New Ending, No Place for a Puritan

Following is the rewrite I did for the ending of the preface for the desert anthology. I've managed to work in a few important statements about the oncoming onslaught of windmill and solar power farms that will soon mushroom across the California deserts, along with new power grids, so many wildflower replacements blinking the sun back towards itself and filling the wide views with seas of lop-lop blade and sound.....

The NEW end of the desert book preface - by Ruth Nolan
No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts

Decades have passed since the desert first took my breath away, and much has changed. I now live in the area of the desert near Palm Springs, where golf courses and posh resorts crowd the horizon, and the endangered bighorn sheep is commemorated in decorated art statues in nearby shopping malls. The entire California desert is threatened with overpopulation, pollution, and other social and climactic ills facing contemporary society. The population of Victorville has exploded to more than 100,000 people, and smog now fills the easy expanses once billed by real estate flyers as “the land of the champagne climate.” A new potential threat to the desert is the rush to install solar and windmill power facilities throughout vast tracts of the remaining open desert spaces as our nation turns to alternate energy sources. What remains of the open spaces I saw as a child from the summit of Cajon Pass will likely soon be transformed into massive power grids, fed by acre upon acre of windmill and solar farms. The selection “Problems with Windmills,” by Katherine Siva Saubel and Eric Elliott, shows the detrimental impact of a windmill facility on a vast hillside near Palm Springs. The area was once rich with barrel cactus, whose flowers served as an important food source for the region’s Cahuilla Indians, and is now all but barren of plant life.
The desert suddenly seems much smaller to me now, but the literary legacy appears much bigger. This is a land of people, of struggles and gains, and, more recently, a region of politically-charged and intensely debated land use designation and management. The California desert has long been—and continues to be—far more than a mere wasteland waiting for people to carelessly exploit or briefly endure it. In the stories in this collection, the desert sings. It hums with the pulse of overlapping human lives, a river of sound that sometimes overflows its shores, and at other times travels quietly underground.

copyright (c) 2009 by Ruth Nolan