| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
|
|
|
habitats Wasting the Desert Even as congress hashes out the final amendments to the California Desert Protection Act there is an underlying mood of relief in the wild land conservation community. The legislation has been in the works for eight long years, and though it has been watered down a lot from former Senator Alan Cranston's original bill, it will still represent a major victory for those concerned with preserving America's greatest wild treasures. But while desert lovers anticipate a victory, they also cast a wary eye at an unsettling trend in the desert. There are currently at least twelve proposals for major dump sites in the Mojave and Colorado deserts of California, the state's answer to its growing urban garbage problem. A partial list of projects now proposed for the California desert includes: Ward Valley, a low-level radioactive waste disposal site outside Needles, near the Colorado River; a number of sludge (a.k.a. human waste) disposal sites on Indian reservations; a hazardous waste site in Broadwell Lake near Ludlow in the eastern Mojave; an abandoned Kaiser mine in Vulcan, in the proposed East Mojave National Park, which would become a disposal site for discarded tires; a rail-fed garbage landfill project has been proposed for Amboy, in San Bernardino County; at Los Coyotes Indian Reservation, near Palomar Mountain, a proposal has been made to dump five thousand tons of garbage per day; and a hazardous waste site has been proposed for Hidden Valley Resources, in Newberry Springs. But the biggest and perhaps the most controversial of these projects is proposed for the site of the defunct Eagle Mountain Mine in the western Colorado Desert. The mine's location was carved out of Joshua Tree National Monument in 1947, when the military required the iron ore buried within Eagle Mountain for ship building during the cold war. For 38 years, Kaiser Steel Corporation's 1,700 mine workers and gigantic earth diggers stripped away layer after layer of the mountain. In 1982, the market for the iron collapsed and the mine went belly up. Almost overnight the four thousand residents of Eagle Mountain scattered, leaving behind them a ghost town and a great scar in the desert. The Eagle Mountain Mine site resembles a cavity in a decaying tooth viewed under a powerful microscope. In the super-hot lowland Colorado Desert, which even in its pristine condition requires patience and a penetrating eye to appreciate, the four-mile-long mine site appears incredibly desolate. Forlorn pieces of mining equipment sit rusting around the pits. A red-tailed hawk flys by, searching the barren hole in vain. Otherwise, nothing moves. In 1988, the Mine Reclamation Corporation (MRC), backed by Browning and Ferris Industries, one of the world's largest waste disposal companies, proposed turning the mine into what they hoped would become the world's largest landfill site. Not only would the project relieve southern California's garbage crisis, it would also, say its proponents, mend the scar the mine left behind, restoring the desert's natural contours. The landfill project would absorb 20,000 tons of garbage every day that's a quarter of the household trash from Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, and San Diego counties. In volume, that's about one football field filled 40 feet high with compacted trash. Every day. The garbage would be transported more than a hundred miles between its source and the mine site, either in diesel-billowing trucks or compartment trains. Supporters of the landfill claim they are doing everything possible to make the site environmentally friendly and that the economic advantages the project would bring to the area's depressed economy would far outweigh the inconvenience or esthetic burden it might place on a few locals. As a Desert Center bar owner pointed out in a Los Angeles Times story, the landfill would "give me the opportunity to have more bodies to sell things to." But the project is especially appealing to big city bureaucrats, who are faced with increasing garbage and decreasing willingness to dispose of it locally. If some place has to be trashed, maybe it should be this place. Besides, says Eagle Mountain site manager Orlo Anderson as we stand at the top of the mine looking out over the desert, "there aren't many neighbors to bother." Not so, say scientists, environmentalists, and the National Park Service, stewards of Joshua Tree National Monument. One long-residing neighbor is the Mojave desert tortoise, a resident of these parts for the last 20 million years. The tortoise, listed as threatened on the Endangered Species List, is doing relatively well in a part of Joshua Tree only a few miles from the proposed dump site. This proximity worries Park Service wildlife biologist Jerry Freilich, who spends much of his time tracking and studying the tortoise. He fears that the radical increase in truck and train traffic, the increase in ravens (who eat baby tortoises) attracted by garbage, and the lights and noise coming from the landfill will all harm the reptile's chances for survival in one of its last secure refuges. Preeminent desert herpetologist Robert Stebbins, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of California at Berkeley, agrees with Freilich. At a recent hearing on the completeness of the Environmental Impact Report on the proposed dump, Stebbins testified that the project would probably have a strong negative impact on the tortoises in the area. Stebbins was especially critical of the mitigation proposals put forth by MRC; they suggested that a biologist ride in front of the trains to watch for tortoises and that fences be used to guide the movements of the reptiles away from the highway and train tracks. "These mitigations just aren't viable," Stebbins says. The guy on the train would have to have eagle eyes and be everywhere at once and "the moment you put fences in for the tortoises you begin impeding the movement of other animals as well." Other threatened and endangered species in the area include prairie falcons, American badgers, and big-eared bats. As we stand on the edge of the mine site's deep crater, Anderson points to the north. "Over that ridge is Joshua Tree," he says. The national monument's boundaries now lie exactly one and one half miles (as the raven flies) from the proposed landfill. Provisions in the California Desert Protection Act would boost the national monument's status to that of a national park. Passage of the law would also alter Joshua Tree's boundaries so that the park would surround Kaiser's property on three sides and bring its borders within less than a mile of the dump. The landfill and its activities would be clearly visible to park visitors from the Coxcomb Mountains. Furthermore, says a letter from the park to the Environmental Protection Agency, visitors may smell the landfill from the park, a fact that they say could "interfere with the enjoyment" of Joshua Tree. "That's just too close," says Freilich. "We have no idea what this thing is going to do. There is no literature on the effects of landfills on deserts.... It's an experiment on a huge scale. "But, if I were experimenting with a chemical spot remover, I'd try it first on the inside in the back of an old jacket. I wouldn't try it on the front of my best suit," Freilich says. "This experiment is going to last 115 years, and we're going to conduct it on the jewel of our desert parkland?"
A few kilometers to the south of the mine are other concerned neighbors. Donna and Larry Charpied moved here 13 years ago to get away from the bustle of the city. They've been eking out a living growing organic jojoba, a native desert plant that produces an oil used for cosmetics and as a lubricant for high-speed machines. The Charpieds, founding members of Citizens for Chuckwalla Valley, along with six other local complainants, recently sued Riverside County for granting MRC permits based on what a superior court judge agreed was an inadequate environmental impact report. The Charpieds charged the landfill could ruin the groundwater supply. Though MRC's plans call for a thick, multi-layered lining of plastics and other materials, neither the Charpieds nor the courts are convinced that these will keep poisons collecting in the bottom of the pits from escaping into the water table, especially after a major earthquake. "It's completely untested," says Larry Charpied. "And if 50 years from now they find it leaking, they won't be able to move a mountain of garbage to find out what's going on underneath it." Though the Charpieds have substantial health and safety concerns about the landfill project, their opposition seems also to be a matter of principle, a principle shared by many of the local opponents of desert dumping. Danny Roman, president of the Eagle Mountain Landfill Opposition Coalition (EMLOC), doesn't think residents of the Coachella Valley should be responsible for everyone else's garbage. Unless cities take the problems of their own waste seriously, he says, they won't have any incentive to curb the real problem: they create far too much garbage. Indeed, the average American produces twice as much waste as the average German. And the average German's rate of consumption wouldn't be sustainable if the whole world adopted it. Installing "bottomless" desert dumps encourages city- dwellers to indulge their consumptive lifestyle without even giving it a thought. That, according to Roman, wouldn't be doing anybody (except maybe the owners of the dump and the producers of the paper and plastic products that make up most of our garbage) a favor; not Los Angelinos, desert dwellers, nor desert habitats and creatures who inhabit them. For the moment it looks like opponents have succeeded in at least temporarily postponing MRC's 1995 target start date. With Judge Judith McConnell's ruling in July, the decisions to host the landfill may be sent back to the county Board of Supervisors, whose membership has changed in composition and disposition since the earlier, approving vote. Kay Hazen, spokeswoman for MRC, is trying to remain hopeful that the Goliath landfill will get back on its feet. "A lot of people around here want this project; the economic ripple from the 200 people employed would spread out through the valley. And it's the ultimate recycling facility, really; it reclaims the land, while encouraging the recycling of materials. Sure we need to reduce the amount we produce and use, but there's always going to be garbage and it should go some place as safe as possible," says Hazen. Donna Charpied sees it differently. "They have carved a huge wound in the Earth, and now they want to smear it with garbage and make it fester for a century. Well, we won't let them."
Gordy Slack is Associate Editor of California Wild. |
Fall 1994
|
