CARRIZO PLAIN NATIONAL MONUMENT, Calif. — First she killed her dogs, shot them in the head with a .38-caliber revolver and covered the two bodies with a quilt. Then Marlene Braun leveled the blue steel muzzle three inches above her right ear and pulled the trigger.
"I can't face what appears to be required to continue to live in my world," the meticulous 46-year-old wrote in May in a suicide note. "Most of all, I cannot leave Carrizo, a place where I finally found a home and a place I love dearly."
Braun had come to the Carrizo Plain three years earlier, after the U.S. Bureau of Land Management placed her in charge of the new national monument -- 250,000 acres of native grasses and Native American sacred sites, embraced by low mountains, traversed by the San Andreas Fault and home to more threatened and endangered animals than any other spot in California.
About 120 miles northwest of Los Angeles, Carrizo Plain National Monument is largely unknown to the outside world. But in Braun's short tenure as monument manager, the plain had become a battleground between conservationists and the Bush administration over the fate of Western public lands.
What began as a policy dispute -- to graze or not to graze livestock on the fragile Carrizo grasslands -- became a morass of environmental politics and office feuding that Braun was convinced threatened both her future and the landscape she loved.
A 13-year veteran of the BLM, Braun was torn between the demands of a new boss who she felt favored the region's ranchers, and conservation policies adopted nearly a decade ago to protecting the austere swath of prairie she shared with pronghorn antelope and peregrine falcons, the California condor and the California jewelflower.
Braun had worked in Alaska and Nevada and had long been committed to preserving the land that was placed in her care. But nothing in her background seemed to foreshadow her fate.
"Marlene was never troubled, as far as I knew," recalled Sutton Edlich, a friend from graduate school who said he was "absolutely" shocked that Braun killed herself. "She wasn't a happy-go-lucky person, but was a realist.... She was a complex person."
In the months leading up to her death in May, Braun lost weight and had trouble sleeping. Doctors prescribed antidepressants and tranquilizers. Friends worried that stress and isolation were taking a toll, but none interpreted her behavior as a sign of despair.
