On Thanksgiving weekend in 1980, a crush of motorbikes roared across the Mojave Desert, tracing a route from the heart of California's Inland Empire to Nevada's southern tip. The off-road vehicles (ORVs) were in the early stages of the sixth annual “unorganized trail ride” from Barstow to Las Vegas, an event led by a mysterious figure known as the “Phantom Duck of the Desert.” The unsanctioned trail ride first took place in 1975 when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the federal agency that oversaw much of the Mojave, stopped granting a permit for the official Barstow-to-Vegas Race. Southern California ORV riders called Barstow-to-Vegas “the biggest and best motorcycle race in the world,” and environmentalists called it a “test case” for how the BLM—in many ways the runt of the litter among federal land agencies—might distinguish itself through careful administration of one of its largest holdings.Footnote 1 The route from Barstow to Las Vegas bisected the 25-million-acre California Desert Conservation Area (CDCA), for which the BLM was completing a management plan when the Phantom Duck rode again.
During the 1980 ride, clouds of dust kicked up by several hundred ORVs engulfed fringe-toed lizards, mesquite trees, alluvial fans, and a handful of people acting as monitors scattered along several dozen miles of the course. The observers included BLM rangers as well as environmentalists from the Sierra Club and the High Desert Environmental Defense Fund. For six years, the BLM had refused to authorize the event while also failing to prevent it. Instead, BLM rangers surveyed the unpermitted race and recorded its effects, working with environmentalists who walked the route and even flew overhead, snapping photographs from a small airplane. Together, environmentalists and rangers gathered and analyzed information about environmental impact. Working alongside each other with reservations but with a common purpose, the monitors demonstrated a quiet but ongoing association between federal agencies and private citizens at a time when such cooperative relationships seemed endangered, especially in the contentious West.
The 1980 trail ride coincided with key developments in modern U.S. political history. ORV riders crossed the Mojave just weeks after voters elected Ronald Reagan president and amid the “sagebrush rebellion,” an attempt by Western legislators to seize federal lands and transfer them to state governments. In the West, policy makers and resource users had grown frustrated with federal land agencies’ multiple-use mandate and the attendant environmental regulations. The politics of public lands and of the Republican Party appeared to have aligned; as a presidential candidate, Reagan proclaimed his support for the sagebrush rebellion, and after Reagan's victory Nevada assemblyman and sagebrush rebellion leader Dean Rhoads assured his backers, “Because of the November election, it's a whole new ball game.”Footnote 2 Historians of the West have long understood the election and the rebellion as a moment when Western antagonism toward environmental regulation fed a growing conservative movement, pitting environmentalists against a hostile administration in Washington, DC, and at the same time galvanizing attacks on the regulatory state.Footnote 3
Recently, environmental historians have questioned the significance of Reagan's election. They have argued instead that the weakening of environmental regulation and the decline of the New Deal order began years earlier, as environmentalists grew frustrated with the hamstrung and compromised agencies responsible for protecting natural resources. This account of environmental regulation has mainly focused on legal battles between environmental groups and federal bureaucrats, battles featuring administrative agencies that overlooked serious abuses and courts that offered immediate remedies.Footnote 4 The story of frustrated environmentalists using the courts to spur regulatory efforts is an important part of a larger narrative about political reform in the late twentieth century, in which Congress offered a means for policing an increasingly unaccountable slew of triple-initialed administrative agencies. The legislature provided tools that allowed public interest groups to use the judiciary to police executive agencies, from the Federal Trade Commission to the Forest Service, when those agencies fell short of their regulatory responsibilities. In the 1960s and 1970s, both Congress and the public grew more skeptical of agency expertise and wary of “regulatory capture”—undue influence by particular industries over their own regulators—and remade the regulatory system, partially outsourcing regulatory responsibility and setting up a quasi-adversarial relationship between public interest groups and distant federal bureaucrats.Footnote 5
Both of these interpretations describe the 1970s and 1980s as the downslope of a rise-and-fall narrative about the New Deal order by pointing to crucial shifts in political dynamics. However, by focusing on critical elections, influential lawsuits, or impassioned rhetoric, they tend to overlook the less fervent conversations and more collaborative efforts taking place outside of courtrooms and legislative chambers—conversations in which particular interests often mattered more than did broad ideological commitments. Those conversations sounded less like the last gasps of a fragmenting system than an ongoing negotiation over distinct concerns and wide-ranging rules.Footnote 6
Shifting focus away from formal legal battles offers a fresh view of the processes and the parties that made up environmental conflicts. Some of the very laws that both antagonized Western resource users and facilitated citizen lawsuits against federal agencies also encouraged collaboration, none more so than the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).Footnote 7 Although NEPA is best known for the many key lawsuits it generated through its mandatory environmental assessments, litigation was never the only or even the primary means of reforming administrative policy. Nor was Washington, DC always the locus of federal administration. In court, laws like NEPA fostered an oppositional stance between federal agencies and private parties; in day-to-day management, those same laws could rely on collaborative if cautious relationships between bureaucrats and the people they served. Contrary to simplistic and quasi-libertarian characterizations of the national government as always centralized and far removed, agency staff interacted with the same constituents month after month and year after year, fostering relationships between active citizens and a federal government much closer to home. Similarly, environmental organizations worked on the ground even as they lobbied in the nation's capital, despite what scholars and Western resource users alike have often judged to be overreach and a lack of consideration for local issues.Footnote 8
The contested management of the California Desert Conservation Area in the 1970s offers a key example of environmental regulation at close quarters. Critics saw the BLM, which managed much of the California desert, as a classic “captured” agency. But recreational trends in Southern California and two key laws—NEPA and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA)—shaped an environmentalism that relied less on lawyers than on persistent and often informal negotiation. Regulating desert use and developing a CDCA management plan was local work that depended on intimate knowledge of the desert and its visitors—a geography of regulation that emerged from environmental assessment and from interactions between federal managers, environmentalists, and ORV advocates.
In the CDCA, collaborative work helped minimize the effects of thousands of ORVs streaking across millions of desert acres. Environmental impact assessment regularly brought antagonists together in delicate partnership, with BLM managers and environmentalists working as unlikely colleagues. By the early 1980s even environmentalists and motorcyclists came together to ensure that one popular race's route would avoid desert tortoise habitat. Lawsuits were filed and conflicts arose, none more contentious than when the BLM canceled the annual Barstow-to-Vegas Race and the Phantom Duck rode in defiance. Desert management, however, evolved less through court orders than through an ongoing debate structured by NEPA and FLPMA. On the ground, the ties between private citizens and national government, so often seen as frayed by the decline of the New Deal order, had in fact become more imbricated. In the California desert, long-term work performed by federal managers and local users, all of whom knew each other, gradually fit regulatory practices to a vast and rugged landscape.
Environmentalism, the Administrative State, and the Geography of Recreation
The modern environmental movement came of age in the late 1960s, at the same moment that Americans sought greater participation in the process of enforcing federal rules and regulations. The broad public had grown more concerned about protecting civil rights, consumer safety, and environmental amenities, and less convinced that administrative agencies alone could handle these tasks.Footnote 9 Lawmakers either shared or acceded to constituents’ doubts about the federal bureaucracy and passed laws that encouraged public oversight of government agencies through private lawsuits. Negligent federal regulators found themselves increasingly likely to be sued by organized groups of watchful citizens.
Environmentalists were among the most organized and watchful. Soon after the first Earth Day in April 1970, environmental organizations concentrated on a strategy of lobbying and litigation, using Congress and the courts to advance an agenda for environmental protection. A raft of new regulations and an efflorescence in the field of environmental law furthered this strategy,Footnote 10 as did a reinterpretation of the “doctrine of standing” and the right to sue over environmental harms. Two key legal decisions, concerning development projects in California and New York, laid a legal foundation for a more liberal definition of standing that would grant environmental groups greater access to the courts.Footnote 11
Environmental organizations grew adept at wielding their new legal weapons, especially against public agencies. With environmental lawyers looking over their shoulders, administrators at offices from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Atomic Energy Commission were more careful to enforce federal regulations.Footnote 12 Activists subjected the U.S. Forest Service to special scrutiny. The Forest Service followed a multiple-use mandate requiring that it balance the competing interests of industry, agriculture, recreation, and conservation, but environmentalists complained that the agency privileged the first two. Legal battles over wilderness designation in national forests in the wake of the Wilderness Act of 1964 triggered lawsuits based on NEPA violations and initiated decades of legal actions against the agency.Footnote 13 Seemingly isolated fights like the spotted owl controversy of the 1980s were nationally visible skirmishes in a long-running contest over Forest Service policy and autonomy. As the judicial and legislative branches began to challenge agency independence after the 1960s, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek write, the Forest Service “bore the most sustained assault from the courts and Congress” of all federal land agencies, an assault coordinated by legislators and jurists and waged by environmentalists.Footnote 14
National forests, flush with scenic vistas and familiar recreational opportunities, assumed prominence of place in legal battles over federal land management. Level, arid, and vacant public lands attracted less ongoing attention from environmentalists. By the 1970s, though, recreation had come to the desert. More people using desert lands with greater frequency produced more immediate and more persistent clashes, and soon managing a sparse, dry landscape was no less fraught than managing a lush mountainside. BLM administrators in desert districts were unused to combining large-scale planning with ground-level administration, and they worked in an agency with decades less management experience than the Forest Service. While influential court battles over national forests emphasized the adversarial and juridical nature of environmental regulation, desert management featured a more haphazard and collaborative approach.
Desert recreation started with cities, even when cities were nowhere in sight. Historians have tended to follow roads and suburban subdivisions in order to track the winnowing of open space by a consumption-fueled midcentury American society; lawns and asphalt signified the broad extent to which the postwar economic and population booms pushed mostly middle-class Americans, in great numbers, into what had been sparsely populated landscapes. But metropolitan influence reached far beyond what standard maps suggested. As Andrew Needham has pointed out, city limits and highway shoulders did not mark the boundaries of environmental transformation; urban growth “was spatially far broader than currently understood.”Footnote 15
By the mid-twentieth century, recreational patterns stretched the peripheries of urban communities. Roads leading out of town were not only a means of escape but themselves a limit to overcome.Footnote 16 Small-bore engines made this easier. Although Americans fell in love with personal automobiles propelled by four-stroke engines, which delivered power every two rotations of their crankshafts, utility vehicles often relied on compact, higher torque, two-stroke engines, in which every rotation provided force. Two-stroke engines proliferated after World War II in lawnmowers, chainsaws, personal watercraft, and ORVs. Louder, dirtier, and less fuel-efficient than their four-stroke cousins, two-stroke engines flourished in an era of abundant oil and scarce regulation.Footnote 17
The combination of wanderlust, postwar affluence, and light and powerful small-bore engines buoyed the market for recreational ORVs. Between 1960 and 1970, annual sales of dune buggies rose to $5 million from nearly nothing, motorbike sales went from less than $1 million to nearly $90 million, and snowmobile sales shot up from $1.5 million to over $185 million.Footnote 18 Paul Josephson has usefully termed the explosion of off-road leisure “Fordism in recreation”—the mass production of machines that allowed fun-seeking Americans to travel nearly anywhere, nearly anytime.Footnote 19
ORVs redefined riders’ relationships with space and terrain, dramatically expanding the geography of outdoor recreation for millions of midcentury city dwellers. In the Southwest, that meant vast stretches of once remote and inaccessible desert now stood within a few hours’ drive of major urban centers. “I am becoming convinced that the social values of the desert as a place for man to escape the pace of urban life may far outweigh its economic values,” J. Russell Penny, California State Director for the Bureau of Land Management, said in 1971 while discussing ORV use.Footnote 20 Although he left it unclear whether ORVs were a means of escaping urban life or a vector for extending its reach, Penny left little doubt that the California desert—which spilled into the Great Basin and Sonoran deserts but overwhelmingly comprised the Mojave—was best understood in relation to the cities that it bordered.
The midcentury cities most closely associated with the California desert were, first and foremost, the conurbation of Los Angeles and San Diego to the west and the urban outpost of Las Vegas to the northeast. The metropolitan area of Los Angeles, California's largest city in the 1960s, pushed well beyond the geographic confines of the Los Angeles Basin. Las Vegas remained relatively small, but the population of Clark County was growing rapidly. Interstate Highway 15 ran for 200 miles between the two urban zones, and on either side of that highway stretched several million acres of the Mojave.
All those desert acres, once a bleak space to cross on the way from one city to another, became a destination for ballooning numbers of recreationists. By the 1960s the American Motorcycle Association (AMA), on the leading edge of national cycling trends, had dedicated itself to off-roading. The AMA's District 37 organized off-road races throughout Southern California, which generally involved hurtling through the desert at speeds approaching 100 miles per hour. Motorcycle culture flourished in the southland, where a vastly disproportionate number of the machines were registered.Footnote 21 Honda, the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world in the mid-twentieth century, opened its first American office in Los Angeles in 1959. Japanese motorcycle makers—especially Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, and Kawasaki—built machines that were smaller than American bikes and easier to ride. At first, manufacturers designed these smaller machines for traveling on or off pavement. Soon, Japanese and Spanish motorcycle companies began making exceptionally lightweight bikes—with high profiles, knobby tires, and heavy-duty shocks—strictly for off-road use. As the bikes’ weight fell so too did their price, the cheapest selling for only a few hundred dollars. Californians recreated in the desert in greater and greater numbers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially while riding motorbikes, dune buggies, or some other kind of two-, three-, or four-wheeled ORV. Reporting on the effects of ORV use in 1973, the Los Angeles Times summarized the view from Kern County's Jawbone Canyon, where a veteran state warden noted how “the crush of humanity and vehicles started about seven years ago and has increased tremendously.”Footnote 22
With over a million ORVs in Southern California by the early 1970s and an increasingly crowded desert fringe, off-road racers looked further afield for more open space. “Each passing year the perimeter where riding is acceptable grows farther from suburbia,” reporter Shav Glick wrote in the Times.Footnote 23 In 1967 the San Gabriel Valley Motorcycle Club, a member of the AMA's District 37, organized a race for Thanksgiving weekend from Barstow, California, to Las Vegas. It would be a “hare and hound” race (the lead cyclist the hare, negotiating a path through the desert, all the other cyclists the hounds). The course stretched for more than 150 miles over unforgiving terrain and took several hours to complete. Just over 500 riders attempted the first Barstow-to-Vegas Race. In 1972 more than 2,500 people signed up, and in 1974, 3,000 entrants rode past well over 10,000 spectators. “For the growing group of family-oriented riders to whom the desert has become a life-style,” Glick explained in 1974, “it is their Super Bowl, Olympic Games and World Series.”Footnote 24
The San Gabriel Valley Motorcycle Club held the Barstow-to-Vegas Race every Thanksgiving weekend from 1967 to 1974 (Figures 1–3). The BLM allowed no more than 3,000 riders for a point-to-point race, and race organizers began turning away hundreds of aspiring entrants. In 1975 the BLM decided that the environmental impact of Barstow-to-Vegas was too great for the event to continue unabated, and the agency refused to grant another permit. That year and the following, a handful of motorcyclists rode the route anyway in a “memorial trail ride” honoring the now defunct race. In 1977, magazine ads and posters named the tradition, announcing a “Third Annual Barstow to Vegas ‘Unorganized’ Trail Ride,” led by an anonymous figure called “the Phantom Duck of the Desert.”Footnote 25 In defiance of BLM management, the trail ride grew larger each year, as did the controversy surrounding it. By the late 1970s the Phantom Duck had become, according to the Riverside Press-Enterprise, “a folk hero among motorcycle and off-road vehicle enthusiasts.”Footnote 26
Figure 1. Barstow-to-Vegas Race, early 1970s. Undated photograph. Courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management California State Office.
Figure 2. Barstow-to-Vegas Race, early 1970s. Undated photograph. Courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management California State Office.
Figure 3. Barstow-to-Vegas Race, early 1970s. Undated photograph. Courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management California State Office.
While the Phantom Duck's rogue event grew in popularity, the BLM attempted to assemble a single management plan for what would become the California Desert Conservation Area. The plan would eventually address issues ranging from wilderness and wildlife to energy production, utility corridors, grazing, air pollution, cultural artifacts, and military use. But as the draft's environmental impact statement acknowledged, “Motorized vehicle use in the desert constitutes one of the most strongly contested and debated desert issues.”Footnote 27 As pleasure riders from Southern California reached across the Mojave to Las Vegas, desert recreation moved to the center of desert regulation.
The Geography of Regulation
“Why do we tolerate them?” the environmental writer T. H. Watkins asked in 1969, describing how ORVs wrecked public lands by churning soil, uprooting vegetation, eroding hillsides and watersheds, and terrorizing wildlife. Watkins blamed “federal land policies that have never been adequately revised to meet the problems of a situation no one anticipated,” and warned that ORV users, organized and active, “have taken full advantage of the weaknesses in the law.”Footnote 28 Weak regulation, Watkins suggested, invited abuse. Like storm clouds, regulated activities inevitably moved from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure. Riders and their clubs drifted toward public lands during the 1960s in part because rules there were so few. Property owners pushed county governments to require written consent when ORVs crossed private land; on public lands, meanwhile, regulation remained sparse or nonexistent.Footnote 29 As recreational ORV use spiked in the 1960s, some states began passing restrictions on use, but state legislators directed such laws primarily at snowmobiles, which enjoyed nearly unlimited range after a heavy snowfall to run over small trees, fences, and both wild and domesticated animals.Footnote 30
Warm weather ORVs initially made less of an impression on landscapes, and so on local residents and public administrators. Compared to snowmobiles in wintertime New England and the Great Lakes region, dirt bikes and dune buggies seemed out of sight and out of earshot as they buzzed across the vast expanses of federal land in the West. BLM's few field staffers had little statutory power when they encountered motorbike races, as both the BLM's legal authority and federal law more generally had scant interest in ORV use.
That changed in the 1970s, when several interconnected developments transformed the geography of ORV regulation in California. First, significant support emerged in Congress for managing California desert lands more closely with ecological protection in mind. Alongside this pressure, the executive branch moved to restrict ORV use nationwide. And, the political openings offered by the National Environmental Policy Act, passed in 1969, intersected with the expanded responsibility and authority granted to the BLM by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, passed in 1976. While these developments in part paralleled some of the common patterns of the new social regulation, in which public interest groups stepped in to enforce and implement policy, the process of mapping regulation onto the desert was collaborative as well as adversarial. Lawsuits offered a powerful tool for molding agencies and policies, but environmentalists, ORV advocates, and concerned citizens put as much work into shaping the habits of regulation through localized practice and on-the-ground administrative learning.
Regulation required knowledge of the desert, and that knowledge lagged behind the accelerating rate of desert recreation. Before the 1970s, biologists and ecologists conducted relatively little research in the Mojave beyond documenting the effects of aboveground nuclear detonations at the Nevada Test Site.Footnote 31 Sandwiched between the much larger Great Basin and Sonoran deserts, and as much a transition zone as a desert in its own right, the Mojave was a varied landscape. In the north, the Las Vegas Valley sat east of where the Death, Amargosa, and Pahrump Valleys stretched flat and wide between the Panamint and Spring Mountain Ranges. The central Mojave, where the mostly underground Mojave River flowed to Soda Lake, lay sparse and relatively low. The southwestern Mojave encompassed Edwards Air Force Base, Joshua Tree National Monument, and the city of Barstow, and nestled against populated areas like the Coachella Valley and Los Angeles County.Footnote 32 Such a varied region supported habitats for many hundreds of species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and plants. Those species and their habitats remained mostly unexamined by federal managers; left out of the Wilderness Act of 1964, the BLM was not required to scrutinize and inventory its holdings as was the Forest Service.
Desert managers knew and understood the human activity in the desert little more than they did the nonhuman. Even by the late 1960s, the BLM could field perhaps a half dozen employees at a time to monitor 12 million acres of California desert.Footnote 33 Still, the first Barstow-to-Vegas Race in 1967 was hard to miss. Alerted to the race after the fact by Riverside District managers, State Director Penny realized how little his agency knew about desert recreation and about ORV riders in particular, and in response he ordered the first comprehensive study of desert use and administration.
The report, The California Desert, considered the region's future primarily in terms of “the need for open space in American cities,” and characterized desert lands as both a source of “outstanding recreation” and also threatened by over-enjoyment.Footnote 34 The report's staff recommended a comprehensive desert management plan that would begin with mapping recreational use—in particular developing a system of roads and trails for the “unique and pressing problems” of ORVs.Footnote 35 One of the staff members who assembled the report subsequently went to work for California Congressman Bob Mathias, and in 1971 convinced the congressman to author legislation creating such a plan. Another member of Congress representing the desert, Jerry Pettis, immediately put together a similar bill, as did California Senators Alan Cranston and John Tunney the following year.Footnote 36
While California legislators introduced and reintroduced desert management bills, the executive branch prodded land management agencies to develop new guidance for ORV use. Rogers Morton, Richard Nixon's secretary of the interior, appointed an interdepartmental task force on ORV use in 1971. “Controversy is intensifying,” U.S. News & World Report alerted its readers in 1972, just weeks before Nixon signed Executive Order 11644, which directed key cabinet secretaries to devise regulations and enforcement mechanisms that would allow limited ORV use on federal lands while protecting natural resources and environmental values.Footnote 37 In response, the BLM drafted an Interim Critical Management Program (ICMP) that began mapping vehicular recreation in California's public domain lands by defining a small fraction of those lands as either completely closed or open to ORV use, and the great majority as open with restrictions—most problematically, with vehicle travel limited to a set of vaguely defined “existing or designated roads and trails.”Footnote 38
As environmental organizations pushed administrative policy toward greater protection of natural resources, the BLM needed an especially strong shove. Of all the federal land management agencies, the BLM was the youngest and in many ways the last to embrace ecological imperatives. Created in 1946 when the Truman administration merged the General Land Office with the United States Grazing Service, the BLM inherited the largest jurisdiction in the country—over 500 million acres of surface lands in addition to a subsurface mineral estate. Reorganization did not come with clear administrative direction; BLM lacked the sort of “organic act” that provided the National Park Service with its dual mission of conservation and public enjoyment, and the U.S. Forest Service with its multiple-use mandate. Relying mostly on mineral legislation and the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act for administrative guidance, for its first decade the agency concerned itself with ranching and mining.Footnote 39
In the 1950s and 1960s, a rapidly growing constituency of outdoor recreationists as well as a nascent ecological sensibility nudged the BLM toward a multiple-use approach to management. Critics judged that it remained a “captured” agency working largely on behalf of two industries. Now legislation such as NEPA allowed public interest groups to act as legal counterweights.Footnote 40 Environmental lawyers quickly realized that NEPA's business end—the requirement that, for any major action, federal agencies assemble an environmental impact statement (EIS) and make it public—offered them a sharp wedge for prying open federal policy.Footnote 41
Litigation, however, was not the only means that NEPA provided for checking bureaucratic decision-making. An agency could also change through the process of navigating the EIS requirement on the ground.Footnote 42 By 1974 the Barstow-to-Vegas Race was in its eighth year, and the San Gabriel Valley Motorcycle Club anticipated as many as 15,000 attendees. As in previous years the race would feature two dead-engine starts across a flat plain toward a “smoke bomb” (an ignited pile of tires), a series of checkpoints to make sure riders followed the prescribed course, and what race organizers called “conservationist friends (?)” documenting the event with notepads and cameras. This time, however, the BLM released a preliminary EIS about the possible effects of Barstow-to-Vegas just one month before the starting banner dropped.Footnote 43
In the past the BLM had rarely based regulatory decisions about the desert on serious environmental assessments. As the draft EIS noted, the longstanding limit of 3,000 participants for point-to-point races was an arbitrary figure unrelated to potential impact. “It does not represent an optimum for any purpose,” the BLM admitted.Footnote 44 The official limit suggested that the desert could sustain the effects of 3,000 motorbikes, but the draft described a vibrant and fragile landscape, with the racecourse cutting through areas full of wildlife, cultural resources, and unusual opportunities for solitude and quiet.Footnote 45 The potential impacts of such a large event included soil compaction that would hinder vegetative growth; crushed reptiles and mammals as well as nests and burrows; ruts across wet playas that could remain visible for decades; the destruction of archaeological and historical sites; and increased particulate pollution that could reach nearby communities.
Hoping to accommodate the desert's varied uses, the BLM at first stopped short of denying a race permit. Canceling Barstow-to-Vegas would have obviated the many environmental impacts but, as the BLM warned with some prescience, could lead to frustration, an unsanctioned ride, and “confrontation between Bureau officials and would-be racers.”Footnote 46 Instead, the agency studied and surveilled the race, making before-and-after estimates of animal populations, photographing the event from the ground and from the air, and measuring soil compaction and dustfall. The BLM, in other words, invested itself in the sorts of observations that groups like the Sierra Club and the High Desert Environmental Defense Fund had already begun to sponsor. As ORV regulations evolved, BLM staff and environmentalists worked alongside if not always with each other.Footnote 47
Barstow-to-Vegas provided an opportunity for the BLM to absorb a measure of NEPA's intended mission, and an invitation for interested parties—particularly environmentalists—to participate. “Most of us feel this race is a test case, especially since this is really BLM's first half-way decent compliance with NEPA's environmental process,” Chuck Bell, president of the High Desert Environmental Defense Fund (HDEDF), wrote to his colleagues with measured optimism.Footnote 48 Bell performed spot surveys of the race route along with representatives from the Sierra Club, the Society for California Archaeology, and San Bernardino County. Overall, the surveyors considered the draft EIS a still-incomplete assessment. Bell and his group found only a partial accounting of Native petroglyphs and artifacts, too little attention to the potential impact of so many spectators, and an unfounded assumption that several thousand cyclists would keep to the “existing roads and trails” designated by the ICMP.Footnote 49
Complaints aside, however, Bell mainly viewed the environmental assessment as progress. “The HDEDF commends the BLM for complying with the intent of the environmental process established by the National Environmental Policy Act,” he wrote to State Director Penny. “The EIS is an outstanding source of information by itself, and a rather good analysis of some of the potential environmental impacts.”Footnote 50 The Sierra Club's Jim Dodson and Lyle Gaston agreed, and viewed the preliminary statement within an even larger framework. The draft EIS, they wrote separately, “is a significant step toward a comprehensive evaluation of the resources of the California Desert.”Footnote 51 Keeping close track of politicians’ efforts to enact an overall desert management plan, Dodson and Gaston perceived NEPA's requirements as a way of knowing the desert through environmental assessment, and they considered that knowledge a foundation for meaningful regulation.
On the day of the race, BLM rangers and representatives of the environmental organizations passed one another as they observed race conditions and tried to keep riders inside the designated course. Both rangers and environmentalists discovered a range of even more distressing environmental impacts than the EIS had predicted—a quarter-mile swath of tracks that far exceeded the hundred-foot limit, illegal shortcuts through a stand of rare desert plants, and kangaroo rats bleeding from their mouths and ears.Footnote 52 In the weeks after the race, the Society for California Archaeology's Ike Eastvold and University of California–Riverside anthropologist Sylvia Broadbent found damage to both unrecorded and candidate historical sites strewn with potsherds and crafted jasper.Footnote 53
Unlike in familiar stories of agency and activist standoffs, BLM analyses of the race aligned with the assessments of a variety of cultural and environmental interest groups. In response to its own findings as well as to further, post-race damage recorded by conservationists, the BLM in 1975 rejected the San Gabriel Valley Motorcycle Club's permit application for that year's event.Footnote 54 “Our followup [sic] studies last year showed impacts from the race were greater than predicted in the environmental impact statement,” BLM announced, “and it is clear we won't know how to prevent or properly mitigate these impacts without going through a detailed environmental analysis process.” Given the legal necessity of an EIS for managing a large-scale race, and given limited available staff, BLM's California office denied the permit for 1975 and gave no reason to think the race would be permitted in later years.Footnote 55 NEPA and the EIS process had reframed how BLM approached not just ORV regulation but management of the California desert. And the Barstow-to-Vegas EIS brought together environmentalists and BLM staff into a tenuous but cooperative relationship, documenting and evaluating the race's effects.
The California Desert Conservation Area
By the late 1970s environmentalists understood that the Southern California desert provided a home for not only scattered communities of people but also a rich variety of plants and wildlife.Footnote 56 For growing crowds of hikers, campers, rockhounders, and especially ORV riders, the desert was a recreational destination. And because so many different groups cared about the desert for different reasons, the desert became an administrative opportunity that could elevate the stature of the BLM among the nation's land management agencies.
Managing the California desert, and public lands across the nation, required that the BLM gain statutory authority and resources to match the sort of oversight encouraged by NEPA. For environmentalists, the BLM's limited authority stood in the way of balanced desert management. “If we end up forcing ‘organized’ events into ‘unorganized’ events, we might not end up saving some of the desert from resource destruction,” Chuck Bell of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) wrote to Penny Kramer, editor of EDF's ORV Monitor, “and since that is the main goal, we will need to beef up BLM's staff and its intent to manage and protect resources.”Footnote 57 Congress achieved both ends when it passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) in 1976. FLPMA provided BLM with new responsibilities and powers, including law enforcement authority on par with the Forest Service and Park Service, both of which had long fielded rangers with firearms and arrest powers. The law also codified and authorized much of what the agency was doing in practice, putting BLM planning on a path already structured by NEPA. FLPMA emphasized environmental protection and wilderness; it made land-use planning into a decision-making process akin to an EIS; and it required the same sort of broad public participation as did NEPA.Footnote 58 For events like Barstow-to-Vegas, the BLM had already worked with public interest groups and local governments; FLPMA made this sort of civic participation in agency decision making mandatory. Together, the two laws provided the agency with not only legal recourse but also a framework for planning and administrating at close quarters.
FLPMA designated the California desert as a testing ground for such an approach. Buried within the law's dozens of pages, Section 601 directed the Secretary of the Interior to implement a long-range and comprehensive plan in order to provide for the public use and protection of the California Desert Conservation Area (CDCA). After watching desert management bills fail to reach a vote year after year, Senator Cranston and Congresswoman Shirley Pettis shoehorned a version of those bills into FLPMA.Footnote 59 As a result, the law effectively created the CDCA as an administrative unit—25 million acres of Southern California, nearly one-quarter of the entire state, stretching from just outside of Los Angeles County to Arizona's western edge and from the Owens Valley to the U.S.–Mexico border.
The California Desert Conservation Area Plan was an ambitious undertaking for an agency that had long operated in the shadow of the Forest and Park services, and it offered the possibility of remaking the BLM. The CDCA Plan, the agency would later take to saying, “because of the magnitude of the area it encompasses, its importance and complexity, is totally unique to modern land use planning in this country and probably the world.”Footnote 60 The BLM reorganized its Southern California personnel around the CDCA, creating a Desert Planning Staff and Desert Advisory Council and subsuming the Riverside District into a larger Desert District that encompassed the entire region.Footnote 61 “I view the California desert as one of the most exciting resource management challenges of this century,” James Ruch, BLM's California state director, wrote in the California Native Plant Society's Fremontia.Footnote 62 June Latting, the Society's Southern California conservation representative, offered a franker assessment when she drafted a response to Ruch. “BLM leadership recognized that the Bureau could take its place within the government as a responsible land manager,” Latting wrote, “and gain stature, respect and credibility in the eyes of the public, if an outstanding Desert Plan could be prepared.”Footnote 63 The Desert Protective Council's Harriet Allen agreed, and offered Ruch a list of pointers on how to manage a major recreational event like Barstow-to-Vegas. “BLM can bring order to the desert,” she assured Ruch, “though it is about ten or fifteen years behind USFS and NPS.”Footnote 64 As recreation and environmental protection gained prominence in federal land management, the CDCA Plan would be the BLM's showcase policy framework—“a regional plan with national significance,” as the agency described it.Footnote 65
National significance came in part from heavy use, and heavy use created a greater administrative challenge. FLPMA required a final CDCA Plan by October 1980, giving the BLM four years to create a regulatory regime for the entire southeast quadrant of California. During those years the nascent CDCA was a laboratory for the concept of “multiple use,” with interested parties arguing for the legitimacy—and at times the preeminence—of their own particular use of the desert, none more so than environmentalists and ORV enthusiasts. “The reality of multiple use, as both an idea and a policy,” Leisl Carr-Childers writes, “is a landscape filled with activities that are not always compatible.”Footnote 66 A multiple-use management approach was a tacit recognition of incompatibility, as well as an ambitious attempt to overcome it. As improbable as that attempt remained in the form of policy, though, in practice it could be an example of what the economist Charles Lindblom once called “the science of ‘muddling through,’” whereby administrators shaped the best policy through experiment as much as through planning.Footnote 67 “Muddling through” led to clashes over how to accommodate multiple use in the CDCA, but it also moved toward a more local and participatory kind of desert management.
In 1980 the BLM prepared its combined CDCA Plan and environmental impact statement, a document that would describe the overall desert management plan while analyzing its impact. Environmentalists wondered how to address the plan's many allowances for ORV riders. “I feel we must make some accommodation to the fact that some level of competitive ORV use will continue to exist,” the Sierra Club's Jim Dodson admitted, “and that we are better off seeking to contain it than confront it.”Footnote 68 Accommodating and containing ORVs in the California desert meant mapping their comings and goings. “Multiple use,” Senator Cranston had explained to members of Congress when he fought to include the California desert in FLPMA, “means multiple planning, by all concerned. It is not a question of whether, for example, off-road vehicles should be permitted in the desert. Of course they should. The question is where.”Footnote 69
That question often came down to the definition of a “road” or a “way.” Few issues better measured the distance between making and implementing policy in the desert. Roads were a physical record of habitual behavior as well as a regulatory imposition on the land. In the desert, roads reshaped both landscape and human activity; the record of a vehicle's passing persisted for many years and often encouraged repeated use.Footnote 70 Tank tracks left by General George Patton's Desert Training Center, which operated in the Mojave from 1942 to 1944, remained visible in 1980, when the BLM considered whether they constituted “acceptable routes of travel.”Footnote 71
ORVs required the designation of “routes,” “courses,” and “raceway areas,” vague terms that suggested where recreational mapping shaded into matters of customary use.Footnote 72 Off-road vehicle events, counterintuitively, had to keep to roads that lacked the fixity of pavement but had the consistency of regular travel. Archaeologist Ike Eastvold worried that annual races would inevitably turn “ways” into “roads,” and so reshape the regulatory map.Footnote 73 Legal and administrative mandates might mean little if desert users simply chose their own paths.
When Senator Cranston asked the BLM to define “road,” he learned how slippery the term could be. There was, agency representatives responded, no specific definition of a “road” in FLPMA or in the Wilderness Act, which BLM began to administer as part of the CDCA Plan. Other agencies that dealt with the Wilderness Act—a law that hinged on the concept of a road—tended to define the term for themselves.Footnote 74 Technicalities mattered a great deal. In 1978, the BLM defined a “road” as a route improved by hand or by power machinery, and a “way” as a route made only by the passage of vehicles. The AMA pushed for the BLM Interim Critical Management Plan's (ICMP) looser definition, by which a road was simply any route regularly used by vehicles. Environmentalists, meanwhile, insisted that only power machinery should count as road-building equipment. As the BLM began to consider wilderness designation in the CDCA, the Los Angeles Times reported, “the definition of road promises to become one of the most heated arguments.”Footnote 75
Both the concept of a road and the roads themselves changed regularly. When environmentalists, motorcycle clubs, and the BLM negotiated the Ludlow-to-Parker Race in 1979, they debated where exactly the 1975 race had circled the Iron Mountains and whether that route would qualify as a road under the ICMP. Lacking a clear route, the Iron Mountains stood in the way of a legal racecourse. Some BLM staffers claimed that the route around the mountains was strictly cross-country, while the AMA insisted that the course followed a clear road. The ICMP's more ambiguous definition did not apply to roads made after its enactment in 1973, negating the 1975 course, but motorcyclists and BLM management argued that the Iron Mountains region fell under a separate road categorization that began in 1977, birthing a new road and allowing the 1975 course to count. An administrative decision, according to this claim, changed the nature of a racecourse from a route to a road.Footnote 76
A stricter definition of a road meant a clearer map of ORV regulation, while a looser definition left that map open to daily redefinition. After the BLM released its draft CDCA Plan, environmental organizations challenged the amorphous understanding and lax regulation of “existing ways.”Footnote 77 That understanding theoretically allowed ORVs to make their own roads. “‘Ways’ are defined so loosely that it could mean a track across the desert left by a few passes of a motorcycle or jeep (because desert land recovers so slowly),” Nicholas Yost, general counsel for the president's Council on Environmental Quality, told BLM Director Frank Gregg.Footnote 78
Sweeping standards eventually gave way to case-by-case negotiation. The BLM gave itself seven years to determine route classifications throughout the California desert, delegating that work to the Subcommittee on Route Designation. The argument over roads remained a heated one, but the subcommittee quickly determined that the most practical approach to management rested on identifying conflicts rather than identifying roads themselves. Designating routes worked best when it happened on the ground and on the fly. The CDCA Plan remained an ongoing process rather than a strict charter, and feedback about actual experiences was not only an effective means of reconciling recreation with regulation but also an end in itself. “Most desert users would find it much easier to participate if they were asked to help identify problem areas where routes of travel should be closed,” the subcommittee advised. “Instead of devoting scarce time and money to inventories and arguments over whether a route exists, BLM could concentrate on finding and solving problems.”Footnote 79 As solving problems between different users migrated to the center of BLM's work, the agency needed to know its visitors as well as its resources. Regulating roads meant regulating people, and desert management brought the agency into closer contact with those people and their use of desert lands.
The Phantom Duck and the Evolution of Participatory Management
As the BLM's Southern California staff worked more closely with desert users, it confronted the challenges of multiple use and face-to-face management, never more so than in a volatile series of encounters with the Phantom Duck of the Desert. By 1978 the Phantom Duck had been revealed as Louis McKey, an electrician from Fontana and a motorcycle enthusiast who deeply resented what he considered the government's heavy-handed management of ORVs.Footnote 80 McKey was a casual rider, and he championed novice cycling through ads in Cycle News celebrating a successful fellow amateur who rode with the Desert Ducks Motorcycle Club. McKey's ads announced themselves with a “Quack! Quack!” as did his subsequent communiqués as the Phantom Duck.Footnote 81
Nine months before the fourth annual “unorganized trail ride,” McKey sent a letter to several dozen people and organizations, including politicians ranging from members of the California Assembly to President Jimmy Carter. Insisting that his unorganized event was legal as long as it kept to “existing roads and trails,” he warned the various lawmakers: “The choice is yours. A controlled, organized race that must follow a prearranged route that will avoid important historical and archaeological desert sites while providing much needed family recreational use of public lands, or, a massive, unorganized, but legal, trail ride of family groups enjoying a day in the desert.” Anyone genuinely concerned about the desert's welfare, he insisted, would advance that cause “by guaranteeing multiple use of public lands.”Footnote 82
Gerry Hillier, director of BLM's Riverside District, made clear his agency's position by seeking an injunction against McKey's unpermitted ride. Hillier's injunction, which a judge eventually granted, was just one among several lawsuits and legal actions in the years leading up to finalization of the CDCA Plan in 1980, and a prelude to even more lawsuits after the plan's passage.Footnote 83 The injunction not only failed to prevent McKey from holding another unorganized ride in 1978; it also pushed McKey and Rick Sieman, editor of Dirt Bike magazine, to form the Phantom Duck of the Desert, Inc. “We intend to protect and expand the intelligent use of our lands through the legal system, legislative action and the courts, when necessary,” PDoD, Inc. explained in a “position paper.”Footnote 84 In 1980, PDoD, Inc. filed suit against the BLM for what it claimed was prejudicial action against itself and in favor of the Sierra Club. “If the BLM lives by a tangled network of unenforceable laws,” McKey wrote to his supporters, “then it can also perish by the same web of beaurocracy [sic].”Footnote 85
Environmentalists and BLM field staff had crossed paths with McKey, and this close contact made him more than just a legal adversary. “There is an overt threat to BLM employee's [sic] lives as a result of the recent gun-toting episode by PDOD and concurrent suggestion that BLM employees may disappear from the field,” area managers warned the Desert District manager one month before McKey's 1980 unpermitted ride.Footnote 86 The episode had taken place two weeks earlier in San Bernardino at a public hearing on the proposed CDCA Plan. Ike Eastvold attended and later described the incident: “McKey came to that hearing and gave his ‘testimony’ with a .45 automatic on his belt. After pointing out that he got a badge ‘for killing people’ in the war (when he was 19), he wound up saying, ‘When you go out to the desert you had better arm yourself, because no matter where you are out there you are subject to the Green Berets jumping you at any minute.” BLM rangers, McKey explained, had been known to disappear in the wilds of Alaska.Footnote 87
McKey's posturing was especially provocative given the BLM's newly granted authority to staff a desert ranger force with arrest powers. Traditionally, BLM rangers had relied on local police and sheriffs when arrests or firearms were necessary, an approach that became less feasible in a more crowded desert.Footnote 88 “Right now BLM rangers have no more authority than your average citizen,” ranger Brian Booher complained after the 1974 Barstow-to-Vegas Race.Footnote 89 FLPMA gave desert rangers something approximating the authority that forest and park rangers had long held. The Desert District sent rangers to law enforcement training in 1977 and began fielding armed rangers in 1978.Footnote 90
With legal actions pending, tempers rising, and guns on display, the 1980 unorganized trail ride seemed bound for a head-on collision. “I want no confrontation,” Hillier instructed his staff, anxious about his agency's newly armed rangers. “Our 1980 approach will be ‘information-communication’ oriented.”Footnote 91 Hillier's staff, however, remained skeptical of appeals to common enjoyment of the desert. “The participant's [sic] attitudes are perceived to be so extreme as to render useless attempts to communicate through such means as interpretive, educational, or ‘fun day’ programs,” area managers warned.Footnote 92
The BLM, as concerned with safety as with enforcing its own rules, continued to deny a permit for any Barstow-to-Vegas ride, even as it helped plan the event's route in order to minimize damage.Footnote 93 Environmentalists grew agitated at the annual flaunting of the agency's own regulations. “The result of their lengthy history of cave-ins is this year's Frankenstein,” Eastvold had said of the BLM a year earlier, before the 1979 race, “a kind of spoiled brat of their own creation, and they now intend to abdicate the desert to this monstrous phantom-child.”Footnote 94 In 1979, Eastvold intensified environmentalists’ ongoing documentation of the race by renting a small plane and taking several hundred pictures of the event and its effects.Footnote 95 In 1980 he planned to fly over the race again. A few days before his flight, he found a postcard in the mail from “Son of Desert Duck” that described the Duck's pre-ride of the race route. “Also observed anti aircraft guns with BLM markings along the trail,” it read. “GOOD LUCK!!!”Footnote 96
Eastvold, among the most cynical Barstow-to-Vegas opponents, doubted BLM strategy. Attempts to stop the race through injunctions, he claimed, had backfired, making McKey into “a ‘protest leader,’ a ‘martyr.’” Attempts to isolate McKey by working on alternate events with more moderate ORV organizations like the American Motorcyclists Association had also failed, by creating the impression that illegal protest produced concessions.Footnote 97 The BLM agreed with Eastvold on at least the first point; legal mechanisms had largely failed. “In 1978,” Hillier wrote to his area managers, “we took strong legal action and in so doing, drew more attention to it and made a folk hero of McKey.”Footnote 98 On the second point, the BLM stood fast. “A positive situation is that at this point in time there is significant momentum building among motorcycling publics toward re-establishing respect for BLM as a result of the recent efforts to permit the Johnson Valley to Parker race,” the area managers reported to Hillier. “Such a trend may significantly serve to reduce support for the PDOD.” The area managers proposed using environmental impact statements as a way of legitimizing AMA races and delegitimizing Barstow-to-Vegas.Footnote 99
In the short term, this policy of moderation worked. Despite the aggressions of McKey and the frustrations of Eastvold, the 1980 trail ride avoided violence. In fact, that year—in which the BLM released, amended, and finalized the combined CDCA Plan and associated EIS—saw significant collaborative work between environmentalists, motorcyclists, and BLM staff. That collaboration was often heated, but the CDCA Plan and the EIS process served to put interested parties in conversation with one another in ways that made California desert management local and participatory.
The sort of regulation that characterized much 1970s environmentalism—designed to distance federal agencies from their traditional patrons and reliant on citizen oversight—put many interested parties at a greater remove from the federal government, especially in the hallways of Washington, DC. “They could face this regulatory apparatus without necessarily meeting a single person charged with enforcing the laws,” Jefferson Decker writes, “let alone developing the sort of collaborative relationships that had once allowed regulated industries, government bureaucrats, and members of Congress to maintain ‘iron triangles’ of mutually reinforcing power and influence.”Footnote 100 “Iron triangles” had structured regulatory relationships around industries, federal agencies, and congressional oversight committees, all comfortably ensconced in a set of ultimately self-serving affiliations. The new regulatory arrangements of the 1970s attempted to sever those bonds and distance those affiliations.Footnote 101
At the same time, new regulations created and structured working relationships between federal agencies and their most active local constituents.Footnote 102 Critics called those active constituents “special interests,” but in more and more instances they had little financial stake in the agency or the issue at hand. Unlike the backroom alliances that made up “iron triangles,” these relationships were testy, local, and often public. Desert management under NEPA and FLPMA depended on environmentalists, ORV advocates, and BLM staff hashing out their differences with one another, often face-to-face. Hillier, Eastvold, McKey, and the parties they represented regularly found themselves in the same room. The “Son of Desert Duck” knew who Eastvold was and exactly how he planned to observe the race. In scrutinizing the race year after year and recording its impact, environmentalists effectively became an extension of the BLM's environmental assessment process.
Environmentalists and cyclists at times made this point themselves. Groups like the Sierra Club and the High Desert Environmental Defense Fund participated in the assessment process from early on, viewing not only the process but also their own involvement as crucial. The Sierra Club, and environmental lawyers more generally, had been fighting for standing to sue in court since the mid-1960s; by the 1970s, thanks in part to NEPA, their claim to valid, non-economic interest in the protection of natural resources extended beyond lawsuits to administrative practices. Environmentalists increasingly viewed themselves as federal land managers’ contentious colleagues, equally well-versed in laws and policies and possessing an even greater understanding of broad goals. “It takes a community of vigilant citizens to ensure that the agencies do the right thing and enforce their laws and regulations,” the Sierra Club's Desert Committee instructed its members.Footnote 103 When the Sierra Club's Jim Dodson wrote to the BLM's Jim Ruch about ORV regulation and the CDCA Plan, he saw the Club as more than just another stakeholder. “Unlike user groups,” he explained, “we are concerned with the entire spectrum of issues in the Desert Plan and other aspects of your management activities; and I feel we both would benefit from more rather than less detailed discussion on these matters.”Footnote 104
Motorbike advocates hoped for a seat at the table too. Philip Briggs and A. H. Tellier, earth scientists and ORV riders, urged their fellow cyclists to accept that the days of unrestricted riding were gone and to get involved in the EIS process. “The opportunity is there to get the analysis reports and impact studies done for point-to-point race corridors—but not without the continued efforts of motorcyclists,” they wrote in Cycle Guide. “Use this new information … to work with the BLM on obtaining use areas and corridors.”Footnote 105
The organized motorcycle community—best represented by the AMA and the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC)—worked with the BLM not only to advance desert riding but also to escape the outlaw persona celebrated by the Phantom Duck. Hoping to promote a more family-friendly image, the AMA opposed McKey's trail ride.Footnote 106 “If the government institutes rules,” said AMA Vice President Jim Wells when asked about the Phantom Duck, “it is incumbent on us to follow them.” Dennis David, chairman of the MIC's land-use committee, said of the unorganized trail riders, “It's destructive of their own interests, flying in the face of the BLM like that.”Footnote 107 When the BLM released its draft plan, the AMA encouraged its members to stick to the prescribed process. “Every rider must read the draft and contact BLM in opposition to all reduction of OHV [off-highway vehicle] space,” advised Rob Rasor, associate director of government relations.Footnote 108 McKey himself best summed up environmentalists’ and motorcycle organizations’ shared interests. “If they aren't working for the Sierra Club,” he said bitterly of the AMA, “they're doing a lot of work for free.”Footnote 109
Desert management cultivated working relationships between erstwhile antagonists, even if only temporarily. By 1980, Dodson and Ruch had met regularly for several years. “I feel I should put down in writing some of the comments made in our phone conversation yesterday,” Dodson wrote to Ruch, explaining why the Club had declined to attend a meeting with motorcyclists and BLM staff. “The first point is your concern that this represents a decision to stonewall the Bureau—to take the approach that we will ‘talk to you in court.’ I assure you this is not the case.” Lawsuits, Dodson made clear, were a last resort. “I think I speak for most environmentalists,” he wrote, “when I say that we welcome opportunities for productive dialogue with the Bureau.”Footnote 110
Productive dialogue led to cooperative agreements. Despite their differences over desert management, and in particular the CDCA Plan's designated course for the Johnson Valley-to-Parker Race, environmentalists and ORV riders agreed to set aside legal actions and work together on mitigating the race's effects. Representatives from the AMA's District 37 and the Sierra Club's San Gorgonio Chapter decided on a route, on how many people would be allowed along that route, and to adjust the course one week before the race in order to avoid active desert tortoise habitat.Footnote 111 Under multiple-use guidelines, BLM director Frank Gregg had insisted a year earlier, “we are both resource and conflict managers.”Footnote 112
There was no shortage of conflict to manage in the Mojave, much of it more difficult to reconcile than was the Johnson Valley-to-Parker Race. Even after passage of the CDCA Plan, antagonisms bloomed. Just two years into the plan, McKey's persistent defiance convinced the BLM that official oversight was preferable to unofficial monitoring. The agency permitted the Barstow-to-Vegas Race in 1983, only to change course again in 1989 after the desert tortoise joined the endangered species list. At the same time, California Senator Alan Cranston grew increasingly unhappy with what he considered BLM's hands-off approach to management after learning about the construction of several illegal utility roads in wilderness study areas.Footnote 113 Cranston began a decade-long effort to strengthen environmental protections in the CDCA, culminating in 1994 with passage of the California Desert Protection Act, which expanded and upgraded wilderness areas and National Park Service units including Joshua Tree and Death Valley.
Motorcyclists, mining interests, and the BLM itself accused Cranston of superseding the democratic support achieved by the CDCA Plan. Even Kenneth Norris, a University of California–Santa Cruz environmental studies professor who occasionally consulted with BLM, claimed that Cranston's efforts “would undermine a unique $8 million planning experiment in flexible desert management.”Footnote 114 Cranston argued that his bill, arrived at through the legislative process, represented little more than a continuation of ongoing desert administration.Footnote 115 That an elected representative in the 1990s had to defend his bill against charges of imperiousness, while a federal agency assumed the mantle of popular will, was a telling sign of broad investment in collaborative management.
Conclusion
In the California desert, interest groups worked with federal administrators even when they fought against them. Environmentalists, and later ORV advocates, weighed in on administrative decisions and policy making. Lawsuits certainly forced changes in policy, but change also arose from administrative practice on the ground. Pressure groups in the West sometimes worked against the federal regulatory apparatus; although the sagebrush rebellion failed in its immediate legal aims, BLM director Frank Gregg nonetheless worried that it could succeed in mobilizing opposition to federal regulations, and there is ample evidence that it did.Footnote 116 But outside pressure also worked in tandem with the administrative state. Desert management, built on relationships between regional administrators and their most interested constituents, grew more sophisticated and better tailored to local conditions. The CDCA Plan recognized that “the public must assume its share of the responsibility for the public lands in the CDCA” and “that government by bureaucracy in a democratic society must be limited.”Footnote 117 The CDCA was, in fact, government by bureaucracy, but one that had grown more responsive and collaborative. Although disgruntled Westerners liked to portray the federal government as an indifferent authority imposing rules from afar, Americans frequently encountered that government as familiar figures working much closer to home.
Critiques of the New Deal's concentration of authority in the executive branch led to reforms that checked the power of administrative agencies and accelerated a sweeping distrust of government.Footnote 118 But historians may have too readily agreed that the 1970s and 1980s marked a startling shift in how Americans—conservative and liberal—conceived of national government. Federal regulatory power was never as singular or as concentrated as its fiercest critics suggested. Although lawsuits against lax regulation and administrative misbehavior served as vital correctives, federal agencies learned in other ways, many of them informal, gradual, and relatively unnoticed. In the vastness of the California desert, administrative management was easy to miss, but—like vehicle tracks—became an indelible part of the landscape.
