Exploring the connection between Veterans, outdoor spaces, and the efforts to push beyond party lines to protect public lands
This is a longer version of the Z107.7 Sunday News with interviews of the people who participated in a panel by the Vet Voices Foundation, held on March 17th at the Mojave Desert Land Trust.
You can listen to the full story here:
Public lands continue to come under attack under President Trump’s second term. In the Trump administration’s 2027 budget proposal, the National Park Service budget has been reduced by $736 million, which the National Park Conservation Association says will most likely result in thousands of park staff losing their jobs. That’s after an estimated 25% reduction in workforce across public lands in the nation last year. In a severely divided political spectrum, public lands can be one of the issues that could help bridge that divide, especially here in the Morongo Basin.
Military and the hi-desert
To the east of Joshua Tree National Park, The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC) sits just outside Twentynine Palms, and it’s the largest United States Marine Corps base in the nation covering over 1,100 square miles. Up to 45,000 Marines as well as other U.S. and allied forces train at the combat center each year. Veterans make up nearly 18% of the Morongo Basin population, which outpaces state and federal populations which hover around 7%.
Vet Voice Foundation
Last month the nonprofit Vet Voice Foundation held a panel discussion at the Mojave Desert Land Trust with four veterans giving their perspectives on why public lands matter to them and should continue to be protected.
Janessa Goldbeck is the CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation and a U.S. Marine Corps veteran. She led the discussion with Chairman Emeritus Glenn Lodge of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe who is also a U.S. Army Special Forces veteran. Nick Borelli, who’s a licensed clinical social worker and a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, and Barry Scanlon, an artist, Mil-Tree Board member, and U.S. Marine Corps veteran. Each person on the panel talked about how public lands and public land access has been an important part of their lives, their military training, and their reintroduction into society after serving in the armed forces.
The event was also attended by members of the public and after the presentation, I caught up with each one of the speakers to discuss their connection to public lands.
Janessa Goldbeck, CEO of Vet Voice Foundation
“I’m a Marine Corps veteran, and I’m the CEO of Vet Voice Foundation, which is a national veterans advocacy organization. For many people — veterans and those who have not worn the uniform — being out in nature is healing and restorative. There’s science that actually backs that. In fact the VA (Veterans Affairs) has put some money into getting more veterans outside because it’s proven to help our mental health, and that’s true for anybody. I think in terms of our role as advocates for public lands, we’re one of the last groups in American society that have cross-partisan respect. Whether or not you agree with a conflict that soldiers, Marines, and airmen have been sent into, you respect the service and the sacrifice of people who raised their right hand and swore an oath to protect and defend this country and our Constitution.
“So when veterans speak up, especially if they’re speaking up on something like public lands that means so much to so many Americans, people listen. And that is why it’s so important for us to use our voices and to elevate the voices of other veterans who really care about this issue.”
Public lands are a bipartisan issue
“We’ve seen a lot of attacks from Republicans in Congress on public lands, and we’ve also seen some Republicans break ranks with the administration and the majority to join the public lands caucus in a bipartisan way. And in fact, that bipartisanship was what helped defeat the public lands sell-off effort last year. We want to continue to see that type of leadership from both Republicans and Democrats. For Republicans to hold those in their party accountable who want to sell off public lands, they really need to step forward and say, hey, selling off public lands is a third-rail political issue, no matter if you vote Republican, Independent, or Democrat. Americans have demonstrated that that’s the case, and we need elected officials to recognize that and vote accordingly.
“I think it’s really important to make it very clear once and for all that this land is our land. It is not for the taking. It is not to be sold off to a billionaire or a private equity firm or oil and gas development that is going to tarnish it and ruin it forever. You can’t regrow a 1,000-year-old old-growth wood forest overnight. You can’t put things back into place once they’re destroyed. It’s really important that in this moment where they’re under attack like never before, Americans come together to really make it clear we will not allow this and we will hold you accountable electorally if you don’t support public lands in this country and in the state of California.
“When I think back about efforts that actually established our national parks and our national monuments, the Antiquities Act, Teddy Roosevelt really faced a lot of opposition to putting into place some of these watershed, bedrock legislative efforts and laws that make protection and preservation of public lands possible. That took a lot of courage to stand up to folks in his own party, to his backers, to his supporters, and to build coalitions. One of the things that I think about when I look at this coalition is that we are standing on the shoulders of people who came before us who had these amazing visionary ideas to establish our National Park System, but they had to work together and they had to work across differences to get it done, and they had to have courage in standing up to people who they disagreed with on this issue, and so I hope that we can see more veterans and more Americans doing the same.”
What’s your favorite thing to do out on public lands?
“I’m a huge hiker… I love to solo hike. I did the John Muir Trail a few months back. I’ve been out on the Chuckwalla National Monument a couple of times, but just being alone out there and seeing the stars at night, I think the vastness of the desert itself really puts in perspective how small some of our problems and issues are, and also how connected we are to everything around us, and that makes my heart sing.”
Nick Borelli, Clinical Social Worker
Panel member Nick Borelli spoke about his time training at the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center here in Twentynine Palms. He also spoke about his time in the Armed Forces and how he uses nature and public lands to help facilitate healing within himself and the veterans that he works with.
“My name is Nick Borelli, and I’m a licensed clinical social worker out of Encinitas, California. I specialize in one-on-one processing traumatic experiences with veterans and active duty service members, as well as first responders and their family members, and I also specialize in really what my love of is surfing and ocean therapy, and I work for a nonprofit called the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation. So I’m out here today actually as part of the team for Vet Voice in advocating for public land use and the preservation and conservation for public land use, not just for veterans but for everybody in our nation.”
Breaking the connection with technology
“We live in a world today, obviously, that’s just so connected to technology, and everybody’s so connected to their phones and to staring at a screen, and so part of us getting outside and outdoors and in open space and open nature is just reconnecting ourselves with Mother Nature, with the earth, with the energetic fields of healing, and taking a moment to slow down, to breathe, and to feel the expansion and the vastness of the universe.
“You have to really make a concerted effort to get people out of their little microcosm and their ecosystem, and it starts with getting out of the phone, and then it starts with getting out of the screen, and then it starts with getting out of their community and their cycles that they’re in, whether they’re healthy or unhealthy, and then bringing them out to a place that is vast, and that is open, and that is quiet, and that is full of life, and letting them sit with that.”
Training in Twentynine Palms
“I was fortunate enough to be an infantry officer in the Marine Corps from 2004 to 2010. I was actually stationed on the east coast at Camp Lejeune with 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, and I was rifle platoon commander there, and company executive officer for Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines.
“We did all of our pre-deployment training out here in Twentynine Palms because it’s the best training that we could get, the most accessible, realistic kind of training that we could do for the Marine Corps combined arms effort out here at Twentynine Palms. So at the time it was called Mojave Viper, so like a four to six week large scale pre-deployment training exercise. So we would actually deploy here before we would deploy to go to combat out in the deserts of Iraq. So I did two Iraq deployments, yes.”
The desert connection
Robert Haydon: “Do you think that not only for people who only just trained out here, for people that trained and deployed in areas like this, what do you think it is about coming out to the desert or having access to public lands in the desert that kind of adds to that sort of healing that you’re talking about?
Nick Borelli: “Thank you for asking that. It’s a fantastic question. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, having driven out here from San Diego and just the years it’s been. I mean, I got out 16 years ago now and, you know, unless you came from a desert-like environment, then your first exposure may be of the desert, may be training at Twentynine Palms.
And for me, during the panel here, I got really emotional because I didn’t grow up in the desert-like environment for the most part. And my affiliation with this area specifically, that was a really tough time for me. One of my best friends lost a Marine in a training accident here and it was just absolutely a horrific, terrible, horrific mishap. And so, you know, for me, this area, my wife is always trying to get me to come back here and we live coastal and I love the ocean, but I was very averse to this place. And I can’t speak for all veterans, but a lot of us have kind of this idea of the desert as being a place that’s super difficult, very dangerous. We do training here and we get stuck here and it sucks. And so to actually be able to come out here and have it be our own and have somebody like you or these beautiful citizens around here that are giving us permission to go, ‘no, no, no, we’re going to find some joy in this place. We’re going to feel connected in this place.’ It’s really, truly freedom.
“Until you really reframe the idea of what it’s like to be out here, and it’s not mandatory, very difficult training in 120 degree heat… It’s actually something that can be enjoyable and healing and peaceful. I feel like everybody needs to make the pilgrimage out to kind of really feel that.
“It certainly helped me.”
What do you like to do out on public lands?
“I like to move. So we’re very fortunate to have in the state of California at a certain disability rating. We have access to becoming a distinguished veteran and a distinguished veteran pass affords us the opportunity to camp at state parks for free. So I love taking my kids to the state parks that are especially near the ocean so that I could surf. I love surfing so much, but I also love hiking. I love mountain biking. And I also just, you know, I love to move in nature. I also just love to sit. I love to feel connected. And I love to bring people out here and just sit and go deep and feel like we’re all part of this together.”
Glenn Lodge, Chairman Emeritus of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe
Losing access to lands, public or private, isn’t new to Native Americans. The federal government may have created public lands and the protections around them, but that land was seized or stolen from indigenous people. Today, some would characterize the methods being used to seize public lands as falling outside the bounds of federal law. I asked Chairman Emeritus Glenn Lodge of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe if he thinks that the federal government would do the same with tribal lands.
Glenn Lodge: “Well, it would take an act of Congress to take tribal land, first of all. You know, when I talked about doing land swaps, we’d like to do land swaps with BLM for some of the land along the river that we previously were part of our tribal lands but now aren’t. And they’ve got to declare them surplus lands before that can happen, you know, and then we have to petition under the program through Department of the Interior to get that done. But outside of that, there are no public lands on tribal reservations. Those are sovereign entities. So sovereignty protects that land.
Connecting to the land as a Native American and Veteran
Robert Haydon: “Everyone up there on the panel sort of spoke about the personal connection that veterans have with public lands. As a member of a Native American tribe that has already had land stolen maybe multiple times, it seems like there would be an extra connection there for you.”
Glenn Lodge: “You know, that’s always been stuck in our craw all these years, That we were forced off our traditional tribal lands, and it took a long time to get it back, because we had federal recognition in 1909 at the time that Parker Dam came along. So, they condemned our reservation, they dissolved our tribe, sent us scattered across the country, and not until 1970, except for Parker, there’s a lot of Chemehuevi down there too, so a lot of them went back there. Some squatted on the land illegally, some of the land was with the railroad company that had a lease going through it that they were going to extend their line, which they never did. The railroad company took all that land that they got from the federal government and put it out on leases to the general public, so that’s, you know, the same as selling the land. So, we fought that off, and finally got title to those lands back as part of our restoration. But, yeah, we’ve experienced that, you know… I want to call it a ‘legal acquisition’ of tribal lands, you know.”
What do you enjoy doing on that land?
What’s your favorite thing to do out on those public lands and tribal lands?
Glenn Lodge: “Hike, hunt. We’re right on the river… we have 32 miles of shoreline.”
Barry Scanlon, Mil-Tree Board Member
Mil-Tree is a non-profit veteran advocacy group based in Joshua Tree, and part of their mission is to help veterans make meaningful connections to community while easing the transition into civilian life. Mil-Tree board member and veteran Barry Scanlon talked to me about how public lands is part of that mission as well.
“My name is Barry Scanlon. I’ve lived out here about four years now, so I consider myself a local again. But in 1972 and 73, I was stationed in the Marine Corps at Twentynine Palms Marine Base. Myself and my colleagues were young kids, right out of boot camp, mostly from the East Coast. We had never seen the desert before, and we were totally enthralled with it. At that time, there were only a two-lane highway through Twentynine Palms. There was no national park… it was a national monument. No one was visiting it back then. When we went in, it was virtually empty. We would take our beer and our cheap wine, go up into the hills and just hang out and look at the stars. And we felt like we were the luckiest guys in the world.
It was near the end of the Vietnam War, there was a lot happening. We weren’t being sent overseas, because at that time, the war was winding down. And then I was shipped out of here, and I kind of missed it right away. After I got out of the Marines, I still remembered how much I liked Southern California and the desert. And since I’ve been here, I’ve joined MDLT and I’ve joined the Mil-Tree I want to support local, and this is, I think, one of the best ways to do it.
The power of community and nature
“It can be very restorative and community-building just to be walking in the desert or in the woods together. You know, when you’re with your friends or even with strangers and you’re walking along, you get to know each other, and you get to share things. And here you are with a bunch of veterans, all ages, and you’re walking along, and, you know, somebody might point out that these Joshua Trees look very familiar from some old Star Trek episode, perhaps, because Captain Kirk and Star Trek did a lot of filming around the Joshua Tree area for alien planets. So here we are walking in an alien environment, and we’re having these bizarre conversations. So in that way, it can be restorative in the heart, in your mind, and also you’re out in the fresh air, and you’re getting out of a town or out of your house. And what can be better than that?
Wide open spaces are becoming harder to find
“Sometimes when you’re on Twentynine Palms Highway, or even in the National Park, you could be standing there, and you can look for like 30 miles and not see a house or a car or anything. That’s very rare anymore in America, and it’s things that we don’t want to lose. It’s nice just to look across the mountains and see nothing but Joshua trees and rocks and all those things that make up the desert. That’s a very unique thing.
What do you like to use public desert land for?
I love to hike. I just hiked Rattlesnake Canyon the other day, and it was amazing. That’s always an amazing thing when you see a little trickle of water running in the desert. There were tourists there from all over the world. You know, I spoke to some lady from France. There were some other people there. I think they’re from Spain, but it was just wonderful. So that’s my favorite thing to do is hike.
You can watch the entire panel here:
How to get involved in Public Lands Advocacy
The Mojave Desert Land Trust hosted the presentation, and Public Policy Officer Krystian Lahage was also on hand to answer questions about public lands advocacy. He and the MDLT are hosting free advocacy training workshops in April that can help you get acquainted with public lands policy, as well as learn how to make your voice heard by decision makers.
The first one is coming up on Wednesday, April 8th. They’re free and take place over Zoom, so everyone is encouraged to attend.
You can learn more about the Vet Voice Foundation and its mission at vvfnd.org.
