What’s Killing Joshua Tree National Park?

“We abuse the land,” wrote the famed conservationist Aldo Leopold in the 1940s, “because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.” The quote, widely circulated among the ecology-minded, applies almost too well to Joshua Tree. To the local authorities who manage it, to the rock-climbing schools and even the National Park Service, the wilderness is a source of revenue. It is not, as Leopold advised, “a community to which we belong.” If it were, we would not treat the wilderness as an island in civilization, but recognize that everything that happens around it has an impact on it. In the end, the wilderness will only be saved when we understand Leopold’s definition of land: not just our national parks and forests, but our houses and green lawns, our office buildings and factories, our highways and city parks — the land we walk on and the air we breathe every ordinary day of the week.