BLM limiting comment on desert renewables; New national park would help Nevada; Colorado River expected to be down

Sierra Club and Paiutes fight coal plant; Navajo memories track climate change; AZ considers allowing secret corporate environmental audits

The Hunt for the Westernmost Saguaro; Sonoran Desert plants no match for hotter, drier Southwest, says USGS; AZ Tea Party conspiracy bill would block environmental laws

Author Stephen Trimble calls the Great Basin desert the "Sagebrush Ocean," and points out that if you choose your path carefully you can walk all the way across that great northern desert in any direction without leaving sagebrush too far behind. With the shrubs filling all but the lowest, most saline parts of Great Basin valleys, sagebrush country can indeed seem a great gray-green sea dotted with mountainous "islands."

This sea may appear monotonous to the casual observer, but it turns out sagebrush is a pretty complex thing. Far from being a wild botanical monoculture, sagebrush has a surprising amount of biodiversity, recently evolved -- and still evolving as the Western landscape changes.

NRDC sues over Calico solar, wild horse capture scrutinized, Salazar asked to release Mexican wolves

Thousands of acres of federal land in Upper Las Vegas Wash not for sale; Rare fungal infection emerges in Arizona; Ocotillo Express project expected to blow in millions of dollars locally

Forty years of Vegas Sprawl; Ocotillo Wind Energy facility approved; Water ruling threatens national park

(First published at kcet.org)

If you've ever gone for a walk on a warm day on a narrow desert trail, you've almost certainly noticed little lizards scurrying away from you just as you arrive at their hiding places. Most of the time you wouldn't have seen them if they'd stayed put in the rocks or vegetation along the trail, but something hard-wired into their brains makes them burst out into the open as you pass.

More often than not in the California desert, this panic-attacked scurrier is a common side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana), which is one of the most common lizards in the desert -- and the species most likely to be enjoying the same sunny afternoon you are. But this lizard isn't just a pleasant companion on walks; it's one of the niftiest evolutionary curiosities the desert has to offer.

(First published at kcet.org.)

It's not easy to find information on the Black Hills online. At least not for the Black Hills in the remote desert of Imperial County. Wikipedia lists four distinct mountain ranges named "Black Hills" in California alone -- one of them with two separate entries for its Kern and San Bernardino County portions. The first one that shows up in a Google search on "Black Hills California" is a small range outside Temecula in Riverside County.

Narrow your search only to cover any "Black Hills" that may be in Imperial County and you'll find a lot of information about geodes. Most of what's been written about the area online has been written by rockhounds, who've been visiting the area for about eighty years digging for geodes, agates and thunder eggs. Geodes and their kin are formed when crystals grow slowly in cavities in igneous or sedimentary rock. At the Hauser Geode Beds and other outcrops near the Black Hills, the sought-after crystalline lumps formed in volcanic bedrock laid down during the Tertiary.

I wrote this in 2008, before the Ivanpah Airport proposal was shelved for the time being. I submitted it as a formal comment on the airport's Draft Alternatives Working Paper. Despite it being four years old and in response to a project that may never happen, I think the piece still helps explain some of why the Ivanpah Valley is worth protecting from the solar development that now constitutes the main threat to its integrity. If you agree, please sign our petition to support establishing an Area of Critical Environmental  Concern in the Ivanpah Valley.