WSJ: Dune Buggy Takes On Peirson's Milk-Vetch

[Crowdog]

In Desert Battle, Dune Buggy Takes On Peirson's Milk-Vetch

 

Fight About Spiny Plants

Blossoms Into a War

Over Endangered Species

By JOHN J. FIALKA

Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

April 15, 2005

 

IMPERIAL SAND DUNES, Calif. -- This stretch of hot, dry, wind-carved sand is one of the least habitable spots in the U.S. But it has become the battleground for advocates of two rugged denizens of these hills.

 

One is the Peirson's milk-vetch, an obscure, shrub-sized member of the pea family. The other is the 21st-century Southern California dune buggy, a snarling, V-8-powered beast in a tubular frame mounted on special tires with rubber flaps.

 

In the milk-vetch's corner is Dan Patterson, a 34-year-old red-bearded ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson, Ariz., nonprofit. He argues that the vehicle endangers the plant and should be banned from large parts of the dunes, which are 20 miles west of Yuma, Ariz.

 

To prove his point, he likes to drive his battered, dirty, 1992 Toyota SUV down a highway that bisects the dunes. The side where buggies are prohibited is dotted with wildflowers including the purple bloom of the milk-vetch. The side where off-road vehicles are allowed is a mess of tire tracks.

 

For the buggies, there's Dick Holliday, sporting a gray Fu Manchu mustache, who has spent 40 of his 60 years driving on the dunes. He's now a top officer of the American Sand Association, a 19,000-member lobbying group in La Verne, Calif., devoted to improving the image and rights of off-road vehicles. He argues the buggies don't pose a threat to the milk-vetch, and says buggy drivers steer clear of the spiny plants for fear of puncturing one of their $250 tires.

 

The competing claims have sparked multiple lawsuits, fights between rival camps' biologists, and testy public hearings. "I've never been physically pushed, but I've been catcalled," says Eileen Anderson, a botanist for the California Native Plant Society. To try to sift the conflicting assertions of vetch viability, the Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management will spend $1 million for its annual survey. This month, as the winter off-road-vehicle season ends, a team of 30 government-hired biologists has moved out here, living in tents, tallying the plants in sample five-mile tracts.

 

The milk-vetch squabble is at the center of a broader, escalating, debate over the 31-year-old Endangered Species Act, hailed by backers as a high point of the 1970s environmental movement. Mr. Patterson's center alone -- calling itself "nature's legal eagles" -- claims credit for having used the law's club to get 334 plants and animals formally designated as threatened, more than a quarter of all species on the endangered-species list.

 

Businesses and political conservatives have long attacked the law as imposing additional expenses on property owners, who must often make changes to protect species. They also argue the law is ineffective, noting that of 1,264 plants and animals listed as endangered, only 16 have recovered. They want the Republican-dominated Congress to make it more difficult for the government to limit landowners' options. "Pretending that mankind is not part of the environment doesn't work," California Republican Rep. Richard Pombo, who is spearheading the effort, said recently at a hearing on the subject.

 

The milk-vetch was named after the early 20th-century California botanist F.W. Peirson, who first identified it. There are no known commercial uses for the plant, but biologists marvel at how well it has adapted to severe conditions. It anchors itself in the shifting sand with a sturdy taproot that can snake down 50 feet to find water. It has gray, fuzzy leaves that prevent sunburn, seductive purple flowers that attract a certain type of white-faced bee and lightweight seed pods that float for miles on desert winds which replant the milk-vetch, often where nothing else grows.

 

The buggies came after World War II and have also adapted. They started as converted Volkswagen beetles, so underpowered that most couldn't make it up the steeper dunes. Then hot-rod enthusiasts and manufacturers created bigger, more powerful machines. Today modern buggies costing up to $75,000 and propelled by 600- to 800-horsepower engines can easily claw their way up any dune. Sometimes they climb into the air above the dunes before slamming down on special, air-cushioned shock absorbers copied from airplane landing-gear.

 

Over the past decade, off-road-vehicle traffic here has nearly doubled. Winter holiday weekends can bring 190,000 people, the great majority of them watching the drag races or roaring around on dune buggies, motorbikes and all-terrain vehicles.

 

Moves to separate vetch from vehicles began in 1994, when a Democratic Congress prodded by environmental groups set aside 32,000 acres in the northern part of the dunes as a permanent wilderness area. That didn't bother buggy enthusiasts too much because the steepest dunes are in the south. Then environmentalists sued to have the milk-vetch officially declared an endangered species and to broaden the restrictions. They claimed victory in November 2000, when the Clinton administration as part of a court settlement agreed to fence off an additional 49,300 acres in the popular southern portion of the dunes.

 

Until then, the battle was a legal and political mismatch. Environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity have had a long history of coordination, working the Endangered Species Act through regulators and the courts. Off-road enthusiasts mainly just showed up on weekends to ride the dunes and to party.

 

But after the string of court decisions favoring the milk-vetch, buggy riders and manufacturers banded together to form the American Sand Association. In 2001, the group hired a biologist, Arthur M. Phillips III. After counting more than 71,000 of the plants growing in the dune-buggy area, he concluded that the milk-vetch wasn't endangered. Patrolling in dune buggies, and using the satellite-based Global Positioning System, Mr. Phillips said he and five other milk-vetch counters marked out 25 census tracts for a return visit. This year, after heavy rains here, "it looks like the count will be equivalent or greater," he estimates.

 

Mr. Patterson dismisses those findings. "Phillips's work is scientifically invalid," he asserts. "Off-roaders think everything they see out there is a Peirson's milk-vetch." Mr. Phillips replies: "We do our work in the field. They do theirs in court. We have almost nothing in common."

 

Another big part of the ASA's campaign is to try to soften the image of dune-buggy riders as hell-raisers -- a reputation exacerbated over Thanksgiving weekend in 2001, when a drug- and alcohol-using crowd that gathered to watch the competition experienced a fatal shooting, several stabbings and accidents involving more than 150 injuries.

 

Since then, the sand association has started a charm campaign. Members pick up trash and put up billboards emphasizing safety on nearby highways. They are working out rules for uphill drag-races to minimize the danger to crowds. The ASA says in one safety flier to members that "this is important" in part because, after one raucous incident, "the Sierra Club demanded the dunes be closed because a reasonable amount of safety could not be maintained. A nonenvironmental issue, to be sure, but ammunition they could use just the same."

 

The Interior Department, which regulates the dunes, is required by law to keep them open for a variety of recreational uses. Mr. Patterson thinks the department should promote greater use of the dunes by hikers and photographers to offset the domination of off-roaders. As it stands, dune-buggy drivers, seeing the rare person walking in the dunes during busy weekends, sometimes stop to ask whether their vehicles have broken down. Do they need any help?

 

"This is not just about Peirson's milk-vetch," says Mr. Patterson. "This is about a really cool place." His center has notified the Interior Department that it is preparing a new lawsuit that argues 16 other dune species are also endangered, including three exotic beetles, two rare ants and four weevils.

 

Write to John J. Fialka at john.fialka@wsj.com

 

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB...ys_free_feature

[ledofthezep]

GD tree huggers. "special tires with rubber flaps." That cracked me up, I gots me some rubber flap tires.