Managing the Mojave: A Struggle for the BLM

Afton Canyon, a four-mile ribbon of green wetlands wedged between majestically weathered rock walls in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, has attracted many people for many reasons over the last century.

It has a reputation as a cattle trail, campground, firearms range, off-road motorcycle course and bird-watcher’s paradise. Wildlife, such as bighorn sheep, also come to the canyon for its life-giving, year-round Mojave River flow.

But in trying to accommodate each of those often conflicting reputations at the same time, Afton Canyon has earned a new reputation as a clear example of the problems preventing the Bureau of Land Management from properly managing the Mojave.

Conservationists and others say the California desert is too big for the BLM to manage well with the number of employees it can afford. At the same time--though the desert itself covers a quarter of the state--its most popular areas are not big enough to accommodate all the people who want to use them.

Conflicts are common: motorcyclists wrestling with backpackers, gold miners pitted against environmentalists and cattlemen battling conservationists. Even the U.S. Army has joined the war over the desert; it wants to expand its tank-training grounds at Ft. Irwin.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management is expected to mediate compromises among these users while also planning a balanced and sustainable future for 12 million acres of desert--not unlike the way city planners zone suburbs.

An increasingly common opinion is that the BLM has, in many ways, failed.

Indeed, concern over the potential for the permanent loss of some resources--especially wildlife habitat and wilderness--has spurred a campaign by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and the Wilderness Society to take the state’s desert from the BLM and turn it over to the National Park Service for preservation.

Push for Park Status

They contend that strict preservation as a national park is the only way to assure the long-term survival of a deceptively delicate and vital land rich in anthropological resources, wildlife and plants, including the planet’s oldest living thing, an 11,700-year-old creosote bush.

And, scientists say, so little is known about the desert that entirely new life forms may be waiting to be found there. For example, Robert Stebbins, professor emeritus of zoology at UC Berkeley, has turned up a large-eyed toad in Afton Canyon that may establish a new amphibian species.

But the debate over how to protect the desert has, in turn, sparked its own debate. Some conservationists challenge the assumption, implicit in Cranston’s bill, that the BLM is incapable of preserving environmentally sensitive areas. Instead, they contend that the bureau has simply been prevented from doing its job by political manipulation and under-funding.

For these BLM watchers, the battle over the future of the California desert--and a similar debate that is developing over Utah’s rugged canyon and desert wilderness--also are battles over the future of the Bureau of Land Management itself.

Morale Factor

“Whenever an attractive piece of property is discovered in BLM hands, some group or another asks to take it away,” said former BLM Director Frank Gregg, now working at the University of Arizona. “What that does is demoralize those in the agency who have spent their careers--with considerable success in many cases--trying to move the bureau away from being only a commodity-development agency and toward (becoming) a real resource-management agency.”

Paul J. Culhane, environmental adviser to former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt before joining the faculty at Northern Illinois University, said stripping the desert from the BLM could prove problematical for conservationists in the long run because it would cement the bureau’s reputation as an exploitation agency--as when it is chided as the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining.”

“There are good things to be said for letting BLM keep wilderness areas,” like those proposed for transfer to the Park Service, he said. “It reinforces to the agency the fact that there are recreationists and others out there, and they serve them too.

“If you isolate BLM to deal only with consumptive users,” he added, “you narrow its view and its approach to other users.”

Ed Hastey, director of BLM operations in California, agreed.

“If people continue to carve out these little bits for parks and things,” he said, “it is going to make it much harder for us to manage the rest of it--areas of less publicity.”

Conservationists favoring the desert bill remain suspicious of the BLM for many reasons, such as its reluctance to routinely require miners or mining companies to post reclamation bonds--money put in trust to assure that tailings and other toxic wastes will not simply be abandoned once a mine is exhausted. BLM’s semi-independent Nevada state office has balked at requiring such bonds, even though the conservative Nevada Mining Assn. itself came out in favor of the idea.

California activists, meanwhile, remember a unilateral revision of the 1980 Desert Conservation Plan by an assistant secretary of the Interior after final public hearings were held. BLM workers said the handwritten addendum, allowing cattle grazing in a bighorn sheep preserve, was meant to benefit a subsistence rancher with 14 children. Critics said the change accommodates “any” grazing--and, in any case, exposes the sheep to potentially deadly bovine diseases.

Internal Dissent

The dissent extends to the BLM staff. As early as 1976, 18 BLM employees wrote an internal memorandum, eventually leaked to the press, that criticized the California BLM office for routinely ignoring scientific advice and federal laws while catering to motorcyclists and other special-interest groups.

Others within the BLM are less critical of the bureau’s record, but there still is considerable internal debate over how best to administer the Mojave Desert, one of the most sensitive and sought-after pieces of public land controlled by the agency.

Last February, such internal criticism erupted publicly when Hastey, acting against the advice of his own staff expert, asked the California Department of Fish and Game to wait up to four years before listing the desert tortoise as a state threatened species.

He said BLM needed the time to develop its own tortoise-protection program, but he later privately told a reporter that he also feared a negative reaction from ranchers and off-road vehicle users, whose activities would be curtailed if the tortoise were given threatened-species protection.

“How can we Americans poke our fingers at South American countries for not preserving the Amazon rain forest when we’re letting the western Mojave Desert deteriorate?” said Kristin Berry, a BLM zoologist in the western Mojave. “We’re giving it all away to a few Marlboro men on motorbikes.”

Hastey discounted that charge. He said the BLM--pressured by the Cranston bill and a growing public awareness of what the desert has to offer--is redoubling its efforts to find that elusive balance of demands Congress mandated when it approved the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, or FLPMA.

“We have--I think, quite well--balanced those socioeconomic needs with the need to preserve some of these (natural resources),” Hastey said, citing the bureau’s efforts to preserve the habitat of such endangered species as the kit fox and fringe-toed lizard.

Hastey also cited management of the King Range in Northern California, the first Wilderness Conservation Area, as an example of BLM’s ability to balance conflicting interests in an innovative fashion.

Land Swaps Praised

Meanwhile, conservationists praise the BLM for using land swaps to preserve valuable wildlife habitat along Arizona’s San Pedro River in the nation’s first Riparian Conservation Area.

But, as in the past, BLM employees find their job made difficult by a lack of adequate funding and the confrontation politics that result when interests collide. Confrontations are especially acute in arid lands, since most users, whether they prefer wildlife or strip mines, want land with water or access.

Afton Canyon is blessed--or cursed--with both.

Its early popularity as a cattle trail and wildlife habitat was compounded in the 1960s, when the BLM built a campground linking Afton Canyon with Interstate 40 east of Barstow.

But the bureau lacked both the money and mandate to staff the campground as the National Park Service or U.S. Forest Service might have done. Intense, often unregulated vehicle traffic, shooting and cattle grazing resulted, scarring the land and destroying native vegetation. Bighorn sheep eventually moved off into the open desert and grew dependent on cattle-watering troughs called “guzzlers.”

In 1980, the BLM named the canyon an “area of critical environmental concern”--a designation meant to qualify it for special protective management. But Reagan Administration budgets never contained money to manage the canyon, so the environmental degradation continued.

Pressured by the campaign to turn the desert into a national park, the BLM last year proposed a plan to stop the destruction of Afton Canyon by limiting human activity in the area.

Among other things, the BLM plan would prohibit motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles from driving along the delicate stream bed and up the severely scarred hillsides, and would assure allocation of enough rangers to enforce the law.

Environmentalists were ecstatic over the BLM proposal. Judy Anderson of the California Desert Protection League called the proposal “the only gutsy thing the BLM has done in years.”

Off-road vehicle owners were outraged. Richard MacPherson of the California Assn. of 4-Wheel Drive Clubs asserted that “there is nothing drastically wrong out there” and characterized the BLM plan as “management through closure.”

The polarization--a result of the BLM’s exploitative history clashing with its new conservation mandate--has left the bureau in an increasingly familiar bind: MacPherson has threatened to sue if the BLM implements the plan, and the Sierra Club has threatened to sue if BLM tries to modify it.

MacPherson said, “There is very little documentation to prove the vehicles passing through bother wildlife.” But Stebbins, the zoologist, said tire tracks crisscross the pool of water containing tadpoles bred by the new and possibly endangered species of toad he and others are studying.

Others note that the desert, being a dry environment, is slow to heal. Even though BLM managers say off-road vehicle users clearly are more environmentally sensitive now than in the past, tracks cut in the desert decades ago are still plainly visible.

Conservationists say such tracks, some of which were cut by tanks preparing to fight in World War II nearly 50 years ago, are more than ugly; they also encourage soil erosion and damage vegetation. To limit the impact of the vehicles, they are now limited to designated “off-highway vehicle areas.”

Race Through Desert

“I may not like motorcycles, but it is not my place to tell them they have no place in the desert,” said Alden Sievers, manager of the BLM’s Barstow resource area. That area contains the starting line for the big Barstow-to-Las Vegas cross-country motorcycle race, which environmental extremists have tried to sabotage to protect wildlife habitat on the race course.

“Congress, in fact, has said we shall find areas for that activity,” said Gerald Hillier, manager of the BLM’s desert district. “But I do think that instead of the desert being nibbled to death, as some tell you, we’re nibbling toward bringing some law to the desert.”

Sometimes, the law must be harsh to accommodate past BLM mistakes.

Desert tortoises, for example, are in dramatic decline for several reasons, including loss of habitat to off-road vehicles and other human activities that the BLM has been unable to control. Now, their dwindling Mojave community also is being decimated by ravenous ravens.

BLM’s answer is to shoot and poison the ravens. Environmentalists ask why the BLM did not years ago control the urban encroachment on the desert that gives the birds a food source--garbage--to fuel their population explosion.

This alleged lack of foresight is particularly ironic to some BLM employees who say the agency has a tendency to abuse the planning process to avoid making tough management decisions.

“Talk is cheap and the bureau is full of talk and plans,” said one BLM biologist. “We plan to plan. When are we going to implement?”

Some plans will be implemented soon, according to a congressional timetable for setting aside wilderness tracts from among BLM lands. But even here, there are questions about the bureau’s sincerity.

For example, a draft of the BLM’s California Statewide Wilderness Study, which has been circulated within the bureau and other government agencies but not yet released publicly, has been challenged by some outside experts who have seen the report for grossly overestimating the amounts of minerals in the Mojave--even after figuring in likely future price increases.

A final version of the wilderness report is to guide Congress as it decides which proposed wilderness studies areas should be preserved and which could be “released” for other uses, such as mining, grazing and off-road racing.

A geologist who studied the draft report but claims no feeling either way about the value of wilderness said the overestimates make the draft “more of a political document for anti-wilderness than anything else.” This, he said, is because the draft seems to assume every mineral trace is valuable, even if it is so small or diffuse it is unlikely ever to be economic to mine.

Hastey said the draft plan tries to anticipate the nation’s mineral needs.

“We do not know what the market for these minerals might be five, 10 or 20 years down the road,” he explained. “We do know we are dealing with a highly mineralized area, and what is not economic today may be valuable 15 years from now.”

Struggle for Balance

Hillier said those kinds of decisions are all part of the bureau’s struggle to balance inherently conflicting uses, as Congress has instructed.

“Some people complain there is not enough for wildlife,” he said, bucking uncomfortably across the desert in a BLM four-wheel-drive vehicle, “but Congress did not create the desert wildlife park.

“Off-highway vehicle owners complain we do not allow them enough room. But Congress did not create an off-highway vehicle park, either.

“What Congress did was create the California Desert Conservation Area, and ‘conservation,’ in its old definition, means ‘wise use,’ not preservation.”