Letter From the Desert: Let It Rain
I’m working to take the podcast on the road to El Paso for the Chihuahuan Desert Fiesta on September 27. The Desert Advocacy Media Network is raising funds to cover costs of the excursion. You can donate here. As online venues of communication become more and more constrained by corporate algorithms, talking to people in person becomes ever more crucial to our promotion of the podcast and everything it works for. I hope you’ll consider tossing us a few dollars to cover travel, lodging, and possibly a nice bowl of green.
A few miles west of me the sky has been cast over with clouds. The clouds are disgorging trailing torrents of rain. Little of it seems to be hitting the ground, at least from my vantage point. We are in the rainshadow of the rainshadow, and over the last five years we have become accustomed to watching our neighbors one zip code to the west get a couple inches of rain for every millimeter we get here.
I could use a good rainstorm right about now. It’s hard to rage Lear-like into the face of a storm if there is no storm.
The mechanics are simple enough. Sun shines on the desert. The desert soil gets hot enough to inflict serious burns on unprotected skin. Hot soil — or pavement, or roofing, or photovoltaic panels — heats the air above it. That heated air rises. at ground level, other air rushes in to fill the space left by the rising heated air. In the American southwest, the easiest direction for that new air to flow in from is to the south, where the Gulf of Mexico and the Sea of Cortez have usually filled that new air with moisture. Humidity builds until even this superheated air can hold no more. Sometimes that moisture falls from the sky in wisps that, as today over Joshua Tree, mostly do not hit the ground. At other times several inches of rain might fall per hour, filling entire canyons, disgorging house-sized boulders into formerly dry washes, drowning unwary tourists in all-wheel-drive vehicles.
We desert dwellers cannot help but celebrate that second kind of storm, though those occasionally strip us of everything we own. Or they strip everyone we love of us. After several weeks of nighttime temperatures staying above 90 degrees F, it is hard not to revel in a monsoon storm. One must run out into the rain and get drenched, trying to stay mindful enough not to drive through underpasses or go frolicking in slot canyons.
Monsoon days are bacchanals in the original sense of the word. They are revelry with an occasional body count.
I could use a little time to vituperate at an indifferent storm, myself. I have come to prefer the literal kind to the metaphorical kind.
We managed to beat back an attempt to sell off public lands last week, a ridiculous proposition that would never work but which stood a non-zero chance of becoming law anyway. Our win was resounding if temporary. And while we were working on that win, the US Air Force bombed Tehran. Congress continues to work on a budget that strips health insurance from millions of Americans. The Governor of California, putatively a liberal, engineered a gutting of the state’s flagship environmental law in order to streamline permitting of timber harvest and server farm construction. And the State of Florida has built a 3,000-bed migrant detention facility atop a former wetland so that ICE can continue to lock up grandmothers and leaf blower operators and pregnant women.
(An aside: If the migrants being chased after were truly violent threats to public safety — if they were really mostly narcotraficantes and cartel thugs and MS-13 loyalists and such — wouldn’t ICE have come under fire by now, on one raid or another, the way the BLM was met at gunpoint when they tried to detain Cliven Bundy’s cattle?)
And locally, the Planning Commission in my town decided, in the face of massive local opposition and one of the shoddiest excuses for an environmental assessment I have ever seen, to approve a garish tourism project catering to the affluent in a rural neighborhood that serves as a critical wildlife connectivity corridor. Meanwhile, a couple towns over to the west, the Powers That Be are refusing to change management of the local animal shelter despite a thoroughly documented history of neglect and abuse under current management.
Anyway. It’s a lot. And I have been realizing over the last several weeks that I never actually recovered all the way from the last iteration of this regime, this confederacy of malignant dunces. Somewhere in late 2019 I began to feel utterly unequal to the tasks I had set myself, never mind the tasks my day job layered atop them. I have dealt with chronic depression since Nixon was in the White House, and much of the time I have it safely chained in the yard where it can’t do much but growl as passersby. But lately it’s been hopping the fence and gnawing on the letter carrier.
In fact, I am having trouble remembering the last time depression settled in as long and sharp as it has now.
I expect I’m not the only one feeling this way. And it’s hard to admit. The toxic impulse to deny, to feign wellness in the face of a flash flood of fascism, is extremely hard to resist. What hope do we have to beat the fuckers back if we’re also fighting off being debilitated by sadness?
Of course, we are in the situation we are in, and not some other situation that would be more advantageous. Which means there had damn well better be a way for us to prevail even with the demoralization.
I usually keep comments restricted to paid subscribers, but I’m opening it up wide for this issue. Because I really want to hear how you are doing, how you’re facing the onslaught.
And a note for first-time commenters: welcome! This is a safe place, because I delete comments by people who make it unsafe. That’s also a word to the wise.
This sacred landscape, this home, this desert was carved by rain. Every pinnacle, every broad bajada, every stratified layer of caliche meters underground bears witness to ancient storms. We are who we are because of storms. The secret is to survive them.
I'm an 85-year-old environmental novelist and essayist. marysojourner.com. I'm somehow holding depression at bay - not, not somehow. I stay angry. Anger is the finest medicine for depression. Anger gives us energy. Anger, despite all the propaganda against it (especially for women) is precisely what those of us who love the earth need to be feeling - and expressing. The earth loves our fury. Our rage is clean. It is a scalpel. Yeah, I'm using a lot of medical metaphors. That's because the Earth is sick right now - and greedy humans are the infection.
I lived on Yucca Mesa for a year. That place taught me more about love than any human ever has.
Chris — I feel it. Not as keenly as you. Perhaps I just have less skill to keen. The perception of a steadily increasing impotence to effect change. We work within the system of law, of civility, of opportunities for "public comment". And an increasing cynicism that anything "we" do will have a real, positive effect.
But it is not without hope. I was reminded of this in a small way in a recent development in our community.
Very long (multi-decade) story short: waterfront enhancements are coming to the part of the City of Los Angeles that fronts the Port of Los Angeles. Long overdue, heinously mismanaged by the Port, and beginning to surface. A late addition to the project is a concert venue on the seaside (sure, who doesn't want that, besides the entire neighborhood that will get unsubscribed concert sound 100 nights per year?). Obviously the developers planned the entire venue to be surfaced with plastic grass. For family enjoyment in the day and concerts by night. Obviously plastic grass.
(For the technically minded, the concert venue necessitated a Subsequent Environmental Impact Report [SEIR] following up the EIR for the main development. So the Draft SEIR is the DSEIR below :) )
We (a local neighborhood council) filed critical, well-framed, sincere, comments to many of the issues in the DSEIR (ranging from traffic to potential impacts on endangered Least Tern nesting sites). In response to later neighborhood concerns, we (um, I) also wrote a non-polemic but pointed analysis of why you want natural grass instead of plastic grass (Really. You do).
On Friday, the Board of Harbor Commissioners met to decide whether to approve (or not) the DSEIR. Of course, they would approve it — we all understand that.
But here's the thing:
– The developers are really, sincerely, and as a result of community input, considering using natural grass instead of plastic.
– One of the fairly new, but horrifyingly politically experienced, Harbor Commissioners took the opportunity to remind us all that the Commissioners really do have the right and responsibility to examine staff recommendations critically and make determinations on their own.
– That same Commissioner proceeded to air several of the same issues we'd raised in the comments to the DSEIR.
– The technical responses to our comments to the DSEIR included some actual analysis of omitted environmental impacts that we pointed out.
How did that happen? I think by building local trust with non-polemic, reasoned analysis. There really are some decision-makers who still perceive and respect reasoning based on evidence. It's essential to be open and clear that differences of opinion are OK — both sides can have important but different concerns, and eventually a choice has to be made based on other considerations. Often we have a (well-founded) assumption that it is not possible to prevail with that approach. But with the right tone, for the right target, it can penetrate.
In the end, Chris, here's the thing. You know, looking back at what you've done, sometimes you won. There's a national climate right now trying to convince us that victories like that can't ever happen — it's not up to the little people. But we can prevail. And those wins will happen only if we keep working.
In our local case, maybe it's a tiny victory that there will be (maybe) a grass park instead of a plastic mat. But that will make this a better community and a better environment for thousands of residents and visitors. We didn't think that was possible. But it happened.
I'll take the win.