Sage and Sand: Ripples in the Groundwater

It’s not just about what you do. It’s about who you inspire to continue the work after you’re gone.

Greetings, friends. I’ve been mostly absent from this newsletter for a good 6 months now. I’ll spare you the details. I’m popping back in to share a piece I wrote to honor of my good friend and mentor Bill Christian. Bill passed away in 2020. Bill was the Amargosa River program director for The Nature Conservancy’s California chapter, and a cofounder of the Amargosa Conservancy. He inspired a generation of conservationists who are now continuing his work to ensure that the Amargosa River remains a vibrant oasis of biodiversity for generations to come. Last week, his friends and family dedicated the Amargosa River Trail trailhead at China Ranch in Tecopa, California in his remembrance, christening it the Bill Christian Trailhead. I read this piece at the trailhead dedication.

Donations in Bill’s honor may be made to the Amargosa Conservancy.

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Ripples In the Groundwater

Our friend Bill Christian left an enormous legacy written in the lands and waters of the Amargosa Basin. But while his conservation accomplishments left tangible marks on the landscape, it is the inspiration he provided that will echo through the generations.

Through substantial acquisitions, Bill’s work with The Nature Conservancy saved numerous beloved landscapes from going under the dozer blade. The Amargosa River just south of Shoshone. The Tecopa Marsh property and trailer, best view in the Amargosa, home to Amargosa voles and hundreds of species of birds. The Zabriskie Borax property, encompassing a huge part of the playa and marsh near Tecopa. Bill got the ball rolling with what would eventually become the acquisition of the Chicago Valley property, which his friends and colleagues like Sophie Parker pushed across the finish line. And of course, our beloved China Ranch, which Bill worked so hard to save from irreparable harm and now is one of the strongholds for conservation in the Amargosa Basin.

His legacy on the ground is far more than just acquisitions, however. Bill was deeply involved in policy, especially as development in the California desert began to amp up in the latter part of the 2000s. He was instrumental in achieving the positive outcomes of the Desert Renewable Energy and Conservation Plan (DRECP), which zoned the California desert, designating a half million acres for solar and millions upon millions of acres for conservation, including almost the entirety of the lands on the California side of the Amargosa Basin. A tremendous victory for this beautiful place. He helped put some of the pieces in place that eventually led to the derailment of the Hidden Hills solar project in Charleston View, which would have sucked hundreds of millions of gallons of water out of the aquifer on a direct flowpath to this very spot at China Ranch. And of course, through his work with Amargosa Conservancy, he was chief architect of the campaign to protect the Amargosa as a Wild and Scenic River, a goal accomplished in the 2009 Omnibus Public Lands Bill, and then expanded in the 2019 Dingell Act.

He also cared deeply about science, and working with his friend and co-conspirator Andy Zdon, was the progenitor of the massive Mojave Desert spring monitoring program. This began in the Amargosa, with Bill funding Andy’s work here that led to the State of the Basin Report and associated publications. In later years additional grants were found and leveraged to expand this work across the whole Mojave Desert. Now we see similar initiatives in Nevada and elsewhere wholly unrelated to Bill or Andy or the Amargosa – a good idea is a good idea. Bill knew that science was going to be the basis for how we saved the desert.

If that was it alone, if the Amargosa Conservancy and the acquisitions and the policy and the science were the totality of Bill’s legacy, we might still be having this gathering here today. Those actions made direct and tangible contributions to the conservation of the Amargosa Basin. We are forever indebted to him for them.

But his legacy was so much more. Let me take a diversion by sharing with you the parable of the springsnails.

Springsnails, tiny organisms that live in springs across the Great Basin and Mojave Desert, are extremely cryptic organisms. So small it’s hard to focus one’s naked eyes on them, they really require magnification to see. In many cases they’ve been isolated from other springsnails for millennia, and, due to high reproductive rates, they readily speciate. As a result, there are hundreds of species of springsnails across these deserts. However, lay persons like you and me cannot readily identify them by species, only by geography. These species of springsnail are differentiated by, what else, their penises. This often yields their names, for instance the distal-gland springsnail, with a penis on its back; the elongate gland springsnail, which apparently is quite well endowed; or the bifurcated gland springsnail, which… well I’ll leave it to your imagination.

Only an expert can identify these springsnails, using a scanning electron microscope. And, as of the early part of this century, there were only two people in the world, Don Sada of USGS and Robert Herschler of the Smithsonian, who could readily identify springsnail species. Any time someone found a springsnail, they’d go to Sada and Herschler for identification. However, like all of us, Sada and Herschler got older, eventually retired, and no longer were around to identify springsnails. Unfortunately, when they retired there was no one left to identify the springsnails. No new experts had emerged.

In one extremely dark moment, BLM was permitting a gold mine in northern Nevada which was going to dry up some springs. They knew there were springsnails present but since there was literally nobody on earth could identify the species of springsnail, no particular protective measures were put in place for them. The springs dried up, and those populations of springsnail were extirpated. Were they whole new species that went extinct? We will never know. The consequence of nobody in the next generation receiving the knowledge of springsnail taxonomy and a passion for applying it may literally have been the extinction of species.

Beyond any acres of land acquired, or policy measures successfully advocated for, or any scientific initiatives spearheaded and funded, Bill’s greatest legacy in the Amargosa comes from the people who came after him. Us. The people standing here today; people who couldn’t be here today; and now, people who never even knew him but who are still benefiting from his teaching and mentorship as they are passed through the generations.

Bill was a co-founder of the Amargosa Conservancy, the first locally based non-profit in the Amargosa dedication to conservation of its waters and ecosystems. He made crucial connections with prominent local landowners who were already interested in conservation, bringing resources and amplification to their voices to ensure that local people in the Amargosa had a say in its management.

The Amargosa Conservancy is how my life intersected with Bill’s. Chris Roholt, my longtime friend and mentor, connected me with Bill and John Hiatt in the autumn of 2014 – I was fresh out of Cal and looking for work in conservation and one thing led to another and I ended up moving to Shoshone to be the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy. Bill was on the phone with me several times a week for the first few months, talking me through not just the issues but the people and personalities that I needed to navigate in my new role.

I remember going to an interagency meeting in Las Vegas where Bill introduced me to the group. He seemed so at ease in this room full of powerful people who hold the fate of the desert in their hands. He was talking to the room and made a joke that I’ve used in the ten years since – “What’s a lawsuit between friends?” He had this ability to be both friendly and amiable while assertive and forceful at the same time, something I’ve tried to emulate in my own work.

At my first in-person board meeting a few months after I was hired, he coached me along and then at the end, handed me a huge check as a vote of confidence. I hadn’t really started hustling money for the organization quite yet, and I’ll never forget the feeling of him handing me that check. It was a seal of approval.

Here we are ten years later, and the Amargosa Conservancy is still kicking. I’m honored to be Vice President of the Board of Directors now, and I consider helping to foster and advance the AC to be one of the most important duties I have in my career. There’s been a lot of ups and downs at the AC – a lot of them! But the vision for the organization has remained relatively steady through all of those years, and it probably has a more secure future today than it’s ever had in the past.

Bill mentored me in all the years since I left the Amargosa Conservancy and went to work for the Center for Biological Diversity. While my current role means I had to develop sharper elbows than I had with the AC, and that my lawsuits aren’t always very friendly, he still dropped me a line every few months to comment on the work, offer a suggestion, or just give me encouragement. Even toward the end of his life, he continued to encourage me. When I heard he was entering hospice, I emailed him pouring my heart out about what he meant to me. His reply? He said only "undeserved" and then said "there's a hydrologist I want you to talk to..." His final act with me was to continue to make connections and bring people together for conservation.

And while I’m sharing my personal story here, you can look around the folks gathered here today, and to many folks all across these desert lands, and you can understand how far the ripples in the groundwater that Bill created traveled. There’s a whole generation of desert conservationists who have been profoundly influenced by Bill and his legacy. And that generation is now producing another generation. Folks like Mason and Scott here, they never knew Bill. And yet their lives and careers are being directly shaped by the ripples in the groundwater that Bill created. The face of conservation in the Mojave Desert would not be what it is today were it not for Bill Christian.

His is a legacy written in acres preserved. His is a legacy written in cubic-feet-per-second flowing from the springs. His is a legacy written in aquifers which will sustain the natural and human communities of the desert for generations to come.

But moreover, his legacy is us. The people gathered here. And the work we are doing and will continue to do to defend and protect our beloved Amargosa. The ripples in the groundwater that Bill created will continue to resonate through us, and through those we pass it onto ourselves.

And that, my friends, is the greatest legacy and lesson of Bill Christian. It’s not just about what you do. It’s about who you inspire to continue the work after you’re gone.

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I’ll be back with normal content at some point. This year has been tough so we’ll have to take what we can get.

Keep on down that long and dusty trail,

-Patrick