opinion

Are great draws like Coachella and DesertX crowding out what makes our desert great?

Two years ago, my daughter and I headed out for a hike to one of our longtime favorite desert places, Cottonwood Oasis in Joshua Tree National Park.

We found the parking lot at the trailhead full, with cars spilling out along the roadway. In 30 years, I’d never seen that before.

Turns out the park, already listed as one of the most endangered of all national parks, has experienced a huge uptick in visitors in the last few years that continues to increase.

I've realized that exponential increases in tourism to our region, unfortunately, are desert-wide.

Maybe this wouldn’t hit so hard if I didn’t have to endure gridlock on Interstate 10, and even Highway 111, for most of April, the result of the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals, wildflower season, and all manner of other festivals, events and wildflower super blooms.

Maybe I wouldn’t be so annoyed if I hadn’t been rudely “asked” recently to move out of the way at Tahquitz falls by tourists who wanted to take a group selfie for Instagram.

Maybe I’d be in a better mood if I hadn’t had to fight for parking at Thrush Park last spring to get past crowds gawking at Desert X artwork — a months-long installation last spring (due to return in 2019) that included sites across a 50-mile span of desert — just to go on an after-work hike.

There’s a disturbing implication our desert is up for grabs for any and all takers who want to profit from our open spaces and quickly-vanishing solitude and peace. It’s the type of land grab mentality that evokes the worst of the California Gold Rush.

In the past decade, large-scale, multinational renewable energy entities and investors — backed by the federal government — have been clamoring for open tracts of our surrounding desert lands. Eastern Riverside County is one of the most targeted-areas.

Well-funded, large-scale culture and arts organizations, meanwhile, seem to site projects where they please, seemingly without adequate environmental impact reviews and in highly sensitive areas.

Coachella’s producer, Goldenvoice, has trademarked the very name of this valley and uses legal means to stop any person or entity from using “Coachella” or the word “chella” for anything that might be associated with an event or product for sale.

Do I now live in a desert whose very name, and soul, has, by dint of its mostly-rural and therefore economically desirable vulnerabilities, been commodified, at the desert’s expense?

In the meantime, just down the road, the Salton Sea disappears — leaving behind playas filled with toxic dust that poisons our air whenever the wind blows — and the ancient aquifer at Cadiz is on the verge of being siphoned dry; both are victims of water-greedy urban municipalities 100 miles away.

I can’t blame people for wanting to spend time in this stunning desert. It’s a world-class place, and offers what I’ve cherished for the past 20 years of living here full time: open spaces, transformational view sheds, and unfolding scenic mysteries, as well as a close sense of a vital, ancient past.

I have this in common with every person who seeks refuge here as an antidote to less-inspired places: I love the desert.

But I can’t help but ask a question that keeps nagging at me:

Are we loving the desert to death?

Ruth Nolan is a desert scholar, author and professor of English and creative writing at College of the Desert. She can be reached at Runolan@aol.com