Protecting the Mojave Desert from Corporate Water Raiders
The monthly meeting of the Los Serranos Group of the Sierra Club is Tuesday, March 19, at 7:00 PM. Our evening presentation will be by John Monsen, Consultant, National Parks Conservation Association and Chris Clarke, the California Desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. The meeting will be held in the Etiwanda Room at The Goldy S. Lewis Community Center, 11200 Base Line Road, Rancho Cucamonga. New members and the public are welcome. Click on the title "Los Serranos Meeting 3/19" above to see the rest of the description.
The Cadiz Inc water mining project hopes to extract 50,000 acre-feet of water per year from under one the driest places in California, the Mojave Trails National Monument near Joshua Tree National Park. Cadiz wants to sell it to major water districts across Southern California. As the latest science shows, the Cadiz-Inc. planned drawdown of underground Mojave Desert water that is up to 15,000 years old would have devastating impacts on the desert springs that sustain life. This includes Bonanza Springs, which is critical to Desert Bighorn Sheep. John Monsen will present information on the problem and what can be done to stop Cadiz from destroying the desert environment.
John Monsen, a long-time Sierra Club public lands activist, is President of JFM Consulting, which is supporting the NPCA in its efforts to stop Cadiz. John was on the Sierra Club National Field Staff in Los Angeles for seven years prior to opening his own consulting firm in 2011. In 2017 he was a recipient of the Angeles Chapter’s Extraordinary Achievement Award for organizing work that successfully lead to the creation of the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument. He has helped to launch several major Club campaigns and initiatives, most notably San Gabriel Mountains Forever, a unique coalition of environmental, social justice and community organizations that has been instrumental in creating a new and better future for the San Gabriel Mountains. John is particularly proud of his 13 year-long effort to help improve the deplorable recreational and aquatic habitat conditions along the East Fork of the San Gabriel River.
Chris Clarke is the California Desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), where, he works with desert communities to protect national parks, monuments, and other protected places, and the landscapes that surround them. Prior to joining NPCA, Chris was environment editor at Los Angeles-based KCET, the nation’s largest independent public television station, where he was responsible for breaking numerous stories about threats to desert national parks. Before that, Chris worked as publications director at Earth Island Institute, where he published the award-winning Earth Island Journal — whose content shifted noticeably toward a focus on desert issues during his tenure. A California resident since the early 1980s, Chris has lived in the California Desert since 2008. He lives in Joshua Tree, California with his dog, Heart.
