It has been asserted that Henry David Thoreau, camping in Ralph Waldo Emerson's back yard at Walden Pond, invented an idea of "nature" that was unknown to the pioneers. It never occurred to the people clearing forest in order to subsistence farm that a forest might need to be "preserved." As recently as World War II, with the tank training exercises conducted in the East Mojave Desert by the U.S. Army, the last thing on anybody's mind was "protecting" the desert environment. (The tread tracks from those tanks have proved surprisingly slow to erode away, according to a study done 50 years later.)

Of course, most people didn't even know they had "an environment" until the 1960s, when a change in public consciousness occurred which ultimately brought about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Endangered Species Act. Today in the Mojave Desert the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the National Park Service (NPS) are charged with protecting a large portion of the land, and habitats for desert tortoises, fringe-toed lizards, ground squirrels and Mojave monkey flowers are protected. The public is free to wander the desert and appreciate its biological wonders, while development and other activities that threaten those wonders is constrained.

If you are interested in a more structured approach to appreciating the desert environment, see the "Tour #3: The Living Desert" under Tours and Detours.

Last update 12:20 PM Fri. 27-Feb-2004 by ABS.