Painting by Carl S. Buell
The Hidden Desert
The California desert doesn't give up its secrets readily. To get to know the place, you've got to spend time here: watching, waiting, learning. It's hard to do that from behind the safety glass of a vehicle speeding along the Interstate. But if you leave your car, tighten your shoelaces, walk until you find an interesting spot, and sit there for a while, you just might start to see something good. Natural history writer Chris Clarke has been doing just that for more than two decades, and in The Hidden Desert he shares some of what he's found.
The Hidden Desert:
Chris Clarke on neighborhood wildlife in Joshua Tree and scientists' attachment to the animals they study.
The Hidden Desert:
Though condors are threatened by many factors, the greatest long-term threat would seem to be a lack of large dead mammals for the scavenging birds to eat safely. I have a way we might fix that.
The Hidden Desert:
The khaki West Mojave bore a color I hadn't seen there before: a bright sparse orange scattered across the desert, almost as if someone had planted a few hundred thousand California poppies out among the paper bag bush and creosote.
The Hidden Desert:
I've warned of the danger of human-created climate change since the early 1970s, so you might expect me to be completely on board with this analysis. I'm not.
The Hidden Desert:
Heading downhill yesterday toward "downtown" Joshua Tree I saw it. It was the developing stalk of a flower, growing out of one of my neighbors' Agaves.
The Hidden Desert:
A memoir from September 2007 of butterflies, and night skies, and coming to terms with loss in the Mojave desert.
The Hidden Desert:
If FWS really wanted to get "aggressive" in enforcing the provisions of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act that protect eagles, it would send a message not by way of a press release, but by way of the local U.S. Attorney.
The Hidden Desert:
I left New York at 22 and hitchhiked west. I awoke one morning in northern Nevada. The emptiness of the desert landscape completely unnerved me. The landscape seemed unadorned and ugly, and yet I could not tear my eyes off the far hills.
The Hidden Desert:
Desert kit foxes are in trouble, facing threats from industrial development of their habitat to a deadly outbreak of distemper that's killing untold numbers of foxes.
The Hidden Desert:
After controversy was sparked in Joshua Tree, a bill has been introduced into the state legislature that would end the California's nearly unregulated bobcat trapping season.
The Hidden Desert:
If it seems to you you've heard the word "milk-vetch" come up in one desert environmental issue after another, you're remembering right.
The Hidden Desert:
The last time you took a long road trip, did you assume you had enough gas because you checked the gas gauge a couple days ago? That's how California manages its bobcat population: letting the "supply" go uncounted for more than three decades as we burn through a thousand or more each year.
The Hidden Desert:
A painful step on a cactus leads writer Chris Clarke down the path of explaining the fearsome plant family's range of weapons.
The Hidden Desert:
An unprecedented coalition of Native people and other environmental activists fought the State of California to a standstill 15 years ago on a proposal to dump low-level nuclear waste in Ward Valley.
The Hidden Desert:
It's one of those places in the California desert where you can find yourself 20 miles off the pavement without much problem. It's also where California almost put its final dump for low-level nuclear waste.
The Hidden Desert:
The discovery of 13 new desert spider species reminds us that our deserts are largely unexplored by biologists, and that we may be losing species before we know they're there.
The Hidden Desert:
If the Mojave Desert gets some rain in the next six weeks, then we might just see one of the desert's least-understood phenomena take place, as Joshua trees work to create a new generation of themselves.
The Hidden Desert:
I don't know what kind of oak it is, and I don't realize as I take a dead leaf for later identification that I'm about to connect one of humankind's oldest technologies with one of our newest.
The Hidden Desert:
Even exposed as a hoax, the "eagle captures child" video's immediate extreme popularity reminds us of something very real indeed about our place in the natural world.
The Hidden Desert:
All life on earth, every thing that lives and has ever lived, every bird and beetle and box elder tree shares a common ancestor. We are each and every one of us related, each and every one of us the front of an impossibly ancient flood of genes rising from a single spring.
'Seeking The Greatest Good' Documents a New Geography of Hope
A new documentary, "Seeking the Greatest Good," identifies key steps we can take to restore the Earth -- and ourselves.
Watch
- Ballot Brief
The latest about elections in Southern California and across the state. - Rewire
Tracking renewable energy in California. - The Back Forty
News and views on land use, wildlife, and environmental issues in California. - Confluence
The latest in stories related to the revitalization of the Los Angeles River.
