the races. It could honestly be an historic flower year, depending on how much warmth and wind we get. Desert rats are aching with anticipation.
But look, the drought was straight up traumatizing. It wasn’t just, oh we didn’t get any flowers, or oh things look a little dusty. Everything started dying. Or at least going so dormant that one couldn’t tell what was dead and what was still alive. It became impossible even just to go for a walk outside one’s house because one was immediately confronted with the stark reality that everything might die. And let’s not even get into the condition of wetlands and groundwater dependent ecosystems. They looked ghastly. Even at the peak growing season in May and June, things looked dead. It was just horrible.
Side note: why would groundwater dependent ecosystems, which ostensibly are not dependent on atmospheric precipitation, fare so poorly under extreme drought conditions? I have my hypotheses. My primary hypothesis is that there is a severe soil moisture deficit from the drought. Just like the Rocky Mountains are discharging a lot more runoff because of soil moisture deficit, so groundwater dependent ecosystems are having their surface expression robbed because the adjacent soils are so hydrophilic that they suck down the water before it can sustain plants and habitat. Secondary hypothesis is that plants, needing to rely exclusively on groundwater during catastrophic drought, will increase their water uptake from the groundwater reservoir and thus deplete available surface water. Finally, it’s not like it hasn’t been hot. In fact, 2020-2022 were among the hottest summers ever recorded in the Great Basin and Mojave deserts. Water stress due to soil moisture deficit and increased evapotranspiration coupled with the hottest temperatures ever experienced by these areas mean that even our hardy groundwater dependent ecosystems were seriously feeling the effects of the drought.
There has been some recovery in the past year. Some of the creosote which seemed dead have bounced back altogether. Some have bounced back but with significantly reduced canopy cover. Some of the little burrobushes, the little AmDu’s (Ambrosia dumosa), have even come back, growing new succulent branches and leaves from the very base of the plant, from the living roots, because all of the above-ground tissue died. Groundwater dependent ecosystems greened up late last year but they looked a thousand times better than they did in 2021-2022. Many perennial plants had seedlings come up after Hilary – practically a mass germination event.
And this year we’re expecting big things. A robust growing season. A good flower year. Groundwater dependent ecosystems in their full summer lushness. My whole mood improves when we just get a little damn rain. So imagine my dismay when I read a Los Angeles Times story about an incoming La Niña later this year and a likely shift in weather patterns. A return to drought conditions. A return to despair.
While the respite from the drought has been welcome, and while it lifts my heart to see the creosote bushes green and the AmDu’s leafing out and the birds chirping and the lizards running, the desert is diminished after 2020-2022. Plants lost significant canopy cover. Wildlife populations crashed. Groundwater dependent ecosystems died back and degraded. They are bouncing back now but they are nowhere near their pre-drought state. Another catastrophic drought hot on the heels of the last one would be absolutely devastating. A higher proportion of plants would not come back.
I sit with anticipation of the growing season to come. But I also sit with the knowledge that climate change continues unabated, that emissions continue to climb, and that the next catastrophic drought is right around the corner. This is the world we live in. Buckle up.
Read more: "La Niña On the Horizon?" in Los Angeles Times; weather data from the Tecopa Community Environmental Monitoring Project station; NASA Earth Observatory on Lake Manly; ABC News
Dystopia Now
If the idea of clear-cutting forests, mashing them up into a paste, fermenting them into fuels, loading that up on diesel-powered train cars and sending it to the port of Long Beach to fill container ships to send the ships back to Asia to get another load of cheap plastic shit that you can buy on Amazon sounds like the start of a bleak dystopian horror movie, well… welcome to Nevada 2024.
The plan is exactly as I said it is. Starry-eyed dreamers in Lincoln County, Nevada, annoyed at all of those pesky pinyon-juniper forests they’ve been trying to get rid of for a century, but unsure how to fund their systematic extermination, are now proposing a new biofuels plant, in partnership with the government of… Denmark. The idea is, we want to cut down all of these forests anyway, might as well make a few bucks off the trees and capitalize on emission-fetishization (i.e. the idea that reducing any carbon emissions by any means necessary is in and of itself a good thing, regardless of any consequences). So Lincoln County and the governor signed some MOU with the Danish government promising to send shipping giant Maersk a bunch of pinyon-juniper sourced biofuels in exchange for investment in the project.
This is a concerning development for several reasons. Readers of this newsletter are aware that we’ve had a multi-year campaign against pinyon-juniper deforestation in the Great Basin. One of the main limiting factors on how much PJ removal could happen was simply that it costs money. One can only get so much money allocated for it in any given year, so while it is a devastating practice, it is mostly isolated to specific areas in the Great Basin. All of a sudden, Lincoln County’s big idea throws an economic imperative into the mix. Not only would the biofuels subsidize the pinyon-juniper removal, they would likely provide an economic impetus for expanding pinyon-juniper deforestation. Cut down a few more thousand acres, Maersk has a shipment of cheap plastic doo-dads that needs to reach Amazon warehouses pronto!
The second issue is that biofuels are just a carbon shell game anyway. Those pinyon-juniper forests actually sequester and store carbon! You’re not just cutting down a beautiful and sacred forest, you’re actually reducing the carbon sequestering capacity of Earth’s natural systems. And then turning it into fuels which still actually do have carbon emissions, just perhaps less than diesel.
It’s one part scheme, one part scam. But that’s an accurate characterization of most resource extraction proposals in the Great Basin I suppose. Louis Sahagun at the Los Angeles Times wrote an interesting story about this ridiculous proposal which I recommend giving a read.
Read more: Los Angeles Times
Buy and Dry and Energy from the Sky
Alfalfa is not a lucrative product. It’s just grass. It doesn’t take a huge amount of work, what with today’s automation, but it’s not some easy way to earn a large living. And it also happens to suck down a hugely disproportionate amount of water across the Great Basin. What with the current rush to develop solar farms everywhere there’s some flat ground, it only makes sense that some have turned their eyes to alfalfa farms as places one could retire actively used water rights, therefore preserving surface or groundwater resources, while converting the land to solar use, thereby generating some economic return for the landowner.
This has great potential in certain places in Nevada, where surface water resources are overallocated and groundwater resources are reaching a breaking point. The Amargosa Basin for one. The Lahontan Valley for another. Diamond Valley for another. Steptoe Valley for another. Does the list need to go on? There’s rumblings about legislation to support agrivoltaics in the 2025 Nevada legislative session, but we just have to see where things go.
In the meantime, there are examples elsewhere in the West. Inside Climate News is reporting on an agrivoltaic project in Wyoming which maintains agriculture, in this case sheep grazing, underneath the solar panels. This may be impractical in some settings, but it’s a step in the right direction. Also, speaking of the Amargosa Valley, there was a project there some years ago called Sunshine Valley Solar Project, which used former ag fields for solar. It’s still operational today, and while some raised a stink about it, in general it’s a much better use for that land than sucking down pupfish habitat, I mean groundwater, in order to grow alfalfa for cows.
Read more: Inside Climate News
Speaking of Buy and Dry…
We need to do more of it! All across the West! The Colorado Sun has a recent story out about the System Conservation Pilot Program, which is basically buy-and-dry on the Colorado River, and how it’s playing out in Colorado. The story details $8.7M doled out to save 17,000 acre-feet of water. At $512 per acre-foot, that’s a pretty good deal for Farmer Joe.
Let’s do a little math shall we? Using grossly generalized numbers. Alfalfa hay prices are all over the map but a reasonable average right now is $250/ton. An acre of alfalfa will take about 4 acre-feet of water per year, producing roughly 7 tons per acre in the best scenario. So, Farmer Joe can take 4 acre-feet of water, put in a whole bunch of work, and turn it into roughly $1,750 per acre; meaning the water is valued at roughly $437.50 per acre-foot. So $512 per acre-foot is already increasing revenue by 25%, which doesn’t account for the fact that they earn that money without having to go to the trouble of actually farming the alfalfa, or incurring any of the expense for the farming of said alfalfa. Now of course reality doesn’t work that way, they still need to make payments on their equipment and their bank notes and whatever else. But nonetheless, it’s a pretty good deal for Farmer Joe, other than the fact that he may enjoy his job farming and would prefer to be doing so than to be watching his fields turn brown and fallow while he finds some other way to bring in additional income.
But is this sustainable? Doling out $512 per acre-foot every single year? I mean we need millions and millions of extra acre-feet on the Colorado River – that’s half a billion dollars per million acre-feet every single year! The Colorado River is an important catalyst and I think as it continues into crisis we will continue seeing large appropriations of money to bail it out, but it’s unreasonable to think that 9 figure allocations will be made year after year after year. The program we’re describing here is admirable but 17,000 acre-feet is truly a tiny drop in the bucket. We need a deluge of freed up water, and these bits and pieces ain’t gonna get us there.
No, the solution isn’t an annual vacation to Florida for Farmer Joe. The solution is buying up Farmer Joe’s water permanently, retiring it, and sending him to Florida for an early retirement. Or hell, he can raise horses or emus or whatever on his property in Colorado, as long as they don’t require any water. But this annual leasing business is for the birds and will bankrupt us while the River continues to run dry. We need permanent reductions in water allocations, and we need them now.
Read more: Colorado Sun
The Global Lithium Extraction Crisis Is Here
Readers of this newsletter have heard lots about our work to defend the biodiversity of the Great Basin against irresponsible lithium mining. But this is a global issue; the tentacles of the lithium extraction industry are reaching out across the globe, encircling communities and ecosystems on just about every continent.
The Progressive has two very compelling new articles out about the new lithium rush. The first article looks at the impacts of existing lithium production in Argentina, and how the current mining boom already has and will continue to significantly impact indigenous communities there. This is where the lithium in the computer that I’m writing this newsletter to you on comes from. I bear responsibility for the consequences described in this article. So do you.
The second article looks at a quiet community in Portugal, and how a proposed lithium mine there might upend both the community and the natural resources the community depends on. This article provides an interesting contrast I think because of course Portugal is an EU country with “first world” living standards and incomes. And yet they are struggling with the same issues as the indigenous communities in Argentina.
Who, in all reality, are struggling with the same issues as rural Americans. People who live in rural Nevada; or in Wikieup, Arizona; or in the Black Hills in South Dakota; or in the Piedmont in North Carolina; or in southwest Arkansas. People across the country are reckoning with the fact that their homes and cherished spaces are about to become ground zero for one of the biggest resource extraction booms in the history of humankind.
So give these stories a read and see what sorts of commonalities you can see between the ties that bind us. And remember, the lithium in the computer or cell phone that you read these articles from almost certainly came from South America, using water that indigenous communities and wildlife has relied on for millennia. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Speaking of these sorts of issues I want to point you to a new paper in the journal International Development Policy, looking at the impacts of lithium extraction in the Atacama Desert. This paper comes from a project with Dr. James Blair from Cal Poly Pomona, funded by NRDC and in partnership with OPSAL, the Observatorio Plurinacional de Salares Andinos, a South American group that tracks the impacts of mining on the ecosystems and indigenous communities of the Andean Salt Flats. The paper looks as the consequences of current extraction practices, and proposes policy mechanisms to blunt the impact on communities and environment. Well worth a read.
Read more: in The Progressive: “After the (White) Gold Rush” (Argentina), “Everything Here Is Green” (Portugal); in International Development Policy: The ‘Alterlives’ of Green Extractivism: Lithium Mining and Exhausted Ecologies in the Atacama Desert
If It’s Got Four Legs and It Walks, You Can Probably Kill It in Nevada
There was much celebration in recent years as moose made their way south out of Idaho into Elko County, Nevada. There are now an estimated 107 moose wandering the public lands of northeastern Nevada. They’ve even started hanging out in the eastern Ruby Mountains, which means they must enjoy scenic splendor and hot springs.
But now, of course, Nevada has decided to let people kill the newcomers. That’s right, moose hadn’t been established in the state for more than a couple of years until the Nevada Board of Wildlife Commissioners, spurred on by the Nevada Department of Wildlife, set a hunting season for moose. Now look, I’m not opposed to hunting, but when there is an animal with a hundred individuals newly establishing territory in an area, perhaps we shouldn’t run out and hand permits to kill to any yahoo with an application fee. Perhaps we should let things shake out a bit, let the moose settle into their new homes and become a part of the ecosystem, before we just start shooting them. But that’s not The Nevada Way, I suppose.
Read more: Elko Daily
A Sad Elegy for the Monkeywrenchers
Reporter Chris Ketcham is always dancing on the edge of acceptability in traditional circles. So when I was reading this Harper’s piece he wrote about a monkeywrencher’s last gasp before the law closed around him, I found it unsurprising that he wound up in an FBI investigation. The subject of his article, an ecosaboteur called McRae, is on the run after a series of accidents befalls electrical infrastructure across the West. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t get away with it. And so has gone the direct-action environmental movement.
I remember when I first read the Monkeywrench Gang, when I first found a copy of the Earth First! Journal at the local food co-op in Moab. When I first read Eco Defense by George Foreman. When I first read Deep Ecology. That was all in my first year in the West, at the tender age of 20, and it changed me forever. I felt so much excitement at the time, at the prospect of being a soldier on behalf of the environment, destroying property used by the machine to destroy the landscapes I was falling in love with. I felt like I’d uncovered some secret, where we could be subversive and set back the forces of evil, and somehow, inspired by the entirely fictional events of Abbey’s tome, we could get away with it.
Little did I know at the time that direct action environmentalism by that time was almost completely dead, crushed by the government and by movement infighting. Little did I know that all the EF! guys (and yes, it was unfortunately mostly guys) had gone on to form or join environmental groups from across the spectrum of the movement. Some of them founded the Center for Biological Diversity. Some of them basically sold out and went to work for mainstream groups, advocating directly against the policies they had begun their careers, such as they were at the time, advocating for. Some of them ended up leading the very federal agencies in question, pushing through policies to permit oil wells and clear-cut forests.
And so, Ketcham’s piece is as much an elegy for the direct-action environmental movement as anything else. Reduced from a cohesive movement to scattered, unaffiliated individuals taking mostly token actions that inevitably result in jail time.
As for myself, I guess I joined the sellouts too with my fancy degree and my fancy job. But I feel that the Center for Biological Diversity is the inheritor of the Earth First! spirit, taking the tools of the machine and using them against it to destroy it or at least push it back from strategic strongholds. Sitting here at my computer typing emails and standing declarations and op-eds hardly feels as visceral as putting sugar in the gas tank of a bulldozer. But in the end, I think I’m accomplishing more from my remote desert outpost on the edge of Death Valley with my computer and my trusty Tacoma than I would behind bars in federal lockup. So be it.
Read more: “The Machine Breaker” in Harper’s
Briefly…
The Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation have finally broken ground on a new school to replace the old one which was widely suspected of causing cancer among tribal members. Their push to get funding for the new school during the last legislative session was heart-wrenching, and I’m so glad to see that at least this one particular environmental injustice is on its way toward resolution.
Nevada Gold Mines is starting construction on their Goldrush Mine, which is really just an expansion of the Cortez Mining Complex in Lander County, Nevada. We pushed back on this project during the NEPA process but we decided not to litigate, for various reasons. Most of which have to do with the fact that there simply isn’t enough supply of public lands mining attorneys to match the demand of all the shitty mining projects simultaneously coming online across Nevada, meaning many really terrible projects like this one, which will negatively impact sage-grouse and cause groundwater drawdown and desecrate a cultural landscape, are going to make it through unchallenged.
Given its position as the capital of the Sagebrush Empire, it’s only appropriate that the Elko Daily would run an article all about the natural history of sagebrush. This is a worthy read for the factoids you’ll pick up about the Great Basin’s ubiquitous, fragrant champion.
Here’s an interesting New York Times article on resolving solar-wildlife conflicts (gift article, paywall removed). It’s looking at a project on private land in the high Arizona grasslands near Flagstaff, so the direct applicability to public lands solar in the Mojave and Great Basin deserts is limited, but it’s still an interesting case study of trying to work through these issues. A worthy read.
This has nothing to do with the desert but the Center for Biological Diversity recently filed an Endangered Species Act petition for the incredible horseshoe crab. I grew up in various locations on the East Coast and was very uninterested in nature as a child but you certainly don’t forget your encounters with horseshoe crabs. What a remarkable creature. Did you know that the biomedical industry harvests them and drains their blood which is an anticoagulant and has other applications? Ghouls. Count me in on Team Horseshoe Crab.
Keep on down that long and dusty trail,
-Patrick
Hey Patrick-- though I love the idea of George Foreman writing "EcoDefense" rather than selling BBQ grills, that book was the work of the late (magnificent) Dave Foreman, not George. Easy slip to make...
Well Patrick, don't change a thing, write for yourself, when, at what length, and on whatever topic you choose. You dont owe your
readers anything. Everything you do is is ok by me. Carte blanche, baby.