The Sonoran Desert, located in southwestern Arizona, southeastern California and northwestern Mexico, is a place of paradoxes. It is as diverse as it is desolate, as beautiful as it is barren. It is home to that icon of the American West, the saguaro cactus, and thousands of other endemic life forms that can be found only here, in this seemingly uninhabitable environment. It is where the desert meets the sea-the Sonoran's southernmost border is formed by the Gulf of California-yet rainfall throughout the region rarely exceeds 6 inches annually. (Some areas of the Sonoran Desert have been known to go without rain for as long as three years.) It is a hot, harsh, hostile land, but amazingly delicate and fragile; a complex ecosystem that has developed over millions of years. It is the largest desert in the Western Hemisphere, and in geologic terms, it is quickly disappearing.

The culprit is, of course, modern civilization. While most experts now agree that even indigenous cultures had an impact on the Sonaran Desert's environment, most of the damage to this 120,000 square mile area has occurred in the past 100 years, as parties on both sides of the international border have exploited the land and the water table to suit the needs of stock raising, mining, agriculture and large urban populations. Grazing and open pit copper mining have destroyed thousands of square miles of top soil. The water table has been sucked to dangerously low levels, first by agribusiness, then the thirsty populations of cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson and Hermosillo.

However, even though modern civilization has permanently transformed vast tracts of the Sonoran landscape, a substantial portion of the desert remains fairly intact. A coalition of nationally known writers, environmentalists, politicians, and scientists on the U.S. side of the border are currently working to have a 5,000 square mile area of the Sonoran Desert declared a national park and preserve. This area, when combined with the already protected El Pinacate and Alto Golfo biospheres in Mexico, would create, in the words of writer Charles Bowden, "the biggest potential of silence and space and life left in the western hemisphere south of the Artic."

Both author and desert rat, Bowden, in a 1999 article he wrote for Esquire, vowed to make the Sonoran Desert "safe from us before I die or I'm gonna go to my grave one pissed-off rat." For nearly 20 years, Bowden has wandered the desert, walking in the footsteps of the rats who came before him, men like Ed Abbey and Julian Hayden. His current wanderings (as of August, 2000) can be tracked at oneworldjourneys.com, an ecotourism web site that has enlisted Bowden's talents as a journalist for its expedition in the Sonoran Desert. His sparse journal entries attempt to capture the ominous silence of the region, a silence that is, in yet another paradox, music to a desert rat's ears.

This tranquility is more than occasionally disrupted by the snarl of dirt bikes and all terrain vehicles, exhaust noise ripping the still, hot desert air as knobby tires shred the ancient desert floor. Although access is restricted, the Sonoran Desert offers some of last open areas for off-road vehicles in the United States, and still plays host to one of the most famous off-road races in the world, the Baja 1000. The men and women who ride these machines, both in professional competitions and on weekend jaunts, are not all that different in mindset from the typical desert rat. Both embrace the spirit of rugged individualism so often found in the American West. While the majority of off-roaders probably can't be called environmentalists, they have a stake in protecting the desert environment. But a few have spoiled if for the rest, riding in restricted areas and generally wreaking havoc on the pristine terrain, which has only increased support for the creation of a national park in which all off-road riding might be banned.

In fact, the inability of governing authorities to enforce existing rules and regulations in the region has been a major impetus for proponents of a Sonoran Desert National Park and Preserve. Currently, all the land being proposed for the park is owned by the federal government and overseen by the Department of the Interior. But management of the land is divided between three separate federal agencies within the DOI: the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is administered by the National Park Service, the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range is run by the Bureau of Land Management. Public access is restricted, and all of the land is off limits to mining, grazing, wood harvesting and settlement. But proponents of the park and preserve claim that enforcement has been shoddy, and that granting national park status to Organ Pipe and Cabeza Prieta and national preserve status to the Air Force Range would provide the Sonoran Desert with the maximum protection available under existing wilderness regulations.