All the Wild and Lonely Places: Journeys in a Desert Landscape

Rating:
Summary: Not too much, not too little
Review: A near-perfect blend of anthropology, geology, human and natural history, it is the thorough overview of the Anza-Borrego Desert that I was looking for. There is no preaching or strong advocacy for either conservation or exploitation of the region, but rather a balanced presentation of the various viewpoints of a surprisingly large number of stakeholders. The easy-going tone and pacing make for an enjoyable read. There is a storytelling quality about the writing that drew and held my attention firmly but pleasantly. There was enough technical detail to flesh out the themes but not so much detail that I felt overwhelmed. The only exception was the chapter on the Salton Sea which included, perhaps necessarily, quite a bit of information on past and current politics regarding the handling of this unique area. While there were parts of the book that challenged my previous impression of the desert as "untouched" and "pristine" - and made me wonder if I really wanted that impression challenged - ultimately my attraction to the desert became more informed, not spoiled.

Rating:
Summary: Must-read for Californians
Review: There must be more biomass contained in the paper that makes up all the copies of all the books in print about the American desert than there is left in the same desert.

A decade after his pancreas gave out, Ed Abbey's books fairly fly off the shelves. Terry Tempest Williams seems to come out with a new book every several months. From lyrical evocations of some guy's weekend hikes in the Superstitions to the yearly raft of new books on running the Colorado, a legion of tomes from the masterful to the mediocre seems to have said just about everything there is to say about the hyper-arid west. Nonetheless, new titles seem to hit the shelves every time you turn around. If John the Baptist had come out of the wilderness into a modern writers' workshop, I do believe he would have been contracted, in print and remaindered before the last locust leg stopped twitching in his beard.

In a less crowded field, Lawrence Hogue's All The Wild and Lonely Places; Journeys in a Desert Landscape might have attracted the attention it deserves when it came out in 2000. It's fairly popular in the San Diego area, which makes sense, given that most of the action takes place within sight of Anza-Borrego State Park. But I've not seen it in nature bookstores north of Mount San Jacinto.

That's a shame, for Hogue has offered up an intensely important book, relevant far outside the sun-drenched confines of San Diego and Imperial counties. All the Wild and Lonely Places may appear to be a collection of musings by a veteran desert hiker - and it is, one of the most appealing such in some time - but it's also a stealth polemic. It's not much of a stretch to call Hogue's work one of the most important books of the last decade on California's environment.

That's not to say the book isn't a pleasant, diverting read: it is amply so. Hogue's matter-of-fact voice and intimate familiarity with the land are refreshing, and he doesn't spend a lot of time using the desert as an excuse for introspection. Rather, he spends his time (and ours) trying to find out just how the Anza-Borrego area came to be the way it is. A quick tour of the land's tectonic origins and botanic paleontology sets the stage for the subject in which the book finds its true strength: the history of human interactions with - and attitudes about - the land.

European colonizers brought much more than cattle, cholera and Christianity to California when they arrived here: they also brought with them a distinct collection of attitudes about wilderness. Originally a negative, fearful abstraction whose sole value lay in the resources that could be civilized out of it, wilderness was partly redefined by nineteenth and twentieth century environmentalists into a source of inspiration, communion, meaning. Other than the signs at the boundary fence, there's not much to distinguish the new, benevolent wilderness from the menacing version feared by our great great great grandparents. Both are valuable for what can be taken away from them, whether timber or solitude, gold or grandeur. And both are, by definition, untouched by people; outside the walls of human society.

Problem is, in California - and elsewhere in the west - it weren't necessarily so. The summits of high mountains may well have been avoided as sacred places. It's hard to picture people getting much use out of wide alkaline playas. But most of the rest of California - valley grassland, Sierra forest, coastal oak savanna - was intensively managed by the people living here. This isn't news: Kat Anderson and Thomas Blackburn devoted their book Before the Wilderness to these practices almost a decade ago. Native Californians set fires to clear encroaching brush, they moved plants from one place to another, they built dams to turn small creeks into seasonal wetlands. Very little of the state was unaffected by native land management practices. There wasn't much wilderness in the state until the white folks brought it here.

Hogue writes at some length about the Kumeyaay, whose traditional territory stretched from the coast to the Algodones sand dunes, and across what's now the Mexican border well into Baja California, as well as about the Cahuilla, the Kumeyaay's northern neighbors.

By regularly burning over their land, the Kumeyaay maintained thriving grasslands now in retreat throughout the southland. (A wetter climatic cycle that ended around 1900 probably played a role as well.) They may have introduced the "wild" California fan palms to the oases they now grace, bringing seeds or seedlings from Baja. They hunted and killed the occasional puma - after giving the cat fair warning - thereby helping sustain populations of the now-endangered peninsular bighorn.

They also committed acts of agriculture. This will come as surprising news to those of us brought up on the canonical observation that California Indians never farmed, aside from the irrigated gardens of the Yuman tribes. The Kumeyaay didn't plow the earth, but they did engage in a form of no-till agriculture that might as well have been taught by Masanobu Fukuoka. They planted grasses, harvested and saved seeds, and planted again the next season, slowly breeding large-seeded cultivars about as wild as red winter wheat.

This is the landscape that the colonists found. Calling it a wilderness is a bit of a stark judgment of the prior inhabitants. When you call a forest a wilderness, despite the clear fact that it's been intensively tended, you're saying something about the people that tended it. If it's land untouched by human hands, then clearly the hands managing it have been something less than human. We moved into this house and said the builder never existed.

Gary Nabhan, who for years has written about the Tohono O'odham and their neighbors in the Sonoran Desert, tells of the oasis at Quitobaquito, once a thriving settlement right on the US-Mexico line, now part of Organ Pipe National Monument. When the Tohono O'odham lived there, the spring-fed pond was a spectacularly diverse assemblage of bird and plant life. Under the protection of the National Park Service, biodiversity has declined to the point that on a visit a few years back, I saw perhaps five bird species there in two hours. A similar oasis across the line in Mexico, still fringed by small O'odham family farm plots, still bears diversity like that Quitobaquito once hosted.

When the Kumeyaay, the facilitators of San Diego's biodiversity, were denied access to most of their land, says Hogue, that biodiversity likewise started to decline. Grazing cattle had something to do with that decline, of course, as did a litany of other environmental events Hogue catalogs. There's tamarisk, the bane of desert wetlands, imported as an ornamental windbreak and now sucking the life out of watercourses from Texas to Torrey Pines Reserve. The US military used part of the Anza-Borrego area for target practice; live ordnance is now a permanent addition to the landscape. Off-road vehicles scar much of what the Pentagon left alone, though an observer less charitable than Hogue might suggest that unexploded bombs pose a potential solution to that vector for damage.

The ferocity with which Anglo-Californians treated the landscape was reflected in their dealings with the Kumeyaay. Hogue gives a brief but compelling description of the Jacumba Massacre, sparked by a few missing cattle, a two-hour gun battle that may have killed a dozen or two natives, and certainly drove any survivors out of the Jacumba area. In an ironic twist, even belated attempts to protect the land compounded the damage to the Kumeyaay, who made up much of the ranching population barred from Anza-Borrego State Park a quarter century ago.

Though the material compels anger, Hogue is no browbeating ideologue. He's sympathetic to the white settlers who populated the land. That's sensible, as he's one of them.

He may not get that sympathy returned from all quarters. In a day when environmental activism is still informed by long-discarded ecological concepts such as the "balance of nature" and ecological "communities," pointing out the capricious, stochastic nature of environmental change in the Far West can earn you green detractors.

Nonetheless, the nature of nature in California has far less to do with stable climax forests and regular predator-prey cycles than would be the case in the Pine Barrens or the Schwartzwald. Out here, it's all landslides and flash floods, lakes drying into toxic chemical flats and rivers changing course. Hogue does a great job conveying the consequences of the last two in his chapter on the Salton Sea, avoiding the tempting easy answers. Do we spend billions to restore the accidental lake to non-toxicity, providing habitat for white pelicans and real estate speculators? Or do we let the sump dry up, sending the water to the critically ill Colorado River Delta? Either way, we may well be trying to make a decision that's best left to the river, which has filled the Salton Sea (Lake Cahuilla) at somewhat random intervals over the millennia, then changed course to let the sea turn to sun-baked mud.

We would do well to consider the native way of looking at this natural unpredictability, and Hogue's portrayal is an enjoyable shattering of common preconceptions on the subject. The most prevalent of those preconceptions is the one that leads people to speak of Indians in the past tense, but those native ways of looking at the land aren't entirely lost. The Kumeyaay Campo Environmental Protection Agency is restoring wetlands on tribal land using traditional techniques, and the plants and animals are responding. Far to the north, a consortium of tribes works to restore the Sinkyone Intertribal Park on the Lost Coast. The California Indian Basketweavers' Association is changing the way land managers use herbicides in wildlands throughout the state, and the Timbisha Shoshone may yet win the right to tend much of the landscape in their traditional territory in Death Valley National Park.

Mainstream environmentalists often ignore these initiatives, if they don't actively oppose them - as has been the case with the Timbisha. This is unfortunate. No one would be served if environmentalists uncritically adopted policies just because Indians said we should. But the least we can do is agree that the homebuilder exists.

We might even ask for a copy of the blueprints.

Rating:
Summary: Almost all I ever wanted to know
Review: Vastly expanded my consciousness regarding the desert I love. A beautifully written book based on a tremendous amount of personal experience, research, and soul searching.

Rating:
Summary: Almost all I ever wanted to know
Review: Vastly expanded my consciousness regarding the desert I love. A beautifully written book based on a tremendous amount of personal experience, research, and soul searching.