My beloved California desert calls me back, for powerful men once again threaten it with the stroke of a pen. They would trade its peace, its wonderous desert plants and animals, for nothing more important than commerce.

These men would have you believe that our desert’s marvelous National Parks, Monuments, and Preserves were created out of Presidential whims to thwart the will of the people. To that end, men like Representative Paul Cook claim that the desert’s newest protected treasures— Mojave Trails and Castle Mountains National Monuments — should be reduced in size to remedy what Cook calls “dirty closed-door politics,” and that he would have supported those monuments had they been subject to a “thorough public vetting process.”

Representative Paul Cook

I confess I am confused to learn that Representative Cook is a retired Marine Corps colonel. In my experience, gentlemen associated with the Marine Corps seldom lie. And when they do lie, they do so far less clumsily than does Colonel Cook. That is, if the recent article in the Barstow newspaper which I quote above may be taken as representative of his craft.

As an aside, I cannot help but chortle at Representative Cook’s professed objection to “closed-door politics.” According to the newspapers, he has been hiding on the other side of just such doors since the last Presidential election.

The Congressman’s essay holds more half-truths, mistruths, and untruths than Mojave Trails holds stones, but one particularly egregious falsehood in his essay I must quote here at length:

No one side should have free reign in the discussion of public land use, but we haven’t seen a balanced approach in decades. Had Obama and his special-interest supporters chosen good public process in determining these monuments, the Trump administration would not be reviewing their misdeeds.

I have been dead since December 1945, and even I know that the creation of Mojave Trails and Castle Mountains National Monuments involved dozens, even hundreds of public meetings over the course of nearly a decade. There were small-scale neighborhood and municipal discussions, meetings among different interest groups, and informal public comment sessions across the California desert from Los Angeles to Arizona to gauge public support for these monuments, and to see whether opposition to them could be handled through negotiation.

And for the most part, it was not lawmakers who arranged these meetings and public comment sessions — though Senator Dianne Feinstein must be mentioned as an exception; that young woman shows admirable promise.

In Mojave Trails National Monument. Photo by John Dittli

No, it was the very people advocating for those monuments that did the work of surveying public opinion.

Of course, the comments on protecting Castle Mountains took place when all assumed that unique landscape would be added to the Mojave National Preserve rather than designated as a distinct monument. Representative Cook apparently hopes you will not remember that.

Sadly, a deliberately negligent Congress left monument advocates no choice other than Presidential action. If there was “dirty closed door politics” at play in the creation of those monuments, it resided not in the White House but at the other end of the National Mall, in the halls of Congress where Colonel Cook plies his trade. There, every attempt to protect Mojave Trails and Castle Mountains by the standard legislative process was blocked. Even Representative Cook’s pallid attempt to create a simulacrum of Mojave Trails, including a 150-square-mile theme park for mining, got nowhere in a Congress devoted only to obstruction.

And Paul Cook worked to aid in that obstruction, perhaps most notably in October 2013 when he voted for the government shutdown that devastated his constituents’ well-being for months after it had receded from the newspapers’ front pages.

That shutdown offers perhaps the best example of Representative Cook’s venality on the topic of the Antiquities Act. It was, after all, the Antiquities Act that, in 1936, allowed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to set aside 800,000 acres of the California desert as Joshua Tree National Monument. This was a culmination of many years of effort in which I was closely involved, so I know a little something about the Antiquities Act process. Were it not for that designation, unscrupulous plant thieves and other hucksters would likely have stripped the Monument clean of its irreplaceable natural wealth.

To its credit, Congress did eventually recognize the value of Joshua Tree National Monument, voting belatedly to upgrade it to National Park status in 1994. And now? Far from being the dead weight on the desert economy its foes feared in the 1930s, Joshua Tree National Park, with its millions of visitors per year, provides a steady source of revenue for California desert communities.

Steady, I should say, except for those periods when Paul Cook and his cohort decide to shut the government down over petty and destructive ideological issues, as they did in October 2013.

Paul Cook’s handiwork. Photo by the SunRunner

Eighty-one years after I attended the signing of the proclamation creating Joshua Tree National Monument, there are still profiteers every bit as unscrupulous as the plant thieves from whom I sought to protect Joshua Tree. Some would rob the desert of its priceless water, with no lie too brazen to enlist in the service of their enterprise. Others would parcel out the land in sterile suburbs, while still others would turn land once protected within Joshua Tree National Monument into a toxic industrial sump. (If you want an argument against altering boundaries of Antiquities Act monuments, look no further than the wartime carving up of Joshua Tree, the effects of which you still contend with 75 years hence.)

The desert has always had its share of deceitful people, the mine promoters and the water stock speculators, the men who would sell a sick mule to a traveler and then rob that pilgrim when the mule inevitably faltered out in the creosote. Although such a merchant might reasonably object to being mentioned in the same breath as the likes of the Cadiz corporation.

Most such reprobates, when pressed, will describe themselves as upright citizens. Many, over the years, have run for Congress. A politician sharing a falsehood is no rarity.

But when a man like Paul Cook threatens with his falsehoods to help wreak permanent damage on an irreplaceable desert landscape, it’s time for even the dead to rise up and object.

Thank you for your attention. I hope not to have to write you again, though that seems unlikely.

Yours,

Minerva Hamilton Hoyt