90 Miles from Needles: the Desert Protection Podcast

Blackbrush, Coleogyne ramosissima, is easy to overlook. Its tiny, dark leaves and gray stems can make a stretch of landscape look at best boring, at worst funereal. But this rose family plant’s low, dense canopy helps shape desert plant communities, and gives desert animals an important food source. Nurse plants shelter vulnerable seedlings from heat, drying winds, and hungry animals. Blackbrush may well be the most important...

• we realized that our continent's easternmost desert, the Chihuahuan Desert, is not as well known in many ways as its sister deserts like the Mojave and Sonoran. And we had to do what we can to rectify that! So in this episode, Chris chats with Dr. Kevin Floyd, botanical curator of the Chihuahuan Desert Gardens at the University of Texas at El Paso, about what life is like in the Chihuahuan Desert. Kevin discusses:
• Elevation, w...

Listeners in Joshua Tree and Moab may think their homes are overrun with jackasses, but this episode's guest has got them beat. We talk with Dr. Jennifer Anderson, whose diverse career has brought her to stewarding 300 acres of Sonoran Desert landscape in Mohave County, Arizona. But restoring her former 19th Century mine site has not proved as straightforward as Anderson had imagined. Western Arizona landscapes — and others t...

As promised a few episodes back, Chris explores a sneaky trick developers sometimes try to use to evade legally required environmental analysis of their projects. Segmentation, the term of art for dividing a large project into smaller pieces to obscure the environmental impacts of the whole project, is likely to become more frequent as the Trump administration keeps hacking away at environmental protection laws.

Chris provides a ha...

Desert Dispatch Media is bringing together artists and communities to document how the AI buildout is affecting desert lands and the people who live there. Chris talks with organizer Melinda Matson Spina, filmmaker Jodi Darby, and musician Sage Bond about their planned community-led documentary, a short film for public assemblies, and the stories they hope to gather across the Southwest.

Sage describes composing with sounds and mat...

For our 150th episode, we return to a foundational question: why does the desert need people speaking up for it?

Chris offers four answers. Deserts are widely misunderstood as empty or expendable. They remain surprisingly understudied, even when familiar species such as Joshua trees are concerned. Desert protection cannot be separated from Indigenous sovereignty, migration, heat inequality, contaminated water, and the lives of work...

Journalist Joe Dana of 12 News in Phoenix joins Chris Clarke to discuss questions raised by the August 29 flash flood in Grand Canyon National Park—and what happened inside the National Park Service before the disaster.

After the 2025 Dragon Bravo Fire, Grand Canyon Trails Supervisor Adam Gibson warned publicly that the upper North Kaibab Trail had beco...

Episode thumbnail photo by Bo Insogna.

The deadly August 29 flood in Grand Canyon National Park received national attention, but it was not an isolated event. Flooding struck communities, parks and backcountry destinations across Utah, Arizona and New Mexico throughout the summer.

Chris Clarke presents four things we should understand about desert flash floods: they are regional rather than isolated disasters; they are fund...

Journalist Kimon de Greef joins Chris Clarke to discuss his new book, The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence.

The Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius) spends most of the year underground, emerging to breed during summer rainstorms. It is a...

We think of range maps as static representations of where plants and animals belong. It doesn't often occur to us that maps are just snapshots of a constantly changing world. In the Mojave Desert, two sister species of desert ground squirrel coexist nearly side by side. A field guide's range maps will tell you where those species live right now. But those maps also convey hints out of Deep Time, and those hints can explain not only...

The vaquita is the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean, but the handful still living in Mexico’s Upper Gulf of California may be more resilient than recent headlines suggest.

In 2025, researchers concluded that there was a 67 percent probability that seven to ten distinct vaquitas had been observed in the study area. That was a count of animals seen, not an estimate of the species’ total remaining popula...

Border-wall contractors have destroyed three ancient Fremont cottonwoods in Lochiel, Arizona. Estimated to have been 200 to 250 years old, the trees stood in the path of two proposed 30-foot walls through the San Rafael Valley.

One landmark cottonwood remains. Activists have occupied it in what may be the first tree sit organized against border-wall construction.

Kate Scott joins Chris Clarke from the Casita de la Esperanza, the ac...

Federal environmental laws matter. They have prevented destructive projects, protected wildlife and cultural sites, and given communities a way to challenge powerful interests. But laws are only as durable as the political support behind them.

As the Trump administration weakens environmental and cultural protections, Chris Clarke asks what happens when desert advocates rely too heavily on Washington. If federal law is the only def...

On July 13, 2026, President Trump announced new reductions of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, removing protections from nearly three million acres. The action again places Tribal cultural landscapes, wildlife habitat, watersheds and public lands at risk from mining, drilling and other development.

Writer Morgan Sjogren joins Chris Clarke from southern Utah. Sjogren has traveled these landscapes extensiv...

• An Australian company has amassed mining claims across roughly 20,000 acres near Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree National Park. Dateline Resources says its Music Valley project could produce heavy rare-earth elements. Residents and conservationists see the possibility of an enormous industrial operation beside homes, wilderness, desert tortoise habitat, and one of the country’s best-known national pa...

Fireworks are an American tradition—and a predictable source of wildland fires. Every year, July Fourth produces a sharp national increase in firework-related ignitions, with many occurring in the western United States.

In desert landscapes, the danger is growing. Invasive annual grasses now carry flames through habitats where large, frequent fires were once uncommon. A single ignition can kill slow-growing native plants, des...

We visit the Amargosa watershed to discuss Greenlink West, a transmission project now under construction that will ship energy from Vegas-area solar facilities to data centers near Reno. This project not only threatens to enable an explosion of data centers in Northern Nevada, but also incentivizes solar developers to concentrate development in largely untouched desert in the Mojave and Great Basin.

Key Takeaways:

• The Greenli...

In this timely episode, Chris discusses the best ways to avoid becoming a statistic while hiking during desert heat waves. He also points out that the vast majority of people suffering injury and death from extreme heat have little other choice. Migrants, the incarcerated, and outdoor labor all face serious threats from hot weather, with little recourse to protect themselves. That's why state and federal protections for workers and...

In the wake of a personal loss and a several-week hiatus, our host Chris wonders about the future of the podcast and whether it's doing what we need it to do to get to the people who need to hear it. Listeners are encouraged to take a few easy and free (or cheap) steps to help spread the word of 90 Miles from Needles, including posting reviews on Apple, Spotify, or our website; boosting us on social media, and so many other possibl...