Unexpectedly ancient
I’ve posted this photo a few times. I’m posting it again now. What jumps out at you when you look at it? The light? The alpenglow on Clark Mountain in the background? The rocks, the Joshua trees? The blurry cholla?
Right now, for me, it’s the least conspicuous aspect of this photo that’s blazing out at me, and I am staggered.
See the dark gray bushes in the foreground, among the Joshua trees? That’s blackbrush, Coleogyne ramosissima, and I don’t think, after tonight, that I’ll ever look at it — or the Mojave — the same way again.
I’m working on a piece for the Desert Protective Council intended to convey the notion that the desert is not a renewable resource. People call paving desert wildlands for solar “renewable energy.” I’ve become increasingly persuaded that’s deceptive terminology, because while the sun may come up every morning the desert landscape that gets bladed to install industrial facilities that make solar power is actually rather fragile and very slow to grow back. And so I’ve been doing a little background research before drafting. There are certain things I intended to mention. The 12,000-year-old creosote clone in Johnson Valley? Check. Cryptobiotic crusts that grow an inch a century, and without which the desert would blow away? Check. I was working on finding some stats about Yucca schidigera, which grows in clumps that take centuries to form — there are 1,000+-year-old Yucca schidigera clumps all through the Mojave Preserve — and leafing through another few old scientific papers I thought I might want to look at, and then I saw a paper entitled Dynamics of Mojave Desert Shrub Assemblages in the Panamint Mountains, California by Robert H. Webb, John W. Steiger, and Raymond M. Turner which was published in Ecology, June 1987.
It mentioned blackbrush.
Webb, Steiger and Turner did a study of disturbed areas west of Death Valley. Some had been disturbed by human activity in the late 19th century, some by debris flows in the last couple thousand years, and some by debris flows of Pleistocene age. They determined the rate at which desert plants recolonize disturbed areas. They found that Coleogyne is very slow to revegetate areas from which it had been stripped.
Now as it happens, I’ve written about blackbrush recently in this very context, in a new Joshua tree book chapter I took to my writers’ group last week. Here’s what I said:
A stand of native blackbrush will take at least fifty years, and probably far longer, to recover from wildfire. That’s assuming there are no fires afterward, and there will be.
It’s a scary image, one literally seared into my brain. In 1997 I went to Bulldog Canyon, Utah, where a fire had knocked down a thick stand of blackbrush and Joshua trees a decade earlier. The difference between burned and unburned was stark after a decade. Where the land had not burned, blackbrush covered the land in an almost solid carpet. Where the fire had been, there was no blackbrush even after a decade.
This is important for a few reasons, the nearest to my heart being that blackbrush is the most common nurse plant for Joshua trees, at least in the upper elevations of the tree’s range in the Mojave. Blackbrush is pesky to hike through, stiff and ornery and scratchy, and Joshua tree seedlings that germinate under a blackbrush canopy stand a good chance of escaping hungry rabbits and ground squirrels until they’re old enough to fend for themselves. Joshua trees also grow in places dominated by other shrubs, creosote probably blackbrush’s main rival in this regard. More often than not, though, a Joshua tree forest is actually a Joshua tree-blackbrush forest.
So what’s the big deal about reading a paper published a quarter century ago? Just this: it turns out I was off in my estimate of how long it takes blackbrush to regenerate. Way off.
Blackbrush can make nearly solid stands across many square miles of desert. The photo above shows one such, mixed in with a dozen or so other shrubs like Menodora and chollas and a few others. Hiking on Cima Dome is an exercise in getting to know blackbrush. There’s a lot of it there, in some places more than half the plant cover.
Webb, Steiger and Turner found that blackbrush took as much as “tens of thousands of years” — their words — to revegetate up to 20 percent cover in the areas they studied.
That’s one study. Something may have happened to the places Webb, Steiger and Turner examined to slow the growth of blackbrush. So I looked elsewhere. I am still collecting citations for the piece I’m writing. It would seem the consensus is that a thick, Cima Dome-style stand of blackbrush probably takes from 5,000-10,000 years to develop.
That unprepossessing, inconspicuous, actually kind of ugly plant in the photo is the base of a very specific ecosystem that may have taken longer to develop than the whole span of human history.
This may be hard to grasp, for for those of us raised on 19th-century ecological notions such as succession and climax forests and such. So let me put it this way:
Find the oldest coast redwood forest on earth, with trees three hundred feet tall and thirty feet thick at the base, some of them 2,000 years old. Then plat out a few square miles of the White Mountains’s bristlecone pine groves, home of the Methuselah tree and its ancient cohort, ranging up to twice as old as the redwoods. Then pick a random piece of Cima Dome, a couple miles in each direction, full of unprepossessing blackbrush.
Chainsaw all three. Bulldoze it all flat. Leave only stumps flush with the ground. Then let them all grow back at their own pace. When the new redwoods and bristlecones are considerably older than the ancient ones we have now, the blackbrush may still not be more than about halfway recovered.
It’s a blackbrush forest out there, and it grows inconsequential, short-lived Joshua trees out of it here and there, ephemeral companions, barnacles on a whale. Though individual blackbrush plants in a stand may not be particularly old, a solid stand of blackbrush is an astonishingly ancient community.
This is how Webb, Steiger and Turner said it:
“Time span for [vegetative] recovery may be longer than past periods of climatic and geomorphic stability.”
They’re talking geological epochs here. They’re talking the blackbrush community beginning when there were standing lakes in the Mojave with sabertooth cats and ground sloths drinking out of them.
And we see it as less valuable than a few megawatts of power to run our swimming pool filters.
Comments
Wow! Just… wow!!
Thanks for sharing this astonishing insight, Chris. Now how do we beat this into the heads of those leading the “green energy” bandwagon marching into the desert?
You are really, really educating me about desert ecology. As a professional ecologist I am amazed at not only the information you bring forth but the manner in which you present it.
I would like to know more about the interruptions and alterations to the desert being proposed by the energy industry. This is new information to me.
Human management of any natural ecosystem is difficult. The relationships between animal and plant species, living species to geologic features, and geology to climate are still much too complex for us to fully understand.
I’m more than impressed with the blackbrush life cycle; a plant community older than human recorded history!
Bill
Why not mention the invasive grass species that fuel the fires that burn the blackbush that nurse the Jo-trees that grace the sky in the house that Jack built? That is the line in the sand, correction cryptobiotic crust. Great article, great writing, found via twitter.
That’s a great description, especially the redwood-bristlecone comparison. Thanks for deepening the picture for me that much more.
Craig
Chris, this is a remarkably beautiful essay on the importance of old-growth desert shrublands. Thank you so much for putting this out there. A lot of us have been fighting for a long time to refute the naysayers who are not concerned about desert fires, attributing them to natural causes when in fact they are the result of careless human activity and the spread of invasive weeds. I put together a analysis of the 2006 Sawtooth fire and it’s impact on native desert habits in our quarterly publication, The Chaparralian. Here’s the download link if you’d like to take a look:
http://www.californiachaparral.org/images/CHAP_20_Denialists_and_Western_Sierra.pdf
Thanks again for spreading the word about the importance and value of the priceless Mojave.
Hi John; I do in fact mention invasives and the grass-fire cycle throughout my writing. In fact, if I had quoted a little bit more from my draft chapter, it would have looked like this:
A stand of native blackbrush will take at least fifty years, and probably far longer, to recover from wildfire. That’s assuming there are no fires afterward, and there will be. What was a diverse desert wildland becomes a monochromatic landscape of a few fire-tolerant invasive species. It is near-inevitable, and I watched the pale grasses bend beneath the earache wind, their seed-heads freeing new generations to travel downwind into yet-uninvaded forests. I told myself it was the wind filling my eyes with saltwater.
Here’s another example.
My first memory of the Mojave as a six year old is seeing dust devils. The last time I was in the TOWN of Mojave, the constant prevailing 30 mph winds made walking difficult.
These solar-power dumbwits are going to “blade” away the delicate crust and plant a thicket of wobbling mirrors on the loose disturbed soil?
It seems to me that a chronic mess of dust will soon overcoat the mirrors, and also there will be choking air pollution downwind, akin to the plumes coming off the Owens Lake bed.
Also, please note a minor spelling glitch, below, “brUUsh.”
“Bulldog Canyon, Utah, where a fire had knocked down a thick stand of blackbruush “
Chris
Thanks so much for sharing this. I personally have gotten tired of hearing about all the “GREEN” companies that have sprouted up in the recent years. In my opinion, alot of them are greedy corporations trying to push their agendas through “GREEN” initiatives without any concern for the environment or surrounding areas, doesn’t sound very green to me. Living in the Antelope valley, we are reminded every day of how human disturbance is affecting the Desert.
Thanks again for the Great info. I will keep my eyes out for any blackbrush on our hikes, hopefully there may still be some in this area.
nice work, Chris.
Amazing, just amazing.
i spent the day today checking out huizaches - one of the most common [and beautiful] chapparal/desert trees here in Guanajuato. after searching all day, i found a single nursery which carried them. they were so tiny - mostly under a foot tall - and i asked how old they were, and they told me that they had been planted by seed 12 years ago. my job now is to sell them to someone who regularly purchases mature trees weighing thousands of pounds which can only be moved by large cranes. no problem… thank you for this fascinating piece which i’m going to forward to quite a few people who think nothing of bulldozing the desert to build another ‘trophy’ house.
Chris,
This is a valuable as well as beautiful piece. I am looking forward to our publication of it in the Desert Protective Council Spring Newsletter. Thank you.
Terry
I am blown away by this info. Beautifully written. My only problem is that all these wonderful comments, appreciating to such a fantastic degree the information - are all written by the choir. I see no comments from the solar energy advocates indicating tht they have read, or appreciate, this information. Hope you can get it to them - and to any and all committees,commissions, or judges who will be approving the energy plants. We need more energy and solar is a great way to go - but whether wind or solar, must we destroy that which we can never get back again?? Its important that not only do we point out the problems - are there those among us who have the technical knowledge to suggest alternatives to destroying these fragile systems?
There are many desert activists who have the technical chops to argue for alternatives, and this information will be getting out to them in the DPC’s Educational Bulletin.
This article articulates so many aspects of where we are right now in our ecological place in the world. With a thimble full of people conscious of the footprint of our lifestyle and the masses trying to attain that lifestyle as fast as they can. How many times have we heard, “doesn’t stand a chance.” In regards to invasive species, are we fighting against a tidal wave? Early settlers brought many invasive species intentional or not. We are at a very critical point in growth…the old way of chomping out our needs out of the earth and the new way of finding a sustainable way to living on this planet with a finite amount of resources. If we, at the top, don’t figure it out, don’t expect those with the least to jump into the fray.
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