Mojave Literary Laureate

February 10, 2021

The environmental group Basin and Range Watch is excited to announce its sponsorship of a new Mojave Desert Literary Laureate position, to be launched on March 1, 2021.

Ruth Nolan, author and editor of No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California's Deserts (Heyday Books) has been named the inaugural Mojave Desert Literary Laureate. She grew up in the Mojave Desert near Apple Valley, CA and has lived most of her life in the California and Arizona deserts. "The creation of this literary laureate position to represent the glaringly underserved Mojave Desert is long overdue and desperately needed," she says. 

The Mojave Desert Literary Laureate position will serve to bring the literary arts - lectures and writing workshops for residents and visitors of all ages - to the region's rural communities, and help strengthen the dedication of Basin and Range Watch to Mojave Desert conservation issues through these interconnected activities that will embrace both the humanities and the sciences. In addition, the acting laureate will represent the Mojave Desert through their own continuing literary endeavors - writing and publishing - in the broader California literary communities and beyond. 

"We are excited to have designated Ruth Nolan as our first laureate," said Laura Cunningham, Co-Founder of Basin and Range Watch. "This new position is so important to broaden our educational efforts to advocate for the Mojave Desert, and meld the literary arts with the science of conservation biology. Nolan has a long history of poetry and writing in and about the desert with consideration too for social justice issues of rural and underserved communities here. With this Literary Laureate position, we intend to finally give the Mojave Desert a voice."

Over the past decade, Ruth has led California desert-centric writing and literature workshops at the Desert Studies Center at ZZYZX; the Desert Institute at Joshua Tree National Park; 29 Palms Inn; Death Valley Historical Society; Copper Mountain College; the High Desert Book Festival - for which she received a grant from California Humanities; and Shoshone Village.

"I feel good about the groundwork I've laid in establishing these events through these previous programs throughout the Mojave Desert," she says. "I will continue to build on these community and organizational connections to strengthen the presence of literary events in these desert places, in a dedication to education and inclusivity and community-building, through the literary arts." 

Nolan will serve in the Mojave Desert Poet Laureate position through Feb 28, 2023, and will help designate her successor, who will begin their two-year term on March 1, 2023. 

See the Basin and Range Watch archive website for more:

https://www.basinandrangewatch.org/Literary-Laureate.html


Mojave Literary Journeys #2

[August 3, 2023 - Basin & Range Watch notes that Ruth Nolan's writings and poetry on the Dome Fire are now particularly current as the 94,000-acre York Fire burns through the New York Mountains and northern Lanfair Valley in the Mojave National Preserve, California, and into 8,000 acres of the new Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in adjacent Nevada. The wildfire raced towards Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness Area in Nevada on Sunday, but seems to be mostly contained in this direction as of today--Laura Cunningham.]

Witnessing the Demise of the Mojave Desert to Renewable Energy Industry and Devastating Wildfire, Courtesy of the BLM

by Ruth Nolan, Mojave Desert Poet Laureate

In the late 1980s, I had the privilege of working for the Bureau of Land Management, California Desert District on a wildland fire engine crew and also on the Helicopter 554 hotshot crew, both out of the Apple Valley, CA fire station. 

We routinely worked on fire suppression across the huge Mojave Desert where it spreads its majestic, Joshua tree-carpeted swatch across California, Arizona and Nevada. Many fires were sparked by monsoon lightning strikes, and some were started by the carelessness of people. Most were suppressed by us and other BLM crews, such as the one from Hole-In-the-Wall, in remote and scenic wildlands that few are lucky enough to ever venture into due to their extreme remoteness. 

Working on a helicopter gave me a close-up view into the integrity of the Mojave Desert's contiguous, mostly-unbroken land flows as it is spelled out in sacred geologic-ecologic eco-tones as one of the world's few remaining such places. And in the late 1980s, as a young adult, I had no idea of the preciousness of this mind-boggling, soul-nourishing place and how quickly and swiftly, just a few decades down the remotest of dirt roads, its demise would be sealed into place.

In the year 2023, I bear witness with heartbreak and dismay as the BLM has established and continues its role as a land broker for the destruction and desecration of many of these wildlands for the construction of large-scale renewable energy projects. 

I bear witness as at least one massive wildfire, in the heart of the Mojave Desert at Cima Dome, not far from one of the first massive solar project at Ivanpah in southernmost Nevada, burned 43,500 acres in 2020, devastating what was once the world's largest Joshua tree forest. It took several days for H554 to arrive at Cima Dome, I learned from friends in the fire-suppression community, and without that and other support for critical initial attack intervention - the pandemic of 2020 and lack of fire crews across California was an unfortunate factor -, the region was doomed.

Wee Thump Wilderness is one area that has, so far, been spared. Ancient Joshua trees up to 600 years old, long honored by the Southern Paiute and other tribes as important and sacred ancestral part of the Mojave Desert, sit on a ridge with access views to both the horrors at Ivanpah - Bright Source Renewable Energy displaced several thousand endangered California desert tortoises and destroyed thousands of acres of ancient yucca plant communities - and the far reaches of Cima Dome. Imagine being one of these ancient ones, situated in place and time between the Colorado River - now dammed, of course - and the old trails to Las Vegas and the Mojave River and the ocean at California and all places between. 

Imagine being an ancient Joshua tree, bearing witness to the destruction of its cousins across the desert sea at Cima Dome and at Ivanpah, the precious Joshua trees and yucca, forever disfigured or completely gone. Bearing witness and posed precariously, profoundly, and beautifully with views all the way to Avi Kwa Ame / Spirit Mountain, sacred pinnacle of the Mojave and other indigenous desert people to the east. The ancient ones at Wee Thump, viewing all of this, holding that which sustains us all in a soulful sense, and that which sustains corporate greed. 

Having loved the desert to death in the unfortunate ways of recent land use planning - still loving the desert to life, this, clinging with shallow roots and a rugged, sun-shouldered tenacity through drought and unimaginable heat for centuries, to witness this. May we listen to these ancient ones and follow their ways, that which they point to, humming centuries of land-story songs and tossing and flowing in the omniscient desert wind, rather than the ugly prisons of death being mapped out by the BLM.