The Mojave Desert Land Trust, with assistance from the Las Cruces Green Chamber of Commerce, will be working to develop a similar marketing toolkit for the new California Desert national monuments. From bed and breakfasts to restaurants, to locally owned stores, hundreds of businesses supported the protection of these places. Now, we invite these business owners and community leaders to be a part of the process to market our new national monuments. In recent weeks, we have met with local Chambers of Commerce to help inform the development of the toolkit. We look forward to our continued partnerships in the months ahead.

The Mojave Desert Land Trust (link is external) (MDLT) in California acquires land to buffer already protected land, such as a national park, to buffer other types of public land, such as a Marine Corps base, to provide public access and to protect wildlife habitat, such as that for the region’s iconic desert tortoises. MDLT generally uses direct land acquisitions and has acquired 1,300 parcels totaling 58,600 acres.

In fact, "desert" may be one of the oldest words in the world, according to UC Davis history professor Diana K. Davis. In her book, "The Arid Lands," she said "desert" may come from the Egyptian hieroglyph pronounced "tesert," which became the Latin deserere, meaning to abandon and forsake, before becoming the "desert" we know today. Call it what you will; just don’t call it barren. “That’s the perception of people from overly green places,” said Frazier Haney, conservation director of the Mojave Desert Land Trust in Joshua Tree, dedicated to acquiring and protecting desert places. “It’s all about looking closely.”

The Mojave Desert Land Trust has acquired the private property in the Whipple Mountains Wilderness, 50-miles south of Needles in extreme southeast San Bernardino County.

Thanks to a partnership forged four years ago between the California Conservation Corps and the U.S. Forest Service – establishing a work-training program for post-9/11 military veterans – public lands are being restored and vets are gaining valuable experience and developing skills that are helping them gain jobs as they transition back into the civilian workforce. One of the most recent examples of this partnership-in-action took place a couple of weekends ago in the Rodman Mountains Wilderness southeast of Barstow.

Seeing water in the desert is a reminder to Danielle Segura, executive director at the Mojave Desert Land Trust, that monument protections are not just for what’s on top of the land. “We’re protecting not just what we see, but everything above it and below it,” said Segura, whose group purchases land and donates it to the government for conservation. “That’s important as we stare down problems like Porter Ranch and Flint, Mich.”