My days and nights are upside down these days. I work until late. I sleep until late. I am less enthusiastic than I could be. Maybe it’s a hangover from the huge amount of bad news this month, which at first I followed assiduously and helplessly. Between the disasters in Japan and our embarking on yet another in our endless and concurrent string of wars, I suppose a bit of disorientation is to be expected. I don’t know. The Trident missiles are not falling on my roof; though earthquakes are common enough here in the Coachella Valley we are unlikely to see tsunamis anytime soon. Aside from concern over a few friends I’ve never met in Japan, my concern was necessarily academic. I lost heart after a while and stopped my constant refreshing of the news feeds.
In the meantime the same old disaster rolls along on the home front, this one a thing I could conceivably do something about, and yet year after year the desert loses ground, and we fight the same old battles in the public sphere. Mainstream enviros are incredibly reluctant to grant that the desert has any value at all.
I’ll confess it: I am disheartened.
This morning I passed along the news on Ken Cole’s paper on Joshua tree survival. I called Cole’s office and asked to see a copy of the paper, and he kindly sent it along. It is persuasive on the first quick reading I was able to give it.
Here’s a figure from the paper, showing in red the areas from which Joshua trees are likely to be extirpated in the last two or three decades of this century:
As the legend explains, orange areas are those in which sustainable populations of Joshua trees may well hold out, while the pale green areas are places where new populations of the trees might thrive, if they can get there before the species winks out.
I’ve long known that the southernmost populations are in trouble, between Joshua Tree National Park and the Antelope Valley, and that’s distressing enough. But look at the portion of the map that centers on the Mojave National Preserve:
I’ve added the approximate boundaries of the Preserve in black, and labeled a couple of things.
You see that U-shaped red splotch with a band of orange and yellow at its base? The one that comes down into the Preserve from the northwest and then doubles back, heading out of the Preserve toward the northeast?
Right now, that is the largest Joshua tree forest in the world.
It’s not a solid forest. There are are few places in that U where you can stand next to a tree and not see where the next one is over the rise. But the trees are close enough to be considered the same population, more or less.
I took this photo standing at the south end of that U, looking more or less north. The curved horizon there, the profile of Cima Dome, is about ten miles away. Aside from crossing Kelso-Cima Road, you could just about walk the entire way to that horizon and never be more than ten feet from a Joshua tree, and then you could do the same thing for another 12 miles farther north.
You see the little orange splotch on Cole’s map, that I’ve marked Cima Dome? That’s a few dozen acres atop that horizon. Cole thinks it likely that a very small remnant of the world’s largest Joshua tree forest might just hang on there, small enough that you could stand in the new forest’s middle and see both edges.
The other spot I’ve marked, the Wee Thump Wilderness, is the northeasternmost part of this swarm. Here’s a photo of the place taken in 2008. Cole’s team predicts that will be gone for good. Maybe a few remnant trees will hang on in the McCullough Mountains, and in the New Yorks farther south.
It’s an ironic thing. Climate change is threatening the trees, and their only hope is to be able to migrate north and upslope. And yet the mainstream environmental movement sees no value in the trees’ only corridors northward, aside from those corridors being level spots of ground to put solar power plants on.
It’s a fiendish coincidence that this is the centenary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The image I’ve had in my head all day is the trees trying to escape the heat and fire, only to find out that environmentalists have nailed the emergency exits shut.
Cole’s data is just that, and some smart people have quibbled with his work in the past, and science is always developing. Maybe we’ll still have Joshua tree forests for me to hike in when I’m a hundred twenty years old.
But it doesn’t look good, and I despair of persuading the greens that the forests deserve to survive every bit as much as the polar bears do.
Chris, great piece and thank you so much for writing it. Your writing is important because you say things that others can’t for various reasons, and it’s out there to educate and inspire people. You never know when some piece of information will make it to a decision maker - and in fact you never will know because those moments are not acknowledged publicly.
Despite despair, and all truly concerned environmentalists feel it these days, we must fight on. Why would give up hope to the greedy bastards on this planet when that is exactly their intent. We should all make a pact to fight on, despite the odds, without consideration of the futility and aggravation, so that someone is left standing who speaks the truth. Nothing more, nothing less.
Polar bear, joshua tree, coral reef; all valid and intricate members of a delicate ecosystem. Without them we cannot go on.
Despite despair, and all truly concerned environmentalists feel it these days, we must fight on. Why would give up hope to the greedy bastards on this planet when that is exactly their intent. We should all make a pact to fight on, despite the odds, without consideration of the futility and aggravation, so that someone is left standing who speaks the truth. Nothing more, nothing less.
Polar bear, joshua tree, coral reef; all valid and intricate members of a delicate ecosystem. Without them we cannot go on.
Leopold: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
Your writing makes us feel less alone.
I miss the Holocene.
Heh, if there were a strong enough earthquake south of Mexicali, you might find the sea rolling up to your doorstep!
I am going to try to make a trip to Cima Dome and to Wee Thump asap.
Great point about the blocking of the northward migration path by energy development areas.
Despair, rage, fear, just a few of the emotions this news awakes in me.
Thanks for the heads up.
Since I live with the Joshua Trees, I am excited to invest and read your new book on Joshua Tree’s! If I am not mistaken, the only other place in the world where they grow is Japan. An elderly man spoke about how the Joshua’s began growing in the Antelope Valley when the Mojave wind blew the seeds here. He also said the Antelope Valley was the prarie lands 100 years ago until man irrigated much water out of the ground that it turned the Valley into a man made desert. Thank you for your great, meaningful, informative, thoughtful writing and I appreciate this site.