Court Order Final Blow to Landfill Near Joshua Tree National Park (eagle, California)

[Unsettomati]

In a decision that is likely the killing blow for one of southern California's longest-running environmental controversies, a federal judge has reversed a 1999 land swap in Riverside County that would have allowed the Kaiser Eagle Mountain company to build a large landfill adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park.

http://www.kcet.org/news/redefine/revisit/land-use/court-order-final-blow-to-landfill-near-joshua-tree-national-park.html

This is absolutely the right decision - this landfill would have been on land that was formerly part of Joshua Tree National Monument, removed from the monument by Congress in 1950 solely to allow Kaiser Steel to extract iron ore from the desert. By the 1980s, that mine was no longer economically feasible, and was closed. Then, after emerging from bankruptcy, the newly-constituted Kaiser Ventures decided that the land it still controlled would make a great place to dump garbage from the Los Angeles basin.





However, given that the only reason for prying away from the monument that chuck of land was to build the mine, once the mine was defunct there was no longer any reason not to reincorporate that land into the monument - which in 1994 was upgraded to Joshua Tree National Park.

The mine, of course, has left a great scar on the land. However, almost all desert parks - from Joshua Tree National Park to Death Valley Natrional Park, from Mojave National Preserve to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and many others - are filled with mining ruins being slowly reclaimed by the desert.

The Colorado and Mojave Deserts (Joshua Tree National Park sits astride the boundary between the two) teem with empty land. There is plenty of room for landfills, if they must be put in the desert, on land that was never part of the Joshua Tree unit.

[Beenaroundabit]

removed from the monument by Congress in 1950 solely to allow Kaiser Steel to extract iron ore from the desert.

Here's hoping there are no more decisions like this.

[luv4horses]

So where should the landfill go? I agree with this decision (at least on the surface), but the big question remains.