Yes I absolutely would oppose converting the desert to agricultural land. We have more than enough existing agricultural land. No need to wreck the desert.
You want section 3.3 "Biological Resources", which shows that it is not "devoid of life", though one of the sections is "on sandy soils with no discernable aspect."
Note however that this is for exploration. It doesn't assess long-term effects of commercial mining. Also, as the L.A. Times article points out, this ...:
> "does not include mapping of floodplain boundaries, nor any hydrologic modeling or analysis," the response read. "There is no discussion of the risks to cross contamination from the deep brines to the freshwater aquifer, and the drill site reclamation practices do not appear to have taken this risk into account."
"Devils Hole pupfish has much to teach scientists about adaptation to adverse conditions. It has adapted to survive in very warm water with very low oxygen content.
Envision each living thing on Earth, including humans, as being a thread in a piece of cloth. Each time a species goes extinct, a thread is removed and the fabric is weakened. As more threads disappear, one-by-one, the strands separate and fall away. Eventually, the original piece of cloth falls apart and disappears.
All living things are part of a complex, often delicately balanced network called the biosphere. The earth’s biosphere, in turn, is composed of countless ecosystems, which include plants and animals and their physical environments. No one knows how the extinction of organisms will affect the other members of its ecosystem, but the removal of a single species can set off a chain reaction affecting many others. Only time will tell."
Separately there is the simple act of conserving a species for its own sake, but that's a separate topic from its helpfulness for material human needs.