The West has a checkerboard problem.

According to the company behind the popular hunting app OnX, 530,000 acres of public lands in California alone are inaccessible to the general public. That’s because they alternate with privately owned lands in the shape of a checkerboard.

It’s easy to see the checkerboard and its inaccessible public lands just by looking at a road atlas. The western Mojave Desert, the swath northwest of Lake Tahoe, and the area between Redding and the Oregon border all have alternating square-mile checks of private and public land. But it’s often invisible on the ground because no fences or visible property lines mark the change in land tenure. If private landowners choose to restrict access across their property, as they have in popular hunting areas in Wyoming and Montana, the public can be prosecuted for trespassing if they pass through to get to the adjacent public land—even if they “corner-cross,” moving diagonally between the squares.

Can the public get access to these lands back? In the eastern Mojave Desert, where I’ve conducted research for a decade, the land ownership map remained a checkerboard until 2000, when a groundbreaking purchase added over half a million acres to the public domain. But while this deal improved access to the California desert, it took more than five years of negotiation to achieve. Even with willing sellers, buyers, and millions of dollars on the line, it shows that public access is nearly impossible to secure in a system that privileges private property.

The checkerboard came about in the 1880s, when the federal government—which had claimed California as its own by dispossessing Indigenous peoples—gifted every other square-mile section along the region’s transcontinental corridors to railroad companies. Congress saw the checkerboard as a novel solution to a practical problem: how to help finance transcontinental railroads without paying for them in gold. By checkerboarding the land, the government ensured that the railroad companies couldn’t sell it to rich landholders in large parcels. The people behind these deals likely imagined that the checkerboard would quickly disappear into a landscape of small homesteads, keeping Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian dream alive while settling the West.

A 1942 map exaggerated railroad land grant holdings. Courtesy of Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography.

Things didn’t go according to plan. In high-value timber areas in Oregon, railroads worked with so-called “dummy entrymen” to file for the alternating public lands sections, consolidate landownership for the railroad, and sell the lands at high prices to large lumber interests. In low-value areas like the Mojave Desert, meanwhile, no settlers wanted to buy the land. Railroad historian David F. Myrick estimated that in San Bernardino County alone, 853,265 acres remained in railroad hands in the early 20th century.

By the 1970s, the federal government—like the railroad—had largely given up on the project of selling lands to homesteaders. With the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, it moved to permanently retain public lands rather than trying to sell them off. But that didn’t get rid of the checkerboard—the private squares remained in the hands of landowners, posing a problem for federal land management agencies. When Congress created the Bureau of Land Management’s East Mojave National Scenic Area in 1976, for instance, parts of its boundaries surrounded a dense swath of checkerboard, which prevented the agency from building access roads or making improvements to those areas.

This came to a head in 1994, when the California Desert Protection Act changed the East Mojave National Scenic Area into the Mojave National Preserve and handed it over to the National Park Service.

After decades of ignoring its desert lands, the Catellus Development Corporation, the company that had taken over the Southern Pacific Land Company’s holdings, sent teams to survey its lands for minerals and development opportunities, and put up large “For Sale” signs. Conservationists feared that this would result in widespread development across the desert, negating the work that they had done to pass the Desert Protection Act.

The federal government tried to strike a deal with Catellus, and failed. Then, a land trust called the Wildlands Conservancy stepped in to broker a deal. But nothing like it had ever been done before: How would a non-profit go about purchasing a half-million acres of land in a checkerboard?

By 2003, the Wildlands Conservancy acquired over half a million acres of desert land from Catellus Development Corporation, much of it “checkerboarded” decades before. Courtesy of The Wildlands Conservancy.

Even simply surveying the purchase posed a major hurdle—it necessitated someone check all that land—more than 0.5% of California—for dumping, hazardous materials, and development.

Wildlands decided to use aerial surveys, but GPS was still a relatively new technology, and prone to user error. One of the Wildlands’ former employees told me that the first flight ended up being a full quarter-mile off, because the GPS was using the wrong map projection.

In the end, slightly over 100 of the 631 parcels that were part of the acquisition required environmental remediation to clean up dumping and remnants of mining and squatting. Some of the parcels—including one that was part of a railroad “Y” where trains turned around—were so degraded that they couldn’t be remediated in time for the sale.

By the end of 2003, Wildlands had acquired a final total of 560,831 acres of desert land from Catellus. Through a combination of Land and Water Conservation Funds sales and donation, Wildlands turned these lands over to the federal government to become part of the Mojave National Preserve. The massive purchase kept open access to 3.7 million acres of public land that could have easily been eliminated by private landowners.

The purchase was possible, in part, because the acquired lands were surrounded by areas with conservation designations, or recognized as critical habitat for the federally listed desert tortoise. When areas don’t have such designations, it’s harder for land trusts to purchase land, because they have to make a case for their conservation value. It’s especially challenging to justify lands as conservation purchases if they have already been developed or mined.

The most important factor in the Mojave National Preserve deal, though, was that Catellus was willing to sell. That isn’t the case for many of the remaining checkerboards today, which are smaller than they were in the 1990s, owned by more people, and more entrenched as private land.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped groups like the Mojave Desert Land Trust from trying. Each year, they reach out to thousands of owners of land in the East Mojave to try to convince them to sell their lands. But their transactions are tiny in comparison to the Catellus deal, averaging around 100 acres per purchase, and many people just aren’t willing to sell.

Without intervention from Congress to sell or trade other federal lands in exchange for checkerboard lands to ensure the right of public access to all public lands through easements or condemnation or to designate checkerboarded areas as having conservation value, hundreds of thousands of acres of public land aren’t likely to become accessible anytime soon. As long as the checkerboard persists throughout the American West, 19th-century railroad robber barons continue to deny the public access to federally owned lands.

The post The American West’s Great Checkerboard <br>Problem appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the question being posed as regions and localities implement the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), the historic 2014 state law that brought regulation to California’s diminishing groundwater supplies.

Groundwater is the water buried in aquifers, the underground spaces between rocks, soils, and sand. Layers of aquifers are called groundwater basins. California has hundreds of them, and we could not live without them. Eighty-five percent of Californians depend on groundwater, which constitutes roughly 40 percent of California’s water supply (and 46 percent in times of drought).

SGMA was designed to protect the most overdrawn groundwater basins, often in rural regions, by requiring plans to balance the amounts of water being pumped from, and recharged into, aquifers by 2040. Complying with the law—and achieving sustainability—is expected to dramatically change the California landscape over the next. Two decades from now, state residents and businesses will have to use considerably less groundwater, agricultural land will have to go out of production, and local ecosystems will have to be restored.

SGMA tried to cushion disruptions from its changes by giving local agencies new power and broad discretion to form and elect a new species of local government—called Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, or groundwater authorities for short. The idea was to encourage democratic collaboration in the making of groundwater sustainability plans—thus avoiding the fights that have long plagued water policy in California. These groundwater authorities, having been created by local communities themselves, would be more inclined to listen to all stakeholders and to develop plans that would minimize local pain.

But the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority—covering 11,000 square miles in the western Mojave, including parts of Kern, Inyo, and San Bernardino counties, which sit above a very large pool of groundwater—has disdained conciliation with an alarming ferocity. Last year, it approved a groundwater plan so politically incendiary that it might have shocked Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher who saw human life as a war of all against all.

If the plan survives multiple legal challenges, it could bring a swift end to agricultural production in an important region for pistachios, force the closure of the valley’s oldest business, and cut off water to the unincorporated rural community of Trona (pop. 1,900). The plan’s aggressive provisions also might extend this water war into the San Joaquin Valley, Los Angeles, and the nation’s capital.

At the heart of this conflict in California’s inland desert is, ironically, the United States Navy. The Indian Wells Valley is home to the Navy’s largest single landholding in the world, the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, covering 1.1 million acres, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. Ridgecrest, the biggest city in the valley, is a military town, owing its economy and its relatively high education levels to the presence of this installation devoted to the research, development, acquisition, and testing of weapons systems.

Local officials, led by former China Lake commander and Kern County supervisor Mick Gleason, have fought for decades to grow and protect the Navy base. To make sure that SGMA wouldn’t affect Navy water, they moved quickly to set up an authority in the Ridgecrest city hall that they controlled, and that largely excluded major water pumpers in industry and agriculture. In the process, the authority produced a plan for valley groundwater that is bizarrely one-sided, even for the crazy world of California water.

Rather than phasing in changes over the next two decades, as the law anticipates, the authority plan immediately imposes enormous pain through fees greater than $2,100 per acre foot of water—so high that they represent an effective ban on agriculture or water-needy industry in the valley. Mojave Pistachios, a major nut producer, says the fees would force it to abandon a $35 million investment in trees made in 2011, before SGMA. Searles Valley Minerals, a going concern since 1873, says its water bills would increase by 7,000 percent, forcing immediate closure and the loss of hundreds of jobs.

Even stranger is the plan’s justification for such high fees, which could take this water war statewide: a need to pay for major infrastructure to import new water into the Mojave. Such a project is—quite literally—a pipe dream, since it would mean taking water that now goes to the Central Valley or Los Angeles, regions with more power than the Indian Wells Valley. In addition, proposing the expensive moving of water into the desert is sure to draw the ire of environmentalists.

This ill-considered plan has already backfired. Pistachio growers and Searles refused to pay the fees and instead filed expensive lawsuits that could reduce the groundwater authority’s power and budget. The mineral company even launched a public campaign against the groundwater authority, with backing from residents and businesses of Trona, whose water supply is also at risk under the plan. Searles’ campaign highlights the fact that it is the only U.S.-based company to produce a critical ingredient for the pharmaceutical glass used in COVID-19 vaccine vials.

The controversy has drawn the attention of politicians far beyond the desert, in Sacramento and in Congress. And that in turn has brought wider scrutiny to, and created water risks for, the massive Naval base, which the groundwater plan was designed to protect. Searles, in legal documents, has attacked the Navy, claiming that its water rights are senior to that of the base.

“The Indian Wells Valley is a microcosm of what can go wrong when the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is implemented without adequate public participation and buy-in, and without detailed plans for a sustainable water future,” Searles vice president Burnell Blanchard wrote in Sacramento-based CalMatters.

The good news is that compromise seems possible. While there are disputes over the models of how much water is being overdrafted now, both sides agree that there is enough groundwater in the basin to last hundreds of years.

The pistachio growers have proposed alternatives that would raise fees and reduce their water usage to the authority’s preferred target, but over the two-decade period set up by the law. If a deal can’t be done, the state should step in, put the current plan on hold, and push the authority to renegotiate.

Unfortunately, state leadership, when it comes to managing water and water infrastructure, is rarer than rain these days. And there are already signs of local conflict and litigation threats at other authorities. So, now would be a good time for the state legislature to send a message by beefing up oversight in SGMA. For starters, the state should provide more technical and financial support for the non-expert local residents and businesses designing these plans. California should also require that all stakeholders in a basin have real representation on the boards of groundwater authorities.

California water planning is enough of a battle already, without folks in the high desert igniting a water war.

The post The Next Great California Water War Is Starting Underground, in the Mojave Desert appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the end of the last Ice Age (about 15,000 years ago), there had been many interconnected lakes, rivers, and springs here in the Mojave Desert. Since then, these extensive waterways have mostly dried up, leaving just two intermittent rivers (the Mojave and the Amargosa) and one permanent river (the Colorado). Yet the desert, where the average rainfall is less than four inches per year, still has over three hundred springs.

Initially, these springs were connected to each other by the faintest of tracks, sewn together by animals who had come to rely on these sporadic waterholes for a nourishing drink, for respite from the searing heat, or to hunt other animals. For many years, the springs were known by the descriptions that Native Americans gave them: “cottonwood surround it,” and “red sandstone at its end.” Today, place names in the Mojave reflect concepts that were important to colonists of European origin: Badwater, Marl, and Soda.

The human history of the Mojave Desert started with Native Americans living within the desert, eating from the land, and tailoring their lives to its shifting resources. It continued with European descendants living in spite of the desert, as they mined resources like gold, silver, lead, magnesium. More recently, modern people have rushed through on massive modern highways, divorced from the rhythms of the place. Now, some Americans are returning to live in the desert with a changed attitude toward its land—beginning a new story of hope, connection, and conservation.

The indigenous peoples of the Mojave Desert adapted to the gradual drying of the landscape in various ways, but the springs and rivers were vital to their survival. Some early residents of the Mojave Desert stayed relatively stationary along the permanent Colorado River, like the Mojave Indians in the eastern part of the desert, or Cahuilla Indians in the southwest. Others were more mobile, like the Chemehuevi Indians. But for all, travel across the desert required an intimate knowledge of the landscape. Native peoples carefully mapped water sources, and occasionally included them in parts of song cycles, creating a verbal picture of the network of water locations to help guide their way. Various factors drove their movement, including seasonal food harvests in the mountains (pine nuts) or valleys (mesquite pods), communal hunting parties for bighorn sheep or rabbits, small-scale mining for salt and turquoise, and trade with coastal tribes. As residents followed game trails, traveled to familiar food sources, and traded, their routes, ever linked to ephemeral springs and rivers, became established tracks.

Spanish explorers began using these Mojave trails in the 1760s. Friar Francisco Garcés, acting at the behest of the Viceroy of New Spain, traveled north from Mexico in 1776 along the Colorado River. Then, guided by Mojave Indians, he continued west across the Mojave Desert to the Spanish Missions at San Gabriel and up to Monterrey. He was searching for overland routes to supply and fortify the missions along the coast of California from Mexican outposts such as Santa Fe. Friar Garcés described the cordial reception he received from the Mojave Indians, who were known as Pipa Aha Macav, or “people who live along the water.” His account of his travels spoke of threaded trails of desert oases and springs, from the Colorado River to the Pacific Coast.

Fifty years later, in 1826, Jedidiah Smith became the first explorer from the United States to travel overland across the Mojave Desert to California in search of waterways and furs. He followed the route of Garcés, by then known as the Mojave Trail, and also traveled along a more northerly route called the Spanish Trail that was originally used by the Utes and other Native Americans. This pattern of trail use, with and without the assistance and consent of the indigenous population, continued as settlers, miners, and colonists of European origin came to seek their fortune in California.

This shift was not viewed favorably by those who were displaced. The Timbisha Shoshone Indians were unhappy when they learned that the pioneers misunderstood the land enough to name one region Death Valley. To those who had lived in the area for more than a millennium, the natural resources of the land offered everything necessary for their well-being.

Originally, the Mojave Road was a trail used by Native Americans. Over time, it became formalized into a dirt road that wagons, coaches, and later cars used to cross what is now the Mojave Desert Preserve. Courtesy of Cindy Phillips.

A few decades after Smith, Captain John C. Fremont explored potential routes through the Mojave Desert to the Pacific coast, in the effort to push America westward to the sea. He traveled on known and unknown trails of the time, often following in the footsteps of Garcés and Smith. Camping alongside the Mojave River on his 1844 expedition through the Mojave Desert, he wrote, “….We were now careful to take the old camping places of the annual Santa Fe caravans, which, luckily for us, had not yet made its yearly passage. A drove of several thousand horses and mules would have entirely swept away the scanty grass at the watering places, and we should have been obliged to leave the road to obtain sustenance for our animals.”

This quote suggests that by the mid-1840s the Spanish Trail was already under heavy use. It also attests to the way increased traffic impacted the environment. Those impacts were to increase significantly after 1848, when James Wilson Marshall discovered flakes of gold along the American River in California.

The gold rush led to the establishment of mining towns, and all the businesses necessary to maintain residency—hardware shops, saloons, brothels, ranches—followed in quick succession. The population surged as men poured in, driven not only by a lust for gold and money, but also by the ever-developing ethos of manifest destiny and westward expansion. More people meant more incentive for the federal government and private businesses to provide roads, railroads, and technology. People and goods needed to move across some of the most forbidding territory in the United States.

Early trains were steam-powered and required significant amounts of water to run, so they followed the existing travel routes—still connected to the springs—whenever possible. Where hills were steep, engineers built elaborate systems of pipelines to bring water to the trains. Eventually, groomed earthen roads and asphalt highways facilitated travel by early automobiles, which were followed by today’s modern cars racing through the landscape on interstate highways. These highways (and airports, and modern trains) helped sever human dependency on, and historical connection to, local water and food resources. Government engineers dammed the rivers, providing seemingly limitless power and water so that big cities in the region, like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Henderson, today resemble cities anywhere, able to ignore local limitations because they rely instead on a global network of resources.

While native peoples of the Mojave Desert adapted to the rigors of the environment with only a few modifications, the explorers, settlers, and opportunists who followed adapted the desert environment to their lifestyle. Today, we drive holes hundreds of feet into the earth to tap underground water sources; farmers plant almond, pistachio, and orange trees where it once would have been unthinkable; and fountains, water parks, and artificial lakes are as common as in parts of the country with higher rainfall.

But behind this solid assertion of stability lies a disquieting sense of impermanence. There are many places in the Mojave Desert where one sees the rusted carapaces of abandoned cars, shuttered towns, and boarded-up windows—all the weathered icons of land running dry. Lake Mead, which provides drinking water for Las Vegas, has a white “bathtub” ring that is left higher and higher above the lake’s surface with each passing year. And when the air conditioner breaks down, we get a flat tire, or we run out of gas, those of us who live here are reminded that the Mojave Desert is not an easy place for humans to live.

From these glimmers of unease, a new vision is taking hold. People are again establishing permanent populations in Mojave Desert cities such as Las Vegas, Lancaster, St. George, and Barstow, supplanting the transience that once characterized the areas. A more diverse economy has replaced what was once seen as a way station or a place to get rich quick. This new permanence could bode well for the desert: We develop a greater interest in conserving what we must rely upon.

A more connected relationship with the desert will not foreclose on alterations. Indigenous people before us lived in a stable world, but it was not a static one. They took fish from the river and salt from the caves. They managed groves of mesquite trees for their own use. They burned, cleared, and planted lands to supply themselves with the sustenance they needed. But they did so as permanent residents of the desert—as managers and as stewards, rather than as exploiters. As we continue to modify our environment, we will become permanent dwellers in the Mojave Desert with an eye to the long future, not as passers-through to another, richer place.

The post After a Century of Neglect, Americans Are Learning How to Live in the Mojave Again appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We are a mix of full-time and part-time professional artists, retirees, and hobbyists. Some of us have years of experience painting outside, while others have had their first experience painting “en plein air” with us. We work in oils, pastels, charcoal, pencil, acrylics, watercolor, and casein. Some of us have elaborate setups with easels, palettes, umbrellas, and chairs, and others just bring a sketchbook and a pencil. What we all have in common is that we have chosen to work en plein air—French for “in the open air”—instead of in the relative safety of a studio.

I started The High Desert Plein Air Artists in January 2014 for community and companionship. I had been plein air painting for a few years by myself, but I wanted to meet other plein air artists in the Morongo Basin. Today there are around 30 artists on our email list, some from as far away as Riverside. On any given Saturday, as many as eight people come out to paint together at a location I’ve chosen.

Creating art is often a solitary activity. When I head out to paint alone, it is a very introverted, meditative experience. I become immersed in the landscape, consumed by my thoughts, interpretations, and reactions. Painting with The High Desert Plein Air Artists is a social experience. We share ideas, talk about potential sites in the day’s area, view others’ interpretations of the same landscape, and have someone to chat with when we need a break. The group also forces me to get out at least once a month—it’s a sacred appointment on my calendar that I can’t miss.

Our gatherings—“paint outs”—look different depending on the time of year. The Mojave Desert weather can be anywhere from gorgeous to utterly unbearable—and those extremes can occur all on the same day.

During the winter, we start around 9 a.m. The artists usually spread out and find their own areas to create. One person will set her easel up to capture the light and shadow on some rock formations, another might be painting a vista scene of a desert expanse and mountains, and someone else might be focusing on a bush in bloom. Some people work in a tight, detailed manner, others are more impressionistic, and some create strongly abstracted pieces. One artist in our group does miniature works on a canvas no larger than 6-by-8 inches. Martha, a professional artist from Palm Springs, joined us last year. The first piece she did with us, a lush impasto oil painting, was accepted into the Joshua Tree National Park Art Exposition last November. Holly, a retired teacher, does colorful, beautifully textured pastels of mountain vistas.

If the weather is cooperating, we will meet up for lunch and share the results of our morning efforts. At that point, some artists will continue to paint, and others will head home. As temperatures rise in the spring, we start earlier. The winds also pick up later in the year. Mornings are apt to be calm, but the winds can really whip up as the day goes on; they have been known to dump easels to the ground and blow works on paper across the desert.

As we head into the summer months, only the true die-hards venture out. We have to start at first light, as close to 5:30 a.m. as possible. We usually only paint for a few hours, and don’t have any group time. By the time we are done painting at 7:30 or 8 a.m., it’s usually approaching 90 degrees, and all everyone wants to do is retreat to the air conditioning of their automobiles. The autumn months are the most unpredictable, with everything from gale force winds and chilling rain to blistering heat. Sometimes we are blessed with an absolutely perfect day, and that makes it all worthwhile.

Joshua Tree National Park covers 1,234 square miles, so we have many potential “studios” and subjects on any given day. I try to find spots with good parking, a restroom, and potential subjects that don’t require a lot of walking. The park is full of Joshua Trees, boulders, junipers, piñon pines, mountains, and more, and it even has a seasonal body of water at Barker Dam. I don’t know if it is possible to exhaust its possibilities. I’ve been plein air painting there for the last six years or so, and I still find new and exciting scenes every time I go.

On one occasion, I was struggling to find a spot to set up. A fellow artist mentioned how the light was hitting the cotton woods a little way down the path, so I headed over there and found my subject for the morning.

A session with The High Desert Plein Air Artists results in artworks that have immediacy, vibrancy, and energy that is difficult to achieve in a studio environment. Outdoors, we take in the subject matter with all our senses, and feel the camaraderie of facing the same challenges (and experiencing the same beauty) as a group.

But perhaps most importantly, The High Desert Plein Air Artists keeps me getting outside to paint and be inspired by the incredible desert beauty, and the incredible artists that join me to create and be inspired themselves.

The post Painting En Plein Air appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.