On the first day of his second term as president of the United States, Donald Trump issued executive orders intended to relax—or eliminate—an array of federal restrictions on fossil-fuel production and timber-cutting on federally controlled lands.
Other executive orders, as well as directives by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, have further eliminated federal protections. The existence of the newly designated Chuckwalla National Monument, which borders Joshua Tree National Park, is in jeopardy.
Fortunately, the lands owned and managed by the Oswit Land Trust are safe.
Based in Palm Springs, the nonprofit organization was founded in 2021 and is one of the most active protectors of desert lands in the area. We recently asked David Paisley, the deputy director and community engagement director at OLT, if Trump’s various orders are affecting the organization.
“It’s certainly a problem for our mission,” Paisley said. “While it doesn’t impact any of the properties Oswit Land Trust currently owns, it impacts our mission of protecting wildlife habitats—and ultimately, our lives as human beings are interconnected with nature as a whole. We can’t survive without providing space for wildlife and for insects and for birds and all these different species that enable us all to live and to thrive.
“When you look at areas that are already protected, they’re already protected for a reason. They were protected because they were viewed as critical wildlife habitat, and to reverse that seems very unwise to me, especially with what’s happening with climate change and the threat to all species, including our own.”
The OLT website displays statistics that summarize the organization’s accomplishments during its first four years of work: eight properties acquired; 10,000-plus acres of land saved; more than 1,000 wildlife species protected on that land.
We asked Paisley if wildlife corridors on or near OLT land—the migration passageways for many local wildlife species—could be disrupted by the federal government removing protections for lands the OLT doesn’t control.
“Absolutely,” Paisley said. “There are two issues here: First is that for the corridors that exist in the Coachella Valley and in San Bernardino and Riverside (counties), there is a risk of breaking some of those corridors, if some of these lands get changed as far as their usage. The second way in which we potentially have a problem is that we’re always trying to buy and purchase new land. When we go to purchase new land, it’s (done with) private funds, and also sometimes state, federal or local government dollars. Everything is so up in the air fiscally right now that it is hard for any of these government agencies to make any commitments to preserve more land. … Also, (funding for) the people who are doing the work of dealing with issues like invasive species (control), which really has important wildfire implications, or people who are staffing the parks and making sure people are using the parks appropriately, is all getting cut back. That’s going to allow for major damage to lands that are already protected.”
The OLT was originally formed by founder and executive director Jane Garrison to protect one of Palm Springs’ last surviving alluvial fans, named Oswit Canyon. Known originally as Save Oswit Canyon, the organization has expanded to include eight staff members and three regular volunteer project leaders. At any one time, the group may be working on five to 10 different land-acquisition deals or agricultural-easement arrangements.
“It often takes years to complete these types of transactions,” Paisley said. “It’s always a process. We’re always working more and more, and we’re growing quite rapidly. We have multiple properties in the works that we’re trying to purchase right now. … Desert Hot Springs, Indio Hills and Hemet are areas that traditionally have a lot of important wildlife habitat, and a lot of open desert that needs to be protected. These are certainly areas that we are working in.”
Purchasing these tracts of desert land, Garrison and her team believe, is the only way that OLT can truly protect habitats from any future commercial or private development. To paraphrase a maxim that Garrison states frequently: The only way to protect open land and wildlife from the detrimental effects of development is to own it.
“You just have to look across the Coachella Valley (to see the evidence),” Paisley said. “Every day, more and more raw desert is being developed. It can be really frustrating, because there are a lot of infill areas, especially in the Coachella Valley, that could be could be developed or redeveloped more efficiently to (create) more housing. But developers just want to take raw desert and plow it under and create new housing developments.”
Paisley said he’d like to see governments do more to encourage infill developments.
“There’s so much land that can get redeveloped, and a lot of is just sitting vacant. By vacant, I mean not even raw land. How many strip malls are half-filled now that could be redeveloped into condo complexes, or town houses, or housing for people?”
David Paisley, deputy director and community engagement director at OLT
“(Infill) could be the priorities of those developers if local or county governments demanded that these infill areas, (where there’s no) risk of destroying natural habitats in the raw desert, get redeveloped first,” he said. “… There’s so much land that can get redeveloped, and a lot of is just sitting vacant. By vacant, I mean not even raw land. How many strip malls are half-filled now that could be redeveloped into condo complexes, or town houses, or housing for people?”
As for agricultural-easement arrangements: The Natural Resources Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines agricultural conservation easements as legal agreements that “help private and tribal landowners, land trusts, and other entities such as state and local governments protect croplands and grasslands on working farms and ranches by limiting non-agricultural uses of the land through conservation easements.”
OLT has started working with government entities and agricultural producers to put ACEs in place on productive regional farm and pasture lands, to ensure they will only be used to raise crops or for livestock in perpetuity. Federal funds have often been used, at least in part, to compensate agricultural land owners for not accepting windfall profits that could result from land sales to commercial developers.
“When you look at agricultural easements across the country, traditionally, the federal government has been very important to funding those kinds of projects,” Paisley said. “So that is a concern in the future for any land trust or other organization that’s working with agricultural (conservation) easements. … We have to protect our food supply. People talk about protecting our energy supplies, and that is important, but protecting our food supply is also very important. Our food supply comes from our farmers, so if we don’t protect these farms, we’re going to run out of food, too.”
Can the Oswit Land Trust continue making deals when there is this much uncertainty around financing commitments?
“Sure,” Paisley said. “If you look at some of our deals, like Prescott Preserve, (that) happened because of Brad Prescott, one private individual. Not all our deals involve just government money. We’re working on a lot of different ways to acquire important land. Sometimes that land is funded by private individuals; sometimes it’s funded just by state (monies), which are relatively stable right now. Sometimes, local, county or city funds chip in. When we’re looking at a big, expensive piece of property, typically the money comes from a lot of different sources. The federal government is not the only (funding) source, but it is an important source—and it’s also an important source for other types of activities like education or transportation. If money gets pulled from those sources, the state or city or county might not have as much money to provide for land acquisition, so it’s all connected.”