We had noted a while back here at TakePart that the beautiful and iconic Joshua Trees in the eponymous National Park are rapidly dying out thanks to global warming, but that wasn’t the only threat to the Park and its gorgeous environs. Luckily, at least one bullet has been dodged, as a federal appeals court has upheld a ruling that stopped construction on what would have been one of the nation’s largest landfills.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (the one the Republicans think have the activist judges) has upheld a 2005 ruling that prevented an abandoned iron ore mine from being converted into the Eagle Mountain Landfill. And why, you might ask, would this landfill maybe not be a good idea? The AP (via MSNBC) tells us:

Kaiser Ventures of Ontario wanted to develop the dump, which would have received 20,000 tons of trash from Los Angeles County daily for 117 years. The 4,654-acre site is about 1.5 miles from the park’s boundaries and surrounded by the park on three sides. Two jojoba farmers sued more than 20 years ago to stop a Bureau of Land Management deal necessary for the development. The National Parks Conservation Association later joined the case.

That’s a suit long in the making. Now, as someone who has spent a little bit of time in the Joshua Tree National Park, I’m happy to hear that I will be able to go back without passing what I know to be a landfill. But this begs a few questions: what are we going to do with all this trash? Which, of course, brings us to the green question: how can we stop wasting so much stuff?

photo credit: tomsaint11’s flickr photostream/Creative Commons