I offer that line not as a jab at the advanced average age of the Coachella Valley’s retiree-heavy population. Rather, it’s a testament to the warmth and wonder I felt while waiting for a recent flight at Palm Springs International Airport.

Pandemic-era air travel in California is typically a miserable combination of unhappy passengers and unreliable service—except in Palm Springs. There, flying still feels like a miracle.

The airport is small, with fewer than two dozen gates, and easy to navigate. Security lines are often short. After your body and bags are scanned, you emerge into an outdoor desert garden, with good coffee. It might be the best waiting room in American aviation.

And, if we’re lucky, sun-splashed, open-air PSP—the code by which this airport is known—will become a model for post-pandemic flight across California, and especially in the smaller airports of our growing inland regions.

PSP is already the people’s choice. While the pandemic has grounded the ambitions of the airlines and the larger travel industry, PSP has soared. 2021 was the busiest summer in the airport’s history. And since last June, the airport has set seven new monthly records for passengers; PSP now serves more than two million people annually.

The commercial air traffic may keep setting new records. Southwest Airlines started service in Palm Springs in late 2020 and now flies from there to eight cities, including Sacramento and Oakland. Six other airlines have added flights, including American Airlines to Philadelphia, JetBlue to Fort Lauderdale, and, just last month, aha! to Reno. The 13 passenger airlines serving the airport now offer 35 different routes—creating more competition and lowering fares, and surely making PSP even more popular.

In local news reports, airport officials have expressed surprise at this pandemic surge; they hadn’t projected a return to pre-COVID numbers until 2023. But this small airport, a former military base that the city of Palm Springs bought and converted six decades ago, has long found ways to succeed, even in hard times.

Indeed, PSP has prospered ever since the Great Recession, even as other airports in California, Nevada, and Arizona have stagnated. One reason has been the large number of Canadian snowbirds buying Coachella Valley properties after the collapse of the housing bubble. That growing Canadian colony created a huge demand for flights from the Great White North. PSP now has non-stop service not just to Vancouver and Toronto, but also to Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg.

Thanks in part to the Canadian influx, Palm Springs established new records for passengers in six of the seven years between 2012 and 2019.

The airport’s growth has been supported over the last two decades by the sort of careful and sustained investment that too many California localities struggle to pull off. Early in the century came a new control tower, runway enhancements, a new and larger terminal, and a remodeling of that outdoor courtyard. More recent years have seen the expansion of the ticket lobby and a new, improved baggage handling system. These additions, carefully designed, have not cost the airport its small and convenient feel.

Palm Springs can’t take all the credit for its growth. The awfulness of flying in and out of LAX, and the horror of driving anywhere from it, have driven customers to find alternatives. And Ontario Airport, the nearest Inland Empire rival to Palm Springs, has been badly mismanaged, shedding flights and passengers for most of the 2000s and 2010s.

When COVID hit, PSP, with that outdoor space, felt like a safe place to visit—not unlike Palm Springs. The Coachella Valley’s great weather, and its tradition of indoor-outdoor living, has made it a popular place to pass the pandemic.

I made my maiden voyage recently on a late afternoon flight from PSP to Oakland, after a tiring day of reporting around the valley.

For the first time I can remember, an airport refreshed me. I made it through security in two minutes, having to wait only for a very polite family of five, all wearing Toronto Maple Leaf sweatshirts. I lay down on a shady bench in the garden, before heading up into the Sonny Bono Concourse to grab a sandwich at an open-air restaurant. While eating, I took in fabulous views of Southern California’s two highest mountains, Mt. San Gorgonio and Mt. San Jacinto. It felt a bit like visiting a desert spa.

Marveling at the scene, I told an airport worker that the only thing missing was a swimming pool. She quickly corrected me—there is a pool, but it’s in the general aviation part of the airport, for those who fly privately.

I’ve heard people compare the look of the airport, with attractive canopies and all that light, to the sets in the NBC show The Good Place, a comedy that offered a sun-splashed view of the afterlife. Of course, we mere mortals have no way of knowing whether PSP really looks like heaven. But Palm Springs does have one advantage on that other paradise: an airport that makes it easy to get in and get out.

The post Am I in Heaven or Just Flying Out of Palm Springs? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If you’re looking for the quintessential Christmas experience, there’s only one place you should go: the Southern California desert.

The Coachella Valley is the Golden State’s very own Yuletide capital—which might make it the capital of Christmas in America, maybe even the world. After all, California popularized Christmas via Hollywood, and still designs it through our toymakers, digitizes it via Silicon Valley, and distributes it through our ports.

Some Scrooges will call this sacrilege, citing our lack of conifers and snow. Leave such people to their ignorance—the desert is already plenty crowded this time of year.

What they don’t know is that Bing Crosby, the man who first and most famously sang “White Christmas,” was a regular in the desert. For a time, he broadcast his radio show from the American Legion Post in Palm Springs, and he even developed Blue Skies Village in Rancho Mirage, according to The Desert Sun. The other signature voices of the American holidays—from Elvis Presley to Frank Sinatra—also had deep desert ties. Frank Capra conceived his holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life in La Quinta.

Christmas, of course, has been a desert holiday for 2,000 years, since a child was born in Bethlehem, a little town in the Judean desert still remembered for its failure to provide enough lodging. Palm Springs would never make the same mistake.

Christmas is about birth and journeys, and so is this time of year in Coachella. While the rest of the state slows down at the holidays, the desert starts up. Hundreds of thousands of vacationers make pilgrimages to the region, and various seniors and snowbirds arrive to take up residence for the winter months, swelling the Coachella Valley’s population from 200,000 to 800,000.

It’s worth noting that an estimated 450,000 of these winter visitors are Canadians, who know all too well the horrors of a cold and snowy Christmas.

And why wouldn’t you come to Palm Springs in December? The warm daytime weather is perfect for golf or swimming, while the cool nights make it possible for you to put on your Santa suit and celebrate the season without breaking a sweat. And if you must have snow, it’s usually there—on top of Mt. San Jacinto, which is only a hike or tram ride away.

The desert is simply the most transcendent environment in which to pass this season. “If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert,” the great Northern California writer and novelist Anne Lamott once observed. “You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.”

Seeking such uplift on the first weekend of December, I drove from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, a trip that, at 100 miles, is about the same length as the journey Joseph and Mary made (in a caravan of migrants, some historians suggest) from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

During the holidays and the subsequent winter months, the Coachella Valley offers so many festivals—in music, architecture, art, film—that every weekend feels like Christmas. In December, it’s also home to huge light displays, none more awe-inspiring than Kenny Irwin Jr.’s Robolights, which draws so many people—60,000—that the city of Palm Springs is forcing it out of its current location in a residential neighborhood. Irwin is looking for a commercial space for next year.

But I most wanted to see what has quietly become one of the largest holiday parades in California: the Festival of Lights parade in Palm Springs.

It’s a relatively recent tradition—the parade started small in 1991. But it has grown, with city government and corporate support, into a bucket-list event that draws 100,000 people to a city with a population of 50,000, on the first Saturday night in December.

The parade runs for 1.3 miles along Palm Canyon Drive. This year, the crowds were 10 rows deep along the boulevard’s broad sidewalks. There were 84 entries—as many as in California’s biggest parade, the Tournament of Roses in my hometown of Pasadena.

All the participants and floats wear electric lights, including marching bands for middle and high schools, and vehicles from garbage trucks to fire engines to vintage golf carts. Neighborhood groups also inflate and carry giant helium balloons—like the ones in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City—which are lit with spotlights mounted in trucks that ride just in front of them.

In these angry times, the warm and welcoming atmosphere distinguishes the event. While Pasadena merchants have long shut down their stores during the Rose Parade, Palm Springs merchants stay open during the Festival of Lights. Even real estate offices, spas, and law firms along Palm Canyon Drive hold open houses, with some offering food and drink. The parade also provides announcers at a couple different points to offer personal details about the participants (this included an introduction of a parade marshal’s “new lady friend”).

At this year’s parade, the cheers were especially loud for the Palm Springs Public Library Book Cart Drill Team, the Desert Burners Bicycle Brigade, and the Cathedral City High School Ballet Folklorico, whose members danced while wearing a combination of multicolored costumes and multicolored lights that gave new meaning to the word psychedelic.

The audience also appreciated the entry for a local hotel, a lit-up Hummer with a snow-making machine mounted on top, promoting the hotel’s “DRG Brunch Sundays,” a set-price brunch that includes cocktails and a drag show.

“We’re so lucky,” said Ethan Kaminsky, a local video production guy who held a massive potluck party next to an RV he had parked on a vacant lot along the parade route. “We get to live where everyone else comes for Christmas.”

Make yours merry, bright—and dry as the desert.

The post From Bethlehem to Palm Springs, Christmas Belongs in the Desert appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now in its seventh decade, Slab City is a longstanding but chronically impermanent settlement built on Camp Dunlap, a decommissioned World War II training camp. It is an informal community of squatters, snowbirds, homeless residents, veterans, and artists like Austin, all making their homes in this unhomely desert environment wedged between an active gunnery range and the Imperial Valley’s industrial agriculture.

Leftover from the military camp, the basic elements of a town are here: roads, reservoirs, sewers, slabs, and foundations. After the camp was disbanded in 1946, the eponymous concrete slabs were left behind when the wooden buildings moved to Niland, the nearest town, four miles away. The slabs that remain today are cracked and partially covered with sand, and the camp’s original roads are pocked with holes and rutted with tank tracks. The million-gallon cisterns are empty; manholes have been filled in and their covers salvaged long ago. This residual infrastructure provides a backdrop to understand how people make homes in extreme places and how the things people make stand up to time, other people, and dust storms.

Off the grid, living in what is often called the “last free place,” Slab City’s residents measure the durability of their freedom in what they build. In structures like houses of wooden pallets.

I met Austin on one of my trips to Slab City with the Irish photographer Donovan Wylie. We wanted to understand the architecture of this place and its residents’ struggles with adaptation and resistance. When the weather alert came through, a year after my most recent visit, I didn’t know exactly how the storm would affect Austin’s pallet structure, and I wasn’t sure which version of pallet architecture would sift the wall of dust, or even if its architect was still there.

Wearing sandals made from two-by-four blocks of wood, Austin first approached us with a clipboard to ask if we’d like to see the three-level A-frame he was building. He walked us through the ground level where couches and chairs filled a shady living area on the ground. Further up, he had a workshop dedicated to hacking the proprietary charging systems of cordless tools. Magazines of AAA batteries sprayed out of the opened handles of drills and saws, waiting for their solar panel charge. Up above, a communal sleeping loft looked out through pallet frames toward the Algodones Dunes and the invisible Mexican border to the south, and westward toward Salvation Mountain and the Salton Sea’s dusty veil. Between slats to the east, we could see plumes of smoke rising from ordnance that had been dropped on the bombing range.

Slab City is here because it is a so-called Section 36. In America’s westward expansion, the National Land Ordinance of 1785 and subsequent land acts, including California’s 1853 survey, overlaid the land with a grid and divided each township into 36 sections. In this system, every township had two square-mile plots—Section 16 and Section 36—reserved for public education. Many have been sold by states to help fund schools, but this particular Section 36 has lingered as a small piece of public land, a forgotten square of desert atop East Mesa along the Imperial Valley’s ancient shoreline.

In the early 1940s, the Navy saw strategic advantages in the plot’s remoteness and its similarities to North Africa’s war theater. And so the U.S. military paid California $3,810 to install Camp Dunlap, the only revenue the state has ever received from this piece of land.

When the military moved out, migrant farmworkers harvesting creosote moved in, and Slab City’s informal settlement began. Despite pressures from developers and state officials concerned with liability, this Section 36 persists as a residual piece of Manifest Destiny where public land hosts private aspirations, rights meet hardship, and makeshift dreams ride the desert sea like concrete slabs on sand.

On Austin’s clipboard were sketches that carried more than just plans for shelter. These designs harbored visions and hopes. They delineated the fugitive aspirations of an artist, a resident of Slab City, a member of a wider community founded on an ethic of reuse. Residency on the slabs can be as fleeting and vulnerable as the materials at hand: cardboard, palm fronds, shade cloth, and pallets are themselves transient. And when I returned less than five months later to visit Austin, his original pallet structure was gone, and another had risen across the road.

If the previous project was the house of an idealist, a DIY hacker, an improviser, then this new one was the refuge of an ascetic, a hermit, a master geometer. If the first had been an exercise in communal living cast within a builder’s yard and its organized riot of materials, this second structure was a remote outpost, its peaked arch of pallets recalling the praying hands of Jerome, isolated in an austere sand and gravel lot. The frame of this inverted V rose twenty feet into the desert sky, pushing the modules of soft wood to their material limits so that the middle two pallets of each side sagged a little under their own weight, as if weary from traversing borders, supporting goods, and delivering things in the 21st century’s global supply lines.

A pallet A-frame structure, the predominant building style in Slab City. Photograph by Donovan Wylie.

Now, this frame (is it a pointed version of St. Louis’s arch and a smaller gateway to this vestige of American frontier?) rises over a box formed by 28 other pallets, making room for its resident and, at the same time, presenting another experiment in living that tests the limits of “free,” within what public land and available materials might offer.

Where do you go in a dust storm when the last free place is already your refuge of last resort? How do you avoid exposure in a place that is already fully exposed? Build what you will, with the materials you have. Each of Austin’s pallet structures embodies the independence of building up and tearing down at will. But in something like a dust storm, this self-determination reaches its limit, and freedom becomes as porous as a pallet’s slats.

Slab City’s residents have been displaced from elsewhere. (Austin came from the city he’s named for.) Some arrived here by choice, but many others came here, seeking to escape forces beyond their control—whether economic, societal, or political. And the dust storm itself is a function of environmental degradation that began with the gridding of a continent, and continued with projects to irrigate the valley, triggering the calamity that formed the Salton Sea, which now issues toxic dust from its retreating shores.

Despite its remoteness and insularity, the last free place can’t escape these legacies. (In fact, it may be at their epicenter, just as it straddles the San Andreas Fault.) In some ways, Slabbers follow in the footsteps of the soldiers who trained here because they too are training to live in the desert. And before the first slabs were poured, the Navy set up a field lab to test the casting of concrete in extreme temperatures, nearly 120 degrees in that summer of 1941. Residents of Slab City now test the idea of freedom in a laboratory of their own making.

No reports followed this particular storm, but any snowbirds who lingered on the Slabs for the summer season would have recognized blizzard conditions as yellow clouds of sand and dust blotted out the sun, lowered temperatures, and reduced visibility to a few feet. Drifts of sand likely pressed into Austin’s second pallet structure, as dust layered onto cans of food, chairs, tables, tools, and sketchpads, leaving a gray coating on every surface as if it had been there for hundreds of years. Slabbers who had cars or trailers would have retreated into their sealed interiors, while others like Austin would rely on a pallet’s imperfect windbreak to avoid sandblasting that can last for hours.

The wall of dust will be followed by other storms, just as plans to close Slab City will be proposed and then postponed, and somehow this place will endure. Freedom may not be free, but when it manifests itself in the solidity—even if makeshift—of this architecture, like Austin’s pallet structures, hidden identities become apparent. Each resident brings their own admixture of need and desire and curates an equally aggregated version of ‘last free place.’

Out here on the slabs.

The post Is Slab City, California the Last Free Place in America? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It wasn’t the Axis’s invasion of their ancestral homeland that concerned these Bedouins, however, but rather their mistreatment by their own government. With the outbreak of the war, they had been thrown into a prison reserved for foreign subjects, and their families were suffering gravely in their absence. Accordingly, they demanded an explanation for why they were being punished as if they were strangers in their own native land.

“We are your subjects,” the Bedouins contended, “and if the government does not want us to be its subjects, we implore you to let us know the name of a state we can join in order to request compensation for our families.” They concluded the petition on a similar note of sarcasm: “We truly believe that we do not belong to the Egyptian government; for, if we did belong to it, adhering to its laws [as we do], it would not subject us to [such] treatment as foreigners.”

Why did the Egyptian government view its own desert-dwelling Bedouin population with such suspicion and contempt? After all, shouldn’t the native inhabitants of Egypt’s desert domains, which comprise roughly 90 percent of the country’s land surface, have counted as being just as Egyptian as inhabitants of Cairo or the Nile Valley?

The answer to these questions lies in the complex history of Egypt’s formation as a modern territorial nation-state.

Nations must never be taken for granted. They do not exist from time immemorial as naturally bounded and cohesive social units, but rather are actively made (and often re-made) to serve particular political projects in particular places at particular times. Even Egypt—ostensibly one of the most ancient political civilizations on the planet—underwent dramatic transformations in the late 19th and 20th centuries before it emerged as a modern nation-state like the one we know today.

One such transformation involved the projection of a unified territorial identity from the center of power (Cairo) into the furthest reaches of the state’s sovereign domains, including the Western Desert. While other nation-states underwent similar transformations, the Egyptian case contained some particular elements that would turn out to be consequential for the country’s region and its history.

My own interest in the territorial dimension of Egyptian nationhood began nearly a decade ago, on a 10-hour bus journey across Egypt’s Western Desert to the remote oasis of Siwa. As I stared out my window at the endless barren expanses, I began to wonder how all of this beautiful wasteland became part of Egypt in the first place. My sense of bewilderment only grew when I arrived in Siwa, which lies only 30 miles from the Libyan border and has an ethnically distinct population that more resembles that of some Libyan regions. (Siwans are of Berber descent and did not speak Arabic for much of their history.) The Egyptian history I had studied as a graduate student, focused as it was on Cairo and the Nile, had little to say about the incorporation or political status of such far-flung places.

So I set out to craft a comprehensive modern history of the vast region I came to call “the Egyptian West.” My foray into the archival sources yielded many surprises. For starters, I learned that Egypt’s western border had gone undefined for most of the country’s history, and that the first modern political map attempting to delineate such a border—an Ottoman map from 1841—went missing for the better part of a century. Although various statesmen periodically noted its absence—Lord Cromer, the British consul-general of Egypt from 1882 to 1907, surmised that the map was “supposed to have been lost in a fire which destroyed a great part of the Egyptian archives”—no one seemed especially vexed by this. In fact, Egypt’s marginal borderlands were typically ignored in the cartography of the period. When they were represented at all, they were left intentionally fuzzy.

The powers in the region—Britain and the Ottoman Empire (still technically sovereign over Egypt)—actually conspired not to define the border, lest it provoke unnecessary legal or diplomatic controversy. This stance became particularly thorny during the first decade of the 20th century, when the Italian government—seeking to lay the groundwork for its colonial occupation of Libya, which would begin in 1911—repeatedly pressured the British to draw a western border.

But the Italians’ protests fell on deaf ears. Citing “the peculiar position in which Egypt stands with regards to Turkey [the Ottoman Empire],” the British agreed with the Ottomans that it was better policy to leave the border ambiguous. A bona fide border between Egypt and (Italian-controlled) Libya would not be defined until well after World War I, in 1925, following a diplomatic treaty that was signed shortly after the elusive 1841 map resurfaced at the eleventh hour. (It had been found deep inside the Ottoman archives, in Istanbul.)

Nations are not made merely by drawing borders around sovereign territory, however; they must also to some degree incorporate and assimilate their heterogeneous populations into a unified political community. In Egypt, this process began in the last quarter of the 19th century, but it had mixed results.

Law was one institution that the government attempted to use as an instrument of assimilation. Beginning in the 1870s, the government passed a series of reforms that aimed to streamline jurisdiction and legal practice across the country, including the deserts and western oases. But it was not long before the government reneged on this project and ceded judicial autonomy to the inhabitants of the country’s vast borderlands.

In the case of the town of Siwa, one official tried to explain the government’s striking about-face by citing the remoteness of the oasis as well as the fundamental distinctiveness of its people. “The town is far from Egypt by a distance of approximately twenty days traveling by camel,” he argued. “It falls in the middle of the desert, and its people have different customs and (linguistic) conventions, and tastes that diverge completely from those of the Egyptians, by virtue of the fact that they are pure [Bedouin] Arabs.” Here is one clear case of the modernizing Egyptian state succumbing to the extreme challenges of standardizing its institutions across the full expanse of its sovereign territory; Siwa was simply too far and too different to be folded into the Egyptian national judiciary at this time.

There would be other such cases. In 1905 and again in 1908, the Egyptian government passed legislation that sought to place its administration of the country’s various Bedouin tribes on firmer footing. The new laws—undertaken in large part to counter the trend of many Egyptians falsely claiming Bedouin descent in order to demand the exemption from military service that the tribes had long enjoyed—strove to “organize [the Bedouin tribes] in an administrative fashion approaching the organization of towns and villages.”

When it came to actually enforcing the new laws, however, the government—again hard-pressed to exert its sovereign control in the sparsely inhabited deserts—was forced to cede considerable power to the local tribal leaders themselves. Despite the veneer of formality added by the legislation, Egypt’s Bedouins were still being treated as a people apart.

So it probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise when the Western Desert Bedouins found themselves in jail at the start of World War II, and being treated by their government like a dangerous fifth column. The Egyptian government’s internment of its people is best interpreted as a reflection of its own lack of faith in the mechanisms through which its territorial sovereignty had been asserted in the country’s western borderland. Egypt might have clarified the limits of its territorial statehood with the 1925 border treaty with Libya, but it had by no means woven an enduring social fabric for the collective nation within those boundaries.

The Egyptian state’s antagonistic relationship with its own Bedouin population continues to this day. This is clear in the Western Desert, which has emerged as a haven for militant groups reportedly linked to the Islamic State. The Egyptian government’s heavy-handed response has led to some grave mistakes, none more egregious than the security forces’ aerial assault on what turned out to be a caravan of Mexican tourists on a Bedouin-led desert safari, killing 12 and wounding numerous others. The now years-long Egyptian military campaign in the Sinai Peninsula, nominally waged to root out the Islamic State as well as Al-Qaeda, is another sign of enduring conflict in the borderlands.

In these present-day events are echoes of the particular history of the country’s emergence as a modern territorial nation-state. Moments of significant political upheaval, from World War II to the complicated fallout of the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, have always seemed to foster contests over territorial sovereignty in the country’s borderlands. And what we see today is not so different from what the Egyptian government was struggling with over a century ago, when it first sought to consolidate the nation at the margins of its sovereignty. As a result, what it means to be Egyptian in the country’s desert borderlands remains an open question.

The post The Bedouin People Who Blur the Boundaries of Egyptian Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s the fastest way to change California?

Assuming you don’t have the power to set off a major earthquake, your best bet would be to connect the two small desert cities of Palmdale and Victorville.

These two working-class places aren’t often associated with political power; but building world-class infrastructure to bridge the 50 miles between the two cities might be the most powerful current idea in California. Strong Palmdale-Victorville connections could transform Southern California’s traffic and economy, boost the West’s energy markets, and reconfigure the path of American trade with Asia and the rest of North America. It might even save the California high-speed rail project.

Why is connecting these two small cities potentially so valuable? Because California, for all its glorious north-south highways, has long lacked fast, efficient and safe east-west connections across its mountains and deserts. So to bridge Palmdale and Victorville is to connect the Antelope and Victor Valleys, two fast-growing exurban regions that host two of the continent’s most important highways. The result would be a dynamic High Desert Corridor.

Palmdale’s home region, the Antelope Valley, in Los Angeles County, now has more than 500,000 people (more than the city of Sacramento); its highways make it part of the Interstate 5 corridor, which goes from Tijuana, Mexico to British Columbia. Fifty miles east, the Victor Valley, where Victorville is the anchor town, has some 400,000 people (as many as Oakland), and sits right on Interstate 15, which not only moves Southern Californians to Vegas every weekend but also transports goods from San Diego County all the way to Alberta, Canada.

Current connections between Interstates 5 and 15 are problematic and primitive. Truckers either have to navigate through the awful traffic of the Southern California basin, or must find a way across the High Desert. Look at a map, and the natural place to do that—those 50 miles between Palmdale and Victorville—requires driving on surface streets, or the 138, known officially as Pearblossom Highway but unofficially as Blood Alley, since it’s one of America’s most dangerous roads. It’s also traffic-clogged; the Palmdale-Victorville drive took me nearly two hours recently.

Good news: This infrastructure gap creates an enormous opportunity. Which brings me to the High Desert Corridor, a decade-old proposal that is one of the most underrated ideas in California. Backed by a joint powers authority of Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, the High Desert Corridor would build not one connection between Palmdale and Victorville, but four.

First would come a 56-mile freeway connecting the two cities, with some of the stretch tolled to help finance the public-private partnership running the project. Second, the High Desert Corridor would establish a high-speed rail right of way, with the goal of connecting the California High-Speed Rail’s proposed station at Palmdale with the planned, private Xpress West high-speed rail project between Las Vegas and Victorville.

The third piece of the connection involves energy: Underground alongside the freeway and rail would run electric transmission lines. The corridor would also devote space to green energy production, as well as charging stations and alternative fuel stations for cars and trucks. And finally, in a nod to politics and younger generations, the High Desert Corridor would have a nearly 40-mile bikeway constructed between Palmdale and U.S. 395, connecting to existing paths near Adelanto.

The impact would be continental, and would go beyond the convenience of connecting the 5 and the 15. Today, international trade is slowed in the L.A. Basin, where the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles are overburdened and dense traffic makes things even slower. There is also little land left for the additional warehouses and logistics infrastructure to support the ports.

Advocates of the corridor say it could become a new “inland international port,” if land for logistics is closely connected to rail and airports in the corridor, allowing cargo to be moved between transportation modes. Such a port would support trade, spawn more businesses and allow the logistics industry to expand beyond the basin, and thus bring more jobs to the desert for local residents, shortening their commutes.

At the same time, the project could address air and energy concerns in Los Angeles by taking trucks off of Los Angeles’ roads, while providing infrastructure to hasten electric and alternatively fueled trucks. The transmission line could make it easier to manage the Western grid, better connecting California energy with neighboring states.

The high-speed rail piece of the High Desert Corridor would connect San Francisco, Burbank, Los Angeles Union Station, and Anaheim to Las Vegas. In the near term, that would take many Californian Vegas-goers off the roads. In the long term, it might inspire the development of high-speed rail in the West (Phoenix and Salt Lake City would be natural next steps) and better integrate the Western states into a regional economy worthy of the 21st century.

The corridor is definitely green—the energy piece could stimulate more green energy in the desert—but it is also a dodge. Air quality rules in the Los Angeles basin limit heavy manufacturing; supporters of the High Desert Corridor are betting that manufacturers will flock to the desert, since it is outside the basin and its air regulation.

Be skeptical of all this if you wish. The history of the California desert is filled with grand plans that went nowhere. But the High Desert Corridor isn’t a grand plan—it’s a tightly focused connection. The environmental reviews are complete, and the next steps are figuring out the exact route, and the costs of acquiring the right of ways.

Current estimates of the project’s overall cost are $8 billion. That’s a lot—but high-speed rail is projected to cost at least nine times that. Supporters had hoped to fund much of the expense with federal earmarks, but Congress has eliminated them. So the project will require a mix of private and public money, and be built in phases (rail first). Los Angeles County’s transportation tax, Measure M, will provide some dough.

But the state should step up. California politics is dominated by the coasts, and especially the Bay Area, which is why big funds were lavished on the new Bay Bridge. It’s now time to look south and east, and build the next great California bridge in the High Desert.

The post The Next Great California Bridge Should Span the High Desert appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As an antidote to this madness, every year in mid-November, about 20 people from my church, First Lutheran of Venice, drive to Valyermo in the high desert to spend the weekend in another millennium. My church group includes life-long German Lutherans, converted Lutherans, lapsed Catholics, former cult members, and stray humanists who haven’t yet made up their minds about Jesus. We do not agree on every point of doctrine, nor do we agree on political and social issues. What connects us is our belief in a loving God and our need for community.

Our place of withdrawal is St. Andrew’s Abbey, a community of Benedictine monks who operate a non-denominational retreat house where visitors are “welcomed as Christ.” While at the abbey, we live and eat simply, slowly. Whether we speak or keep silent, it is with intention. We leave behind our individual selves and become reunited as a community. We are able to do all this because of the horarium, the daily schedule of the abbey that prescribes specific times for prayer, study, and community.

The monks’ hospitality is genuine, but the accommodations are not opulent. Two low cinderblock structures of 10 rooms apiece house guests, each room containing two twin beds, a desk and chair, a couple of lamps, a temperamental wall heater, and a small bathroom. Given that this is the desert, one might also expect to find some small creature in the room, annoying but not deadly. The majority of our time is spent in the lodge, with its massive stone hearth and abundance of comfy chairs, or walking the grounds of the abbey, awash in the yellows, browns, and reds of fall foliage, the grayish green of cacti and Joshua trees, and the purple of the surrounding mountains.

At most services, the monks sing softly and in unison as a reflection of their sense of community and humility. In a two-week cycle, they will sing all 150 Psalms to acknowledge the Lord’s presence in the natural cycles of life. Psalms are sung on a single note, rising or falling at the end of a line, and ending in a scriptural refrain that changes according to the seasons of the liturgical year. This gives the worship an ancient quality, and connects the singers to all those who have worshiped in this way since the early church.

After Friday night’s supper, we are greeted by Father Patrick, the subprior, who gives a brief history of the abbey for the first-timers and reminds us all of the horarium and the thinness of the guest-quarter walls. Father Patrick was raised Catholic but lost his faith as a young man. Years later, he felt a deep need in his life and came back to the church. After a retreat much like ours, he decided to pursue a vocation and was ordained at the age of 62. His story resonates with our group, many of whom lost faith and returned to it later in life.

The abbey gets very quiet after Compline, the evening prayers. In the years that I have been going to St. Andrew’s, I have succeeded in observing the “Grand Silence” exactly once and, even then, not for the full 12 hours. The purpose of our silence is to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s not an audible, get-the-straight-jacket kind of voice; it’s more like the voice of a wise mentor or one’s own conscience. This voice gets drowned out in the everyday busyness of life. Being silent for one hour or 12 doesn’t guarantee a profound revelation, but it is another way of slowing down the racing mind and obtaining peace.

As we adjust to the rhythms of the horarium, some of us are unable to unwind from our sea-level lives and appreciate the quiet, worries clinging to us like commercial-grade plastic wrap. It can be good to sit with that discomfort, the knowledge that you are one hot spiritual mess and the fear that everyone else knows it too. On the other hand, sometimes, you have to let your church group members in on the secret, so they can help you haul that trash to the dump.

Oblate Cemetery at St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, CA.

This cleansing begins with a morning service of praise called Lauds. Praise is simply being grateful for who God is, acknowledging his nature as Creator, Father, and Defender. It isn’t asking for stuff; the churchy word for that is “supplication.” The Psalms sung during Lauds are chosen because they address some aspect of God’s character. The final stanza of each Psalm is a variation on the phrase, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” emphasizing the triune nature of God. As the congregation sings these lines, we rise together and bow as a sign of deep humility.

Our meals are served buffet-style in the large cinderblock dining hall with a vaulted ceiling and full eastern wall of stained glass in an abstract pattern. Breakfast is always eaten in silence, and dinner is silent until after a reading from the Lives of the Saints. The brothers are soft-spoken at all times, so we tend to be so as well. At lunch, the soup is ladled out by Brother Peter, who smiles as though this is an ecstatic oblation.

Brother Peter Zhou Bang-Jiu was professed to the original St. Benedict’s Priory in Chengtu, China. In 1952, after several years of persecution, the Communist regime expelled the European monks from China, closed the abbey, and threw Brother Peter into prison, where he remained for 26 years. He kept his sanity by writing copious amounts of poetry, which he committed to memory for lack of pen and paper. He rejoined the abbey, transplanted to Valyermo in 1984 and has served here ever since. His presence alone is a blessing.

The weekend officially comes to an end on Sunday morning, when we hold a private Lutheran service amid a stand of rustling white Aspen trees planted in 1954. As I drive the hour and a half back toward Los Angeles, I think about Father Patrick, Brother Peter, and all those who have journeyed with me and taught me about living a life of gratitude and humility. The purpose of the desert sojourn is to have intimacy with God, yet I find that I have gained greater intimacy with my fellow church members also. The challenge is to keep these gifts once I leave.

The post My Antidote to L.A’s Madness Lies Less Than 100 Miles Outside the City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The regional library, where I first discovered Harry Potter and David Sedaris at age 11, overlooks the park’s urban fishing lake. Cormorants, great blue herons and egrets feed in the shallow ponds and reeds. It is the wild in the middle of suburbia. It is endearingly messy, and also breathtaking.

But I was not taken with the preserve when I was kid. My family hiked it on a sunny winter day in 1999. I trudged behind everyone, squinting. I wanted to go back home, read Harry Potter and imagine I was in the rainy English countryside.

The preserve had its troubles too. Shortly after opening in 1999, the park became a dumping site for unwanted house cats. Soon the population exploded into what the newspapers referred to a “feral cat colony,” and the local birds suffered, especially the pocket-sized burrowing owls. Authorities tried to reduce the population with traps, sterilization and relocation efforts.

I hated growing up in Gilbert, a conservative town where church steeples and preschools dominate the neighborhoods, and blonde moms in jeggings rule the grocery stores and strip malls. I hated the desert, and the stupid-hot Arizona sun, and the landscapes speckled with Saguaro cacti and dusty Palo Verde trees. I didn’t want sunny Christmases. I wanted the woods, snow, rain, and rivers. I wanted to be a writer, and writers always wrote about road trips, snowstorms, and sticky hot summers. They didn’t wax poetic on megamalls and droughts. In my mind, Barbara Kingsolver was the exception, not the rule.

I struggled through my junior year in college and worked a dead-end waitressing job. I wanted to be a novelist, but the only writing I did was term papers and maudlin diary entries. I dropped out of school and needed to get away from that feeling of failure. So after 20 years in Gilbert, I drove my rickety red Escort out East.

The car shuddered and died after a particularly wicked winter in Iowa, but I remained away from the Arizona desert. I moved around, from Iowa to Nebraska to Colorado. Every destination was picked with the same thoughtfulness of closing your eyes and swirling your finger over a map. My tattoo artist boyfriend (now my husband) inked a new section on my arm every couple months: The first pieces were an anchor on my foot, a 1940s Sailor Jerry pin-up girl on my arm, and a closed book on my forearm. I got a cowboy after we drove through New Mexico and Texas, an arrowhead while in a small town in South Dakota, and a cross on the arch of my foot after a particularly wild night at a bar in Omaha.

I started several novels but finished none. I learned that just because you can drink like Bukowski doesn’t mean you can write like him. I stopped drinking, we adopted two dogs and started hiking with them.

I found I loved the blooming cherry trees in downtown Denver, the fireflies flickering in an Iowan field, and hopping rock to rock in the Colorado River with my wiener dog, Zdzislaw.

Arizona stole me back in 2012. I visited in January, in the midst of a snowy Colorado winter. I ran everyday until my legs were sore and ate grapefruit fresh from parents’ backyard. Everything was just as I’d left it, but it felt like a fresh start. I went back to Colorado and gave the coffee shop where I was a barista my one month’s notice.

Soon, I was back in the Valley, living a few miles from my childhood home. I found work in a medical office and re-enrolled in college.

Even with my tattoos hidden under a cardigan, I stick out—and feel like an outsider in my newly reclaimed home. It seems like everyone in my town is tan, outgoing, and blonde. I am pale and quiet with a tangled mess of black hair. They drive everywhere and live at the gym. I prefer walking and taking the bus.

But, this second time in the desert, I love it. I no longer see it as a barren wasteland. I noticed bits of life tucked away in the sprawling city. I love the miles of walking paths and historic downtown. I love how Phoenix is surrounded by big hills, with the Superstition and San Tan Mountains looming nearest.

And I love that I’ve found a favorite place to go in my once-and-present home: The Riparian Preserve.

Over two years, I had grown into a hiker, runner, and birdwatcher. The preserve, I realized, is perfect for all three.

After moving back, I started volunteering at a wildlife rehabilitation center with a friend from high school and slowly learned the names of the birds, from the tiny American kestrels that dive-bombed the dry lake beds for mice to the turkey vultures hunched over carrion by the canals.

I now understood the importance of the preserve. Birdwatchers travel from across the country to see the flocks at the park. Suburban kids visit and get excited every time a rabbit hops by or a cooper’s hawk swoops overhead. The preserve has been the backdrop for some of my best memories.

Near Christmas two years ago, my rehabilitation team released a great horned owl near one of the preserve’s habitat islands at dusk. The group consisted of my husband, my friend from high school, an older couple and college-aged kids from the rehabilitation center, and my parents. We drank hot chocolate and passed around binoculars. By the time the owl disappeared into the thicket, the park had closed, and we were locked in. We jumped a fence to avoid an impromptu camping trip. It was such a mishmash of people I had come to care about on a random adventure.

Now, when I run the trails the same trails I once moped around with my family, I start at the lake. People dot the shore year round and fish for catfish, bass and rainbow trout. Cat fishermen recline in camping chairs and surreptitiously sip beer (Gilbert’s parks are “dry” and alcohol is banned). Kids fish with miniature poles next to their parents.

After the lake, I weave through the patches of deer grass and wildflowers, where amateur photographers snap pictures of newly engaged couples. When the weather is good, the trails are thick with families in coordinated outfits.

I pass the observatory and the gazebo where my husband and I got married two Octobers ago. I fretted for months about where to have the wedding. Country clubs and churches just seemed like a poor, expensive choice. I finally thought of the preserve, and realized it was the perfect fit.

The trail leading up to the gazebo parallels a creek thick with marsh grass. Every time I walk by the trail, I remember the pre-wedding jitters and saying our vows before the same mismatched crowd, our conservative families and tattooed friends.

The further I run into the preserve, the quieter it gets. The cottonwoods muffle traffic and form a shady tunnel over the trail.

I think of that one Sunday afternoon in 2014 when I finally came face-to-face with the now-dwindling cat colonies. It happened while walking my dogs. An ambulance blared down a nearby road and was followed by howls. My husband tilted his head and said that they were coyote howls. I argued and insisted they came from dogs. Our debate ended after we turned on the trail and surprised a coyote drinking from the creek. I jumped back, but the coyote just looked up and trotted away.

Later, I went looking for the coyotes with my binoculars. A park ranger spotted me on the dry lakebed. Instead of yelling at me for going off the trail, he pointed to a hill in the middle of the basin. A coyote pounced on unseen prey in the grass. Another jogged along the perimeter of the basin.

So much of suburban life in our desert is sealed off, which is part of why I once had to leave. I came back once I started seeing the cracks of imperfection. Gated communities keep strangers out. Homeowners associations maintain a sense of peaceful sameness. People spray chemicals to keep the weeds and scorpions at bay.

But the preserve remains. It is endearingly messy, a true home in the midst of the tidy suburban bubble of homes.

The post Discovering the Cracks of Imperfection in My Suburban Desert appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

tummy-showing and barefoot.

You should live where mountains and water
compliment your dual ascendant, the one

reaching for high mountain lakes; the other
the depth of ocean.

My patio fountain in the Sonoran Desert,
like a mockingbird, its trickling water incessant—

a waterboard.

The best change comes slowly
like summer, when Sun forces burnt skin

into action.

Even flies know when to leave.

I’ll wait to see if my wife packs for two.

The post The Melancholy of Moving Back to the Desert appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before a full house at the Heard Museum, New York University historian Andrew Needham, author of Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest, suggested that Phoenix had an advantage when it comes to questions of urban sustainability. The city couldn’t have grown as it did after the Second World War without reckoning with its desert environment.

“Phoenix has thought about these issues longer than other cities have,” said Needham. “One of the reason why people ask the question, ‘Should Phoenix Exist?’ is because of the interaction between the built environment and the natural environment here.”

Needham and the other two panelists—former Phoenix Mayor and Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, and Sarah Porter, director of ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy at Morrison Institute—emphasized that Phoenix’s record of sustainable design is mixed, depending on whether the topic is power or water.

Because water was so scarce, and because Arizona was in competition with other places (like California) for it, Phoenix did better in building sustainable structures. “Arizona… created a water system that has several reinforcing infrastructures that can mitigate for failure. That can make Arizona a resilient place,” said Needham.

But power was plentiful, and so Phoenix came to rely on coal and coal-fired plants from the Navajo nation hundreds of miles to the north. That power has had all kinds of costs—for the environment and for the Navajos, who, Needham argued, haven’t gotten the full value of the energy they provided. It also fueled energy-intensive suburban development in Phoenix—and the idea of a growth that could continue forever.

That said, the panelists argued that Phoenix is, in many ways, “a marvel,” as Needham called it. Goddard, the former mayor, said, “we created an entirely new type of urban living.” But he added that the city needed to be more mature—with everything from new sources of energy (“the era of coal and the long-distance transmission is just about at an end,” he said) to landscaping that is more appropriate for a desert.

“We’re just now beginning to mature,” he said, adding. “Do we make a prototype of what a city is going to be? I think we do, so we better do it right.”

Porter, of the ASU Kyl Center for Water Policy, said that, “in comparison with other Western cities,” Phoenix got water right. She noted two timely anniversaries this year: the 30th anniversary of the very first Central Arizona Project water delivery, and the 35th anniversary of Arizona’s groundwater management act. (California, by contrast, only regulated groundwater for the first time last year).

Those two acts made the water of Phoenix and Tucson secure, but change is necessary to deal long-term with drought, Colorado River water shortages, and the impact of growth, panelists said. Porter said cities need to include water plans as part of their economic development plans; the city of Chandler, Arizona, has recent taken steps to create a tiered water system that gives the city the power to limit high-water users.

She said the changes in water and sustainability would require more engagement from people in Phoenix, from changes in their own behavior to pressuring elected officials. “When was the last time you asked a candidate for council his thoughts about the city water plan?” she asked the audience. “We’ve tended to leave water up to the experts, but we can’t do that anymore.”

Goddard said that legal standards for water would have to be rethought; water rights are tied to using water, which discourages conservation, he said. He added that Phoenix has an opportunity—provided by its transportation system—to rethink its land use policies that have encouraged low-density housing and sprawl.

“You don’t have to have a half acre backyard and a pickup truck to be happy,” he said, pausing for laughter. “I know that’s revolutionary in this community.”

The event’s moderator, Arizona Republic columnist Robert Robb, took that moment to pose what Phoenix scholar-lawyer-author Grady Gammage, Jr. has called “The Bob Robb Question”: Given that outdoor water usage is half of water use, and that projections of shortage over 25 years show excess demand, why not raise water prices until you eat up that excess demand?

Porter called that a good question. But Goddard noted the political peril; when Tucson raised water prices dramatically to encourage reductions of usage, “I think the entire council was recalled.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, many of the queries focused on the particulars of water, water conservation, and the practice of banking water in the ground. Is water spiritual? one questioner asked (It is, especially in a desert, said Goddard).

The panelists suggested that people should appreciate the wonders of the desert more. “We do not honor the most biodiverse desert in the world often enough,” said Porter.

“The Sonoran desert is very beautiful,” said Goddard, while the hills in New England are “redundant—they have all that extra green on them. We take our mountains pure.”

The post Phoenix Is a Survivor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To call the Santa Cruz Flats a man-killing dust bowl is no exaggeration. Fierce dust storms known as haboobs blow across barren “playacitas”–little beaches of bare ground. When the Flats’ fine surface soils are swept away by dust storms, it’s so hard to see that scores of people have died in rear-end traffic accidents on Interstate 10. The annual rainfall is less than 9 inches, more than half of which falls during a monsoon season that may flood a normally dry Santa Cruz River to overflowing.

It may be hard to believe, but, until about 100 years ago, portions of the Flats supported a thriving, if fragile, grassland. In the summers, you could walk among grasses named Rothrock grama, Arizona cottontop, and tanglehead that grew up to 2 feet high. Ironwood and acacia trees regularly dotted the landscape and provided shade for mule deer and pronghorn antelope. Two species of jackrabbits were abundant, and, at the Flats’ southern extremities, you might catch a glimpse of a shy bobwhite quail. After a humid thunder-and-lightning storm passed, such diverse species as the green toad and the cheddar-yellow Arizona caltrop flower would wake up from their slumber as if by magic.

The Santa Cruz Flats were part of an ecosystem known as the Sonoran Savanna Grassland that once covered portions of lowland southern Arizona below elevations of 3,500 feet in places like Tubac, Altar Valley, Avra Valley, and Red Rock. This grassland received an annual average rainfall from 11 to 16 inches–a little more than nearby Tucson–with half or more of this falling during the July to September monsoon. The lower, drier parts of this grassland–such as the Santa Cruz Flats–benefited from flooding from the Santa Cruz River and from soil conditions with good moisture retention. There were no large grazing animals and fires ignited by lightning blazed occasionally across the landscape.

What used to be Sonoran Savanna Grassland has been swallowed up by the surrounding Sonoran Desert. Most sites are now so lacking in grass cover that some biologists have questioned whether they ever had grasses at all. Indeed, a century of farming and grazing appear to have made this change irreversible. Like the Sahara Desert’s relentless advance on the Sahel (the African transition zone in between the desert and the savanna), the retreat of Arizona’s savanna has been a one-way exodus. Only historical photographs and a few areas at the upper edges of Sonoran Savanna Grassland that retain their integrity give us a picture what has been lost.

The tall summertime grasses that used to grow in the Sonoran Savanna Grasslands at an unknown homestead in the Casa Grande, Arizona, area.
Image credit: Casa Grande Valley Historical Society

The transformation of tropic and subtropic grassland to bare-earth desert is as dramatic as any ever witnessed. I’ve been able to see the intensity of the loss because I study creatures such as the masked bobwhite, white-tailed hawk, and antelope jackrabbit, which prefer the grasslands, and have seen their habitats disappear.

The story of how the Sonoran Savanna Grassland turned into Sonoran Desert starts with the influx of homesteaders at the turn of the 20th century and their effects on a fragile ecosystem. These settlers considered the area perfect for grazing cattle, horses, burros, sheep, and mohair goats. But the Sonoran Savanna Grassland was covered mainly with annual plants that didn’t have well-developed root structures, making it difficult for them to grow back after cattle had eaten off their leaves and stems.

Grazing in this area typically left bare ground behind. And without fine grasses for fuel, the occasional fire ceased entirely. That led to wind erosion, invasion by woody shrubs and tough weeds that cattle didn’t like, and more bare ground. The livestock’s human minders were also able to settle in what was previously thought of as the middle of nowhere because windmills enabled homesteaders to raise water for livestock and subsistence farms. The tendency of these homesteaders to divert natural drainages and abandon farmlands only heightened the process.

This desertification went virtually unnoticed as Arizona’s forefathers promoted the area for statehood based on three economies: cattle, copper, and cotton. (Later they added climate and citrus.) A powerful “Cowboy Legislature” and pro-ranching state land commissioner kept many grasslands open to continual grazing by small ranchers and homesteaders. During the peak of homesteading in Arizona in the 1920s and 1930s, more windmills and stock tanks sprang up across the landscape, and their livestock nibbled away at what was left of the native grasses. Fires, if they occurred, were extinguished as rapidly as possible, lest any forage be lost.

There were attempts to conserve the native grasslands, especially after the 1890s, when a series of droughts caused catastrophic losses on overgrazed rangelands. In 1903, the U.S. Forest Service created the Santa Rita Experimental Range south of Tucson, to test ways to recover the grasslands. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt converted millions of acres of rangeland into national forest, protecting some grasslands at higher elevations. Since then, there have been experiments with livestock rotation, mesquite removal, herbicides, pesticides, predator control, and even total rest of the grasslands; but none has been successful when it comes to restoring native grasses.

Fine surface soils being increasingly blown away by seasonal dust storms known as haboobs. Image courtesy: David Brown

Those who managed rangelands didn’t understand that two grasslands were involved–a slightly wetter “Desert Grassland” above 3,500 feet elevation, and a lower, more fragile Sonoran Savanna Grassland–and what might allow grass to recover in one didn’t necessarily work for the other. They also failed to see the need for fire, despite a study in 1958 by range ecologist Robert R. Humphrey showing that fire suppression was the principal cause of shrub invasion.

There is hope for reversing the desertification. Eliminating, or greatly restricting livestock grazing–and limiting off-road vehicles–has resulted in a return of grassland conditions at places such as Altar Valley’s Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge and Anvil Ranch south of Tucson.

But removing livestock alone will not suffice—not in places like the Santa Cruz Flats where grasses are now mostly absent. Land managers need to aerate the ground to allow the shallow roots of herbaceous plants to take hold, even at the risk of temporary dust storms. Assisting plant growth by tilling and irrigating areas prior to the summer rains may also prove beneficial. Planting and irrigating native woody plants like mesquites along the fissures cut by water would also provide some shelter from the wind and reduce wind erosion. Natural fires should be left to burn wherever possible.

Left to current management practices, the short-lived native grasses may cease after a few years. Even occasional grazing could lead to an expansion of the now impervious playacitas and basins filled with fine clay soils. Winds blowing over these areas will sweep away these soils in increasingly dense clouds, and cover Phoenix and other Arizona cities in dust.

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