To protect the desert tortoise, a federal judge has closed more than 2,200 miles of California’s Western Mojave Desert to off-road vehicles. By the government’s own monitoring, those vehicles are blamed for roughly half of one tortoise death a year. To spare that half a tortoise, the order is dismantling Randsburg, a 130-year-old town of 45 people.
I serve on the board of the BlueRibbon Coalition, and I have watched it for years. One organization, the Center for Biological Diversity, has used the Endangered Species Act to close three of California’s most storied off-road destinations: the Peirson’s milk-vetch at Glamis, the western snowy plover at Oceano Dunes, and now the desert tortoise across the Western Mojave. The judge who signed the Mojave order, Susan Illston, presided over the Glamis case as well.
None of this is an argument against the tortoise. The animal is imperiled, down roughly 90 percent since the 1970s, and deserves real protection. That is exactly why the ruling is so hard to defend: it sacrifices a town for the appearance of protecting a tortoise.
Consider the record before the court. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that off-road vehicles kill about eight tortoises a year, seven one-hundredths of one percent of the population. When the Bureau of Land Management surveyed the routes, it found five tortoise deaths in eleven years it judged “likely” caused by off-roaders, closer to half of one a year. The agencies cannot even say those deaths were ours. Paved highways through a nearby preserve kill up to ten a year, and no one closes them. An enclosure sealed from all vehicles for 24 years still lost 92 percent of its tortoises to disease, ravens and drought. The forces actually driving the decline are untouched by a line on a map. Closing trails is the illusion of action, and the people who built their lives around them pay for it.
What makes it worse: the work had already been done. For a decade, off-roaders, conservationists, agencies and locals built a Western Mojave travel plan that protected habitat while keeping the land open. Then the Center for Biological Diversity sued, and one judge decided her view outweighed that consensus.
That decision has an address. The trails that carried visitors into Randsburg for generations are the ones it closed. Almost no one came by paved highway; they came by dirt, and that dirt is now off limits. Off-roaders supply 90 to 95 percent of the town’s revenue, and overnight, those routes were gone.
Carol Dyer has owned the town’s only restaurant, the historic Randsburg General Store, for nearly ten years. When the closure hit the news, visitors stopped coming. If the trails stay closed through October, she says, she walks away $20,000 in the hole and may lose her home. The next meal is 30 miles away.
At its core, this is not a fight about off-road vehicles. It is about how decisions on public land get made. Those lands belong to all of us, and the choices that govern them should come from an open, accountable, science-based process, not from a courtroom and advocacy organization with a history of bias against public land access. When a court can erase a town to save no species, every rural community in the West has a stake.
There is a further reason to halt this. This spring, the federal government rescinded the decades-old criteria the BLM had to apply to these routes, the framework this case was built on. At a minimum, that warrants a pause: Interior should reopen the routes, or the court should stay its order, while judges decide whether the closure can stand. Glamis was eventually reopened, but only after roughly a decade in court. This order may be overturned too. Randsburg does not have a decade.
These are our public lands. Protecting them should never require destroying the people who live on them, for a gesture that protects nothing.
We belong here.
Shannon Welch of Riverside is vice president of the board of directors of the BlueRibbon Coalition, a national nonprofit that advocates for responsible access to public lands. She spent more than a decade in the off-road industry, including helping manage King of the Hammers.