When I moved to the Mojave three years ago, I already knew about the plan to trash the desert at Ward Valley with radioactive wastes. What I didn't know was that the dump was just part of a plan to dump many types of waste in the desert. Southern California deserts have become the latest great frontier for the giant trash-and-profit waste industry.
What other dumps are planned? A brief inventory: A hazardous waste facility at Broadwell Dry Lake near Ludlow. Another toxic dump 15 miles away at Hidden Valley. Solid waste dumps of unprecedented magnitude: at Amboy, a mountain of garbage 40 stories high, 20,000 tons shipped daily for hundreds of years by train from throughout Southern California; at Eagle Mountain, one mile from Joshua Tree National Park, an almost identical plan, and yet another of the same scale at Mesquite in Imperial County.
All would bring air pollution and degradation of the environment, and would threaten scarce desert water supplies. So why the big move to the desert?
Dump advocates will give you many unsupported and self- serving arguments about how the desert is the appropriate place for landfills. But if we look past their double-talk, the reason the dumps are coming to the desert is clear: The population here is the least able to resist.
Landfills in the last ten years have become almost impossible to site in populous areas due to local opposition. The big waste companies like Waste Management Inc. and Browning Ferris Industries (bfi) are now trying to go where they think they will meet the least resistance. The sparse desert population, with low incomes, limited access to resources, and the perceived lack of sophistication common to rural people, are seen as easy marks.
Landfills in the last ten years have become almost impossible to site in populous areas due to local opposition. The big waste companies like Waste Management Inc. and Browning Ferris Industries (bfi) are now trying to go where they think they will meet the least resistance. The sparse desert population, with low incomes, limited access to resources, and the perceived lack of sophistication common to rural people, are seen as easy marks.
It's a big-stakes deal: Rail-haul mega-dumps in the desert would let metropolitan areas continue out-of-control development while sending their problems "out of sight, out of mind." At the same time, the waste giants get to team up with the big railroads, and sweeten the pot with the profits of long-distance rail-haul. Conveniently, the plan allows them to also consolidate their control of the trash business.
And who cares about the desert anyway? There's nothing out there, right? Although when I moved to the Mojave I knew I was moving to paradise, not everyone shares my view. Some who aren't familiar with the desert's beauty and abundant life perceive it as a wasteland, remote, empty, ugly and useless. Those who stand to profit from trash seem intent on turning this image of the desert as "wasteland" into a reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But everyone should care. What make this battle to save the desert so crucial is not just the terrible damage to a unique environment, and the willful confirmation of its image as a wasteland. It is just the threat to its exceptionally clean air and its scarce water supplies. And it is not just the injustice of heaping all of society's garbage on desert dwellers against their wishes.
This battle is crucial because it is an opportunity to help end out society's suicidal reliance on a one-way system of exploit, consume, and dump.
In the United States, we must eventually face the exhaustion of our exploited and wasted resources. We must find another way to live, based on values of sustainability. Clearly it would be best to begin to tackle now the immense changes that will lead us to a recycling-based economy, centered in waste reduction and the cycling of resources.
This will require a major change in thinking, and will not come about so long as we think we still have any "easy outs" left. Saying no to the trashing of the desert will close the door on one last major easy option. It will declare that toxic production, careless consumption and mindless dumping is no longer an alternative. And maybe it will get us started moving toward a better alternative.
The battle is here in the desert, and it is now. But the struggle is long and exhausting, and resources in these rural areas are scarce. Desert citizens are working to oppose the dumping, but we need help. We need the assistance and support of folks who see the desert as something more than a dumping ground. We need people who care about an opportunity to help turn our waste-and-dump culture around toward a sustainable society that will still hold promises for our grandchildren.
If you care about the desert, and about the future, you can find out more by contacting the Desert Environmental Response Team (dert) at (619) 361-3501, or write P.O . Box 1078, Joshua Tree, CA 92252.