Only one desert: conflict, compromise, and consequence in the east Mojave

Abstract

This dissertation examines how efforts to reshape arid landscapes have repeatedly fallen short in the eastern Mojave Desert of southeastern California. An environmental history, "Only One Desert" combines close readings of archival records, government reports, land and water law, periodicals, maps, and oral histories with analysis of the desert's physical features and infrastructure to explain how the creation of Mojave National Preserve in 1994 reflected national debates about public land use in the West. This dissertation argues that land-use conflict in the East Mojave emerged from struggles over water, mobility, and authority to regulate access in an ecologically dynamic desert. In the early-twentieth century, desert homesteaders and cattle ranchers competed to control scarce groundwater and to stabilize an arid environment through pipelines, windmills, wells, dry-farming practices, and land claims. Drought in the 1920s exposed the fragility of these efforts, as litigation, intimidation, and violence revealed how survival depended on access to water. Conflict during this period emerged from attempts to impose fixed property regimes and agricultural stability on a hydrologically uncertain landscape. Later in the twentieth century, conflict unfolded around access. After World War II, Desert Magazine and four-wheel-drive vehicles fostered an access-based conservationist ethic rooted in engagement with the desert. This dissertation reframes automobility as central to desert conservation rather than merely a force of environmental degradation. Roads, jeeps, and off-road motorcycles expanded who could claim use of the desert and under what terms, compelling federal land managers to confront competing mobility-based visions of use, preservation, and enforcement. The 1981 California Desert Plan and the 1994 California Desert Protection Act attempted to reconcile these tensions through zoning and compromise, creating Mojave National Preserve as a hybrid landscape of Wilderness Areas, private property, off-road trails, and grazing permits. Early policing methods underlined mutual distrust between the National Park Service and resentful locals. By 2005, large fires exposed the ecological consequences of earlier management decisions and the difficulty of restoring a "natural" desert through administrative decree. This dissertation finds that late-twentieth-century western land conflict stemmed from political expedience, competing conceptions of ecological knowledge, and conflicting visions for land use.