The Southwest must be losing its desert habitat as fast as the tropics are losing rainforest. In LA, the growth is haphazard and uncontrolled, like a tumor growing in a body. It stretches along the coast in a continuous line from Santa Barbara to San Diego, and follows mountain passes toward Palm Springs, Victorville and Lancaster. Today I'm driving through the mountainous region near Acton, north of Los Angeles. It is where Steven Spielberg shot the TV movie Duel in the 1970s.
Duel takes place in an almost deserted landscape of low hills and scrub.
Nowadays you could shoot L.A. Law here. It's almost totally built up, with ugly tract houses and trailer parks traversed by the Antelope Valley Freeway. I think of Chaco Canyon and its ancient ruins. No one knows why the Anasazi built such a great settlement there, in the middle of one of the Southwest's harshest deserts. Perhaps it was chosen for its location in the geographical center of their empire.