Julie Cart

President Barack Obama on Friday designated Fort Ord a national monument, completing its conversion from bustling military base to popular Monterey Peninsula recreation area,much to the consternation of a Utah congressman.

LOS ANGELES -- House Republicans are backing legislation in Congress to give the Department of Homeland Security control of more than 50 national parks and forests within 100 miles of the U.S. borders.

The legislation involves a sweep of land along the frontier with Canada and Mexico, but exempts state land, private property and federal holdings used for mining, livestock grazing and timber harvesting. The new authority would carve through 54 national parks, including Joshua Tree, Saguaro, Acadia and Glacier.

IVANPAH VALLEY, Calif. -- Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket.

Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors -- each the size of a garage door -- are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar power project will soon be a humming city with 24-hour lighting, a wastewater processing facility and a gas-fired power plant. To make room, BrightSource has mowed down a swath of desert plants, displaced dozens of animal species and relocated scores of imperiled desert tortoises, a move that some experts say could kill up to a third of them.

One day deep in the administration of George W. Bush — a time of tumult among environmentalists and conservationists — Roger Kennedy found himself shaking his head and sighing. The Endangered Species Act was in the cross hairs of a Republican Congress and his beloved National Park Service, which Kennedy directed from 1993 to 1997, was under assault.

IMPERIAL SAND DUNES RECREATION AREA, Calif. -- Freed from the confines of Washington, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Sunday kicked up his heels in California's Mojave Desert, where he raced across undulating dunes in a souped-up sand rail.

And, perhaps as a reminder of the gridlock he left behind on Capitol Hill, Salazar's vehicle became mired in the sand as he attempted to surmount a steep dune.

The daredevil antics were driven by a serious intent: to reach out to a constituency often antagonistic to federal officials and their management of public lands in the West. To that end, Salazar and Bob Abbey, director of the Bureau of Land Management, toured the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area on a busy holiday weekend.

The pair came to mend political fences by stressing that motorized recreation fits into the Obama administration's vision of "America's Great Outdoors," a conservation and health initiative rolled out last week that is heavy on land preservation.