Welcome to The Mojave Beat!
I’m launching the website, mojavebeat.news, with this letter from the editor as the first post. I hope you will be a regular reader and that every time you visit MojaveBeat, you’ll find something of interest.
As a journalist, I’m basically a storyteller and I see stories everywhere. There are great stories in California’s Mojave Desert and I believe they matter to the people who live or work in the desert and to all Californians. I hope to tell some of these stories and also provide a forum for others to share theirs.
About 14 years ago, Peter S. Alagona, a college professor and historian, and Clinton F. Smith, an environmental researcher, teamed up to write an article about the Mojave Desert that was published in the Fall 2012 edition of Boom: A Journal of California, published by the University of California Press.
I came across their piece, “Mirage in the Making, Mojave dreams” in my research while building this website. A lot has changed in the Mojave since it was published, but much remains the same and it’s worth a read.
These words, from their introduction, remain true, mostly:
Energy is what makes a desert a desert. Sun and wind are the two universal, inescapable forces of every arid landscape. Together, they foster unique evolutionary adaptations and reveal the evidence of awesome geomorphic processes. But they also scour and desiccate the surface, while buffeting and irradiating its inhabitants. Energy is what makes deserts so majestic and intriguing; it is also what makes them so austere and forbidding. Excessive energy, in the form of sun and wind, has hindered the economic development of many arid regions. And the Mojave Desert, where both exist in extravagant abundance, is no exception.
I thought about those words while driving through different parts of the Mojave, some known to me since my childhood, some new. I am in awe trying to imagine the powerful forces that created a landscape that both repels and fascinates.
The researchers’ last two sentences, stating that economic development has been hindered by the sun and wind, aren’t quite as true as they were in 2012, especially in the western Mojave where some of the largest wind installations in the country churn out enough kilowatts to nearly exhaust the region’s transmission capacity, and Joshua trees are scraped away to make room for solar farms that stretch to the horizon.
Energy, as Alagona and Smith said, makes a desert.
And they continued:
Sun and wind have become the region’s most valuable commodities, and the Mojave now constitutes a key site for the global boom in renewable energy. Dozens of bureaucratic assessments, academic studies, and media reports have chronicled the issues and controversies surrounding energy development in the Mojave. But a larger question remains: What do Californians want from the Mojave Desert?
As I embark on editing a new news source focused on the Mojave, answering that question will likely be the theme of many articles. What do Californians — and the people who live and work there — want from the Mojave Desert?
A desert, in the simplest terms, is a very dry area of land that gets almost no rain, making it hard for many plants and animals to live there. About a third of the Earth’s land surface is classified as desert but because so much of the Earth is covered by water, only about 6% of the planet is desert.
About 38% of California is desert, mostly in the southeastern and eastern part of the state. The Mojave is the largest desert in California, covering about 25,000 to 40,000 square miles. There’s quite a span in that estimated size because there are transition zones between the Mojave and other deserts and the mountains.
The Mojave Desert extends into some neighboring states including Nevada, Arizona and Utah, but most of the Mojave (somewhere between 50 and 60%) is in California.
Although about 20% of California’s real estate is in the Mojave, only about 2.5% of Californians live there.
The fact that the land is sparsely populated by any definition is among the reasons that many communities in the Mojave are not only in an actual desert, they are also in a news desert.
There are a few ways to define “news deserts.” According to the Center for Innovation & Sustainability in Local Media, a news desert is “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”
I don’t mean to imply that no news operations include Mojave Desert communities in their coverage. Journalists at the remaining newspaper and broadcast stations, and some who have started online publications and newsletters, are still working hard every day to report news. Even people who run some social media pages and groups do a pretty good job of keeping their neighbors informed.
Still, dozens, if not hundreds, of governmental meetings are held across the desert with actions affecting thousands of people never reported.
Many people don’t know about actions affecting federal land — an astounding 80% of the territory — in time to have a say. The government follows the law and publishes descriptions of proposed projects in advance and provides comment periods. But without trained journalists to help interpret those documents and let people know, sometimes no comments are received.
The same is true for decisions of local and state government.
Journalists are working hard, but there are not enough of them to cover all of those governmental agencies and priority is correctly given to the communities with the most people.
I’d like The Mojave Beat to make a difference in this regard, producing work to supplement that of established media, but that won’t happen overnight.
After this first letter from the editor is published, I will add some of the first articles and you will see that they span a number of topics and include the lighter side of life in the Mojave, fun things to do.
Also, I hope to hear from you. Feedback from readers is like gold to an editor, whether it’s a formal letter to the editor or just a comment sent by email.
Expect a letter from the editor in this space about once a week.
And now I need to get back to getting some news published and making sure all the parts of the website work.
Best wishes!
Claudia Elliott
Read more about The Mojave Beat and Claudia Elliott
PS – You’ll see that some of the first articles I post are coverage of the bankruptcy of Searles Valley Minerals, Inc., and associated companies in Trona, a small community in northwestern San Bernardino County. Versions of some of these articles were previously published in The Daily Independent, Ridgecrest, The Bakersfield Californian and Tehachapi News. I’m including the articles dating from mid-June here because the story is still unfolding.