Chris Clarke
Chris Clarke was KCET's Environment Editor until July 2017. He is a veteran environmental journalist and natural history writer. He lives in Joshua Tree.
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You might expect environmentalists worried about the Salton Sea to be outraged at the proposed cut. As it turns out? Not so much.
The deserts are largely unexplored, in a biological sense: much of our deserts' biological diversity is yet to be discovered and described. It's a floristic frontier out there.
Here are some resolutions you can adopt that will help protect California's deserts. What distinguishes this list of resolutions from most others is that these are all either easy, or fun, or both.
Leonard Knight, creator of the folk-outsider-art desert installation Salvation Mountain, seems to be doing better than some news reports in the last week might have led you to believe, but the mountain's fate is still uncertain.
Just about everything in my field of view is horrendously spiny, or coated with unpalatable resins, or armed with pincers, stingers, or fangs. But I can't bring myself to think the desert hates me.
Is the Riverside East Solar Energy Zone in the California desert appropriate for solar development?
This isn't the amusing asthma you see on situation comedies, that marker of nerd-dom that recedes with a few hits off an inhaler. This is the kind of asthma that sends you to the hospital for weeks.
At first glance, the ground cover in these spots may seem unremarkable, as if someone had just spread a layer of gravel over a dead surface. Look a little closer, though, and surprises emerge.
As of November 1, visitors can travel the spectacular Pinto Basin Road for the first time since violent storms cut off access September 13.
Native people work to defend and preserve their diverse cultures. And some aspects of that cultural diversity are far harder to preserve than a petroglyph or intaglio. Some are as ephemeral as a soft voice spoken in the desert wind.
There was one unambiguous piece of good news in the long-awaited draft documents about solar energy development in the Southwest. The rest? Well...
When the summer ends, and the temperatures slacken, the desert gets to be a more attractive place to spend time