Divining a Desert’s Future: The California Desert Conservation Area

• In Event: Sources of Conflict: Environmental Impact Statements as Methodology and History

Abstract

An environmental impact statement is a predictive document that considers risks in order to weigh the relative advantages of one path or another. To do this an EIS has to account for not only different values but different kinds of “environmental impact.” This paper will consider this process by tracing the history of the California Desert Conservation Area (CDCA), roughly 25 million acres in the state’s southeast. From 1976 until 1996 the Bureau of Land Management oversaw much of this area along with ongoing controversy over the desert’s use and the agency’s handling of it. Critical interest groups included conservationists, off-road vehicle users, Native Americans, energy companies, and ranchers.

In the 1980s environmentalists and politicians dissatisfied with BLM management proposed strengthened CDCA protections, culminating in the California Desert Protection Act of 1994. Arguing against this act, the naturalist Kenneth Norris warned that the desert might have unseen uses. “Will, for example, the sun-drenched and windswept desert be our energy source when the problems of emission-induced climate change and acid rain threaten to overwhelm us?” Norris asked in 1987. Decades later Norris was proven prescient, as environmentalists fought each other over whether the desert was best used for solar plants that would reduce fossil fuel consumption or as a reserve for threatened species and fragile ecosystems.

From 1976 to the twenty-first century, CDCA management involved dozens of EISs that addressed everything from motorcycle races to desert tortoises to energy installations. The constant process of seeking public input and summarizing different perspectives made the CDCA perhaps the most democratically managed set of public lands in the nation, and one of the best examples of how difficult and variable the idea of “environmental impact” can be on a rapidly changing planet.

Author

• Keith Woodhouse, Northwestern University