Customer Reviews

Mojave Lands: Interpretive Planning and the National Preserve (Center Books on Contemporary Landscape Design)

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A thoroughly disappointing book. I should have known when the author began the book by describing herself as a centrist - aka a BS artist who thinks she knows better than the crazy liberals or dumb rednecks, but understands them both.

The beginning starts off with several chapters about the area now known as the Mojave National Preserve and the various groups that use the public lands there. A diverse picture is painted of many different groups who want to see many different things. There are some important groups who are wholly excluded (dirtbags, climbers, overnight campers just looking for a place to sleep, migrant workers), but many more that are included. Sadly, just as the book begins to get interesting, the author decides it is important to boil everything down into only two sides - park proponents and opponent. Then, she has the audacity to claim that these groups agreed on pretty much everything after she just got finished talking about the diversity and individual interests that different groups had. Ugh. This oversimplification at the end feels just like a lie. The individual interests in the area cannot be boiled down into such a simple argument. Then, she presents a reorganization of the argument which she considers a compromise and it just looks horrible and makes no sense.

One of the biggest lowlights was saying all park proponents were from big cities and the locals were all park opponents. All this despite interviewing a proponent who lived in the preserve in a previous chapter.

Her interviews for the book were more than 75% white men. The rest, white women, usually the wives of white men she talked with. She claimed that she was unable to locate any of the 25%+ minority population in the area for interviews.