Mariana Maguire of the Conservation Lands Foundation and Frazier Haney of the Mojave Desert Land Trust will present “Meet the New California Desert National Monuments” when the San Gorgonio Chapter of the Sierra Club meets 7:30 p.m. Aug. 2 at the San Bernardino County Museum, 2024 Orange Tree Lane, Redlands.

The designation earlier this year of Sand to Snow, Mojave Trails and Castle Mountains national monuments has given rise for local organizations like the Mojave Desert Land Trust to partner in new ways with Latino communities in the California desert and to participate for the first time in Latino Conservation Week by celebrating our traditional connections to the outdoors. My role with MDLT allows me to continue to nurture the connections between plants and culture that I first learned as a child by working with native Mojave Desert plants.

The Mojave Desert Land Trust, with assistance from the Las Cruces Green Chamber of Commerce, will be working to develop a similar marketing toolkit for the new California Desert national monuments. From bed and breakfasts to restaurants, to locally owned stores, hundreds of businesses supported the protection of these places. Now, we invite these business owners and community leaders to be a part of the process to market our new national monuments. In recent weeks, we have met with local Chambers of Commerce to help inform the development of the toolkit. We look forward to our continued partnerships in the months ahead.

The Mojave Desert Land Trust (link is external) (MDLT) in California acquires land to buffer already protected land, such as a national park, to buffer other types of public land, such as a Marine Corps base, to provide public access and to protect wildlife habitat, such as that for the region’s iconic desert tortoises. MDLT generally uses direct land acquisitions and has acquired 1,300 parcels totaling 58,600 acres.

In fact, "desert" may be one of the oldest words in the world, according to UC Davis history professor Diana K. Davis. In her book, "The Arid Lands," she said "desert" may come from the Egyptian hieroglyph pronounced "tesert," which became the Latin deserere, meaning to abandon and forsake, before becoming the "desert" we know today. Call it what you will; just don’t call it barren. “That’s the perception of people from overly green places,” said Frazier Haney, conservation director of the Mojave Desert Land Trust in Joshua Tree, dedicated to acquiring and protecting desert places. “It’s all about looking closely.”

The Mojave Desert Land Trust has acquired the private property in the Whipple Mountains Wilderness, 50-miles south of Needles in extreme southeast San Bernardino County.