SAVING THE Desert tortoise

Desert tortoises have lived in the deserts of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah since the Pleistocene. In the early years of the twentieth century, they still thrived within the Southwest’s arid landscapes: As many as 1,000 tortoises per square mile once inhabited the Mojave. But by the end of the century, this population of the desert tortoise was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Livestock grazing and urban development, along with the ever-increasing use of off-road vehicles, continue to degrade the tortoise’s vanishing habitat.

Since 1997, the Center has been working to protect the Mojave population of threatened desert tortoises. By challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s grazing practices on arid public lands, we’ve been successful in protecting millions of acres of fragile tortoise habitat. The Center has also actively sought to limit off-road vehicle use throughout the desert tortoise’s range, and we’ve worked hard to save desert tortoises from the detrimental effects of a relocation project that has killed a number of the animals as part of “mitigation” for expanding the Mojave Desert’s Fort Irwin. Thanks to a lawsuit we filed with Desert Survivors, Fort Irwin officials suspended the disastrous project in October 2008.

In 2000, we made significant gains for the desert tortoise when, as a result of our legal efforts, the Bureau of Land Management permanently cancelled all livestock grazing on 276,125 acres of the Granite Mountains Grazing Allotment. In 2002, the Center and its allies won another landmark settlement in which 1.9 million acres of the California Desert Conservation Area were protected against livestock grazing and 18,000 acres of tortoise habitat were closed to off-road vehicle access.