Who Speaks for the Joshua Trees?
Or ... a treehugger comes out of the closet.
“I really miss this,” I said to two co-workers last week in the Nevada desert a few hours north of Las Vegas, a city which seems more foreign and alien-like to me, despite being born and mostly bred in the Western US, than the neon-lit streets of Osaka. For some reason a building with a giant neon Asahi Super Dry beer sign is more appealing than a glass pyramid covered in Michelob Ultra advertisements.
We were visiting the area on behalf of a client blasting a playlist called “Outlaw Country” over the rental car’s stereo. It was a fitting playlist for the area but also for the fact one of my co-workers had just finished telling the story about how John Wayne apparently got the cancer that killed him while filming in neighboring Utah. That had where he’d been filming the movie The Conqueror - downstream from the various nuclear tests conducted by the US Department of Energy at the Nevada Test Site. The story goes that residents of and visitors to Vegas held rooftop parties on top of the various Vegas casinos to view the mushroom clouds from a distance. Even if they didn’t win in the casinos, they were lucky.
“What?,” my other co-worker asked, “it’s dry as hell and there’s nothing out here.”
“Exactly,” I said, “There’s nothing out here but complete ear-ringing silence which reminds me of Wyoming. Well, except here the wind isn’t howling but the dryness and sun whips your skin to a jerky-like crisp like no other.”
“Oh,” I continued, ”and the Joshua Trees. They remind me of one of the things I miss most dearest from living in Southern California. Getting to see them was an escape from the chaos of the city. Have ya’ll ever seen this place at night? It’s damned outright magical, especially after a long week in the office and an even longer couple of hours sitting in traffic on the fifteen. That’s uh, eye-fifte…nevermind” He eventually conceded and said he could relate noting he’d grown up in the rural midwest. Not quite the same, but okay.
This all came after my other co-worker, an old timer who’d spent much of his life living in Nevada, told tall tales of desert tortoise and tarantula migrations. Both were so prolific, he’d noted, that he had to stop various times over the years while driving in the desolate two-lane highways of the Nevada and California deserts to let them pass. Later the Old (and wise) Timer and I went into a mutual tirade over the destruction of desert tortoise habit “FoR tHe PlAnEt” as a result of nearby industrial solar farms.
“We could have just built a bunch of nuclear plants and just be done with it and knowing what we know now we could remove the dams on the Colorado River instead replacing them with nuclear” my other co-worker remarked.
All of us nodded in agreement. Only a few miles as the crow flies from the failed, yet largely unnecessary and uncompleted, Yucca Mountain.
Having trampled all over this region, often alone, with only a pack, the moonlight and even at times only the light from the Milky Way and the faint urban light pollution of the cities, all I’d ever seen was a desert tortoise in a friend’s fenceless backyard (in the middle of Ridgecrest) and the occasional tarantula crossing the road on an Anza Borrego highway early in the morning.
We’re all people who simultaneously held the, “they died to make the desert bloom,” mentality of modern Americana progress yet at the same time held a deep and spiritual appreciation of the land relatively untouched. Never mind after seeing that memorial for the first time, I’d nearly died after making the stupid decision to cycle down to the site in 95 degree weather.
As we drove back into Vegas, that longtime Southwest traveler and resident noted, “damn, this place has really grown. There used to be noting, uh, I mean nobody out here.” I’ve had a love and hate relationship with Las Vegas only having my mind awakened by the stories Batya Ungar-Sargon told of Las Vegas residents seeking success in the American Dream in her book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women. What a paradox.
Rumor has it, long before some Irish Band popularized the name, Mormon settlers passing through what is now the Mojave Desert noticed a species of tree, seemingly rare for a desert tree-less environment, whose branches and spiky leaves shot up towards the sky, in roughly the shape of a person with arms pointing to the sky. Invoking Joshua, from the Bible, who was portrayed as reaching his arms and hands to the heavens, they named this mysterious creature (and not-really-tree) a Joshua Tree. This species of yucca had long before the white man’s arrival was used by native tribes for its fiber and fruits. It wouldn’t be the first time a hardcore religion would embrace the species as part of its mythos.
Mythos the trees has achieved.
For years I thought the Joshua Tree had been the inspiration for the late Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel’s The Lorax. Turns out, he was a neighbor from another era meaning he had to have seen Joshua Trees. But who knows, anecdotally when I lived in the area, just a stones throw from the paradise from the desert, I’d noted that few Southern California residents had ever even ventured passed the domesticated exits adjacent to “the ten.”
We’d do our annual pilgrimage from a park and ride in San Diego to Borrego Springs (not even Joshua Tree habitat but nevertheless heavenly) as part of the local cycling club and that was the only time many of them would experience even just the desert in intimacy. It’s rumored Dr. Seuss’ real inspiration for The Lorax was actually a Monterey Cyprus overlooking a park near La Jolla Cove. It couldn’t even just be a Torrey Pine.
Millions of people from all around the world travel to the Southwestern part of the United States where this species is endemic specifically to isolate themselves in the only region of the world where it exists. They seek to view this unique and beautiful tree which proves a gateway to the wonderful and surprisingly biologically diverse desert where she, er, he I guess, thrives.
The Western United States has thing too for having national parks named after trees - Sequoia, Redwood, Saguaro, and wanna-be trees such as Joshua Tree.
“Joshua Trees Are in Peril — California Has a Plan to Save Them” screams an article on the front page of the Times of San Diego and also lacing the inboxes of people who subscribe to their newsletter.
The news isn’t old - Joshua Trees, the famed larger than life yucca of the Mojave Desert spanning from parts of California to Nevada and even parts of Arizona and Utah, is under threat.
Is threat from existing cities and towns expanding further into the desert? Perhaps.
Is it too many tourists trying to find what they were looking for?
Well, overtourism to Joshua Tree habitat is close.
But that’s not it.
Suburbia be that the real thing or the mock-up version isn’t exactly the tree’s best friend either.
Guess again?
Climate change crisis.
Duh!
It’s the only dinging sound that play louder is that of a jackpot in a Vegas casino.
The narrative goes that the climate is changing, and that’s true, and it’s suspected warming making the incumbent habitats of species such as the Joshua Tree, which is already a picky princess of a plant, change for the worst.
Of this “plan” The Times of San Diego article says, “its effectiveness and the survival of the trees will depend largely on whether humanity can limit and reduce the planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil and gas that are causing climate change.”
They’re not the only ones to shine the spotlight of a diminishing Joshua Tree population thanks to climate change crisis.
An LA Enemy of Regular Californians Times article in the summer of 2023 bemoaned, “at the current rate of loss, Joshua Tree National Park, part of a crucial desert ecosystem, might need a new name one day.”
Apparently nobody told the “journalists” at the Times that much of Joshua Tree National Park actually lies in the lower and hotter Colorado Desert, where Joshua Trees don’t grow. LA Times Journalists can’t be this dumb to miss that stretch of desert on their way from LA. Never mind it was these assholes who in part further a
would call it “brandfucked” the region by telling their readership to move up there.Here’s another from the Grey Lady of the West Coast in that same summer: “California’s famed Joshua trees are burning up fast. They might be impossible to replace.”
They write, “But not even the desert-adapted trees are immune to climate change, which experts say is making it harder for young trees to become established. Even when humans try to help foster regrowth of burned or damaged Joshua trees, it’s a long, fraught process, said Ashley Hemmers, a tribal administrator for the Fort Mojave Tribe, whose ancestors have lived for centuries in the region.”
And another: “Imagine no Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Park” - that one was from 2021, almost a year after the lightning-ignited Dome Fire (blamed of course, on climate change) took out over 40,000 acres in Mojave National Preserve which is another federally protected area in Southern California where the Joshua Tree is common. Media reports showed the fire burning through dense areas of Joshua Trees whining that it was human-caused climate change crisis responsible for the carnage.
Even the National Park Service has an entire page dedicated to Climate Change in the famed Joshua Tree National Park:
Our namesake species, the Joshua tree, has and will continue to feel the stress of hotter temperatures and drought conditions. At lower, warmer elevations, fewer seedlings are sprouting, growing, and surviving. By 2099 under the highest emissions scenario forecasted, the average annual temperature inside the park could increase by 8℉ (5℃). Research suggests that under these conditions, it could eliminate nearly all suitable habitat for Joshua trees in the park and reduce habitat in the Southwest by 90 percent. Even with lower emission scenarios, nearly 80 percent of suitable habitat in Joshua Tree could be lost. Check out the links at the bottom of the page for more information on this research.
If push comes to shove it can just be renamed Teddy Bear Cactus National Park. Or perhaps they should name it Witchy Woman National Park.
So it might be good then, that “California” meaning the State Government, now “has” a “plan” to protect them?
That government is led by King Imbecile Gavin “The ocean is literally on fire. But yeah, sure -- we can’t afford climate action” Newsom.
Newsom is the same criminal whose “policies” single handedly made forest fires worse in California regardless of the demon of climate change. As Michael Shellenberger reported under his long list of reasons to recall him back in 2021:
And rather than put forest management on war-time footing, Newsom in 2019 actually cut the budget for forest fire prevention, which resulted in a full halving of the forest area treated for fire in 2020, all while accusing his political opponents of climate denial, and suggesting that the deployment of weather-dependent renewable energy will somehow address the state’s high-intensity forest fires.
Yeah, that didn’t and is not going anywhere.
But back to the Times of San Diego article.
It turns out it’s a re-print of an Associated Press article of the same title. That’s the source which as
has noted is “literal pay for play propaganda bought and paid for with grants from activism inc (especially climate groups) who are putting up 10’s of millions of dollars to fund activist reporting and activist reporters who cover every story from one predetermined side.”If readers are interested in the snarls and growls of the el grrrrran don gato there’s more where that came from:
This makes one wonder, did AP, supercharged by its cabal of climate cultism acting as a Yucca brevifolia Lorax, get upset about one of the largest and actually manmade causes of Joshua Tree deaths?
Oh, Green Leap Forward, clearly you mean another climate crisis caused weather event, do you?
Nope, er, well sort of.
Meet the Aratina Solar Center, a 2700 acre industrial solar farm to be located adjacent to the town of Boron. Inside that Noble Cathedral of Climate Saviorism is estimated to be well over 4,000 old-growth Joshua Trees, all slated for destruction.
Watch, weap, and realize California’s infamous Prop 65 doesn’t apply to Valley Fever.
Of course, the reason in the first place for installing industrial solar in California’s sunny deserts is to build “climate saving” renewables such as wind and solar farms. And as that video reveals, this is from the first industrial solar facility to impede the habitat of Joshua Trees.
To those familiar with the area, this is somewhat old news, and it long left the news and activism circuit earlier this year. I had several draft pieces written up to post here but was too infuriated to edit and get them out earlier this year.
After having spent countless nights exploring, sleeping, rock climbing, testing the limits of my Lesburu, and cycling among the Joshua Trees, this issue was and is personal.
Before COVID, back when real estate prices in the area were reasonable, I even had a desire to purchase a plot of Joshua Tree filled land land between the town of Joshua Tree and Twenty-Nine Palms and recall an real estate agent telling me I could not modify any part of the property if it imposed on any Joshua Trees. I never verified it this was even true or not and never had any plans of touching any of the species on the land anyways as that was part of the point of owning land in this unique area. Confirmation bias really hit when one time, and that rare one time I was able to secure a campsite inside the national park, there was a handwritten sign that said, “hammock hanging on Joshua Trees is prohibited” next to the usual National Park regulatory signage.
But one may wonder, did the AP, apparently now so utterly concerned about the Joshua Tree, ever cover the destructive Aratina Solar Project?
A casual search for terms such as “joshua tree,” “Aratin,” and a combination of related and similar terms turned up nothing.
The same went for similar searches in the Times of San Diego website.
But something interesting did turn up - an op-ed from 2022 in the Times of San Diego (two years after the Dome Fire) entitled “Protecting the Joshua Tree Imperils California’s Transition to Clean Energy” written by Ethan Elkind whose job title is “Director, Climate Program, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment” within the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley.
That’s normal people speak for “theft-funded useless bureaucrat,” or as Argentina’s President Javier Milei might call:
There, Elkind whined that, “California is falling behind on meeting our climate goals, not on pace to meet our 2030 greenhouse gas reduction target until the 2060s or later. Now the state’s pending decision on whether to list the iconic western Joshua tree as a threatened species could imperil progress further by potentially making large-scale solar facilities infeasible to build in our vast, sun-soaked deserts.”
Well perhaps the LA Times, Noble Friends of the Joshua Tree, would have stepped up in this quietist hour to defend and protect the Joshua Tree?
Things looked promising when there was an early 2023 editorial called “Finally, a plan to save Joshua trees from climate change — and the bureaucrats.”
Irony abound that the bureaucrat-fetishist LA Times Editorial Board actually believed their holy savior was part of the problem yet they too seemed part of the solution writing, “California wildlife officials’ inability to move proactively to protect the Joshua tree from the warming climate has been disappointing. But this legislation creatively bypasses that and imagines something better: the rare kind of compromise that could actually provide broader, more effective conservation than the Joshua tree would otherwise receive under the current legal and political process.”
What was just that rare form of compromise composed of legislation that creatively bypasses and imagines something better?
A “proposal,” in their words from their master:
The governor’s proposal would allow wildlife officials to permit the killing or removal of a western Joshua tree only if certain conditions were met, and would give property owners and developers the option of paying mitigation fees instead. The money would be pooled into a state-controlled conservation fund that could be used for large-scale projects, like the acquisition of land in the tree’s northern range and in higher elevation areas where survival is more likely as the climate continues to warm.
There’s not enough excrement in the world to cover the noses of LA Times propagandists here. It should be noted that Aratina’s developers are paying such indulgences, er, mitigation fees.
Now enter the LA Times’ Sammy “Blackouts4ClimateCrisis” Roth in his column “Solving climate change will have side effects. Get over it.”
The mother asshole of energy and moral iliteracy writes:
“In an ideal universe, I’d support building renewable energy exclusively within cities and on previously disturbed lands such as farm fields and irrigation canals. In an ideal universe, I’d support only climate solutions that don’t cause other problems.
But we don’t live in an ideal universe.”
And:
“Even with aggressive energy-efficiency improvements, we’ll need an unprecedented solar and wind building spree to replace all the coal, oil and fossil natural gas boiling the planet and spewing toxic fumes responsible for millions of deaths each year.
So why have we had so much trouble coalescing around the need for a broad range of clean energy technologies?
If you ask me, it’s because it’s so hard to grapple with the enormity of the climate crisis.
Deadlier heat waves, bigger wildfires, shrinking reservoirs, rising oceans — we understand them on paper. But most of the time they’re abstract, lurking in the background. Whereas a wind farm that will kill golden eagles is tangible, easy to grasp. Same with a solar farm that will be visible from Joshua Tree National Park, or an electric line that will cut through ancient burial sites.”
That’t not all.
He also wrote a piece for his Climate Crisis Fetish Column Boiling Point entitled, “Why razing Joshua trees for solar farms isn’t always crazy.”
There, he tries to cosplay by copying the infamous quote by JFK, “We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” invoking the cliche moonshot.
Then he quibbles, “If you want to adopt a stance of ‘no Joshua trees need die,’ that’s your call. But I don’t think it’s possible.”
Of course you don’t, shithead.
He continues:
The desert Southwest is home to same of the nation’s sunniest terrain, much of it within power-line distance of L.A., Phoenix, Las Vegas and other electricity-hungry cities. Some of the world’s biggest solar farms and battery storage projects have been built on those lands over the last decade, with President Biden hurrying to approve more. In April, the Biden administration announced it had achieved a congressional mandate to approve 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on public lands by 2025.
There are places to build solar projects besides pristine ecosystems. But there’s no get-out-of-climate-change-free card.
And:
Hence the need to accept killing some Joshua trees in the name of saving more Joshua trees.
I feel kind of terrible saying that, because I love Yucca brevifolia. I lived in Palm Springs for several years and fell in love with the desert by way of hiking and camping trips to Joshua Tree National Park, Death Valley and Mecca Hills Wilderness.
But I’ve spent 10 years reporting on energy and found it impossible to reach any other conclusion.
Perhaps since the Joshua Tree wasn’t front and center in Disneyland, of course he doesn’t really want to help protect them.
As a note for those less familiar with the area than the esteemed expert Roth, Palm Springs is indeed “close” by “as the crow flies” distance to Joshua Tree habitat but lies too low in the Colorado Desert for them to grow. That same fact goes for the Mecca Hills Wilderness.
As usual with the LA Times, this shit gets worse.
There was another piece from the Enemy of Regular Californians paradoxically titled, “How losing Joshua trees could help save them in the long run” by Safi Nazzal.
Nazzal writes, “Perhaps 90% or more Joshua tree habitats could be lost by the end of the century due to climate change and human and environmental pressures. As a keystone species, Joshua trees are essential to their habitats in the high desert.”
One might think this is a J-Tree sympathetic Times employee but no, Nazzal instead disappointingly points readers towards Roth’s column, by deflecting and invoking religious tones:
“Times climate columnist Sammy Roth speaks to Judeh on the trade-offs California will have to navigate to meets its goal of 100% zero-carbon emissions by 2045.
Learn more about the solar farms coming to Kern County: Solar project to destroy thousands of Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert”
To add insult to injury, Roth is “interviewed” by fellow Corporate Press thugs in the Columbia Review of Journalism. Attached to the interview is the perfect template for a punching bag - an selfie of Roth smiling, saved from sanpuku eyes by the blazing sun (ahem,
) with a few Joshua Trees in the background.The interviewer, Kevin Lind, asks Roth about his LA Times Joshua Tree related columns:
(Lind) A few weeks ago, you wrote a newsletter that referenced a colleague’s reporting on the destruction of a grove of Joshua trees in order to build a solar farm. You grappled with the inevitable conflict between building greater green infrastructure and causing harm to the environment. In such circumstances, it seems impossible to make everyone happy. Can you talk about the nuance of that conversation?
(Roth) It’s fraught, because there are people who, rightfully so, care deeply about some of these ecosystems and landscapes that are getting torn up. It’s absolutely true that—to the extent possible—protecting an intact, biodiverse natural world is critical not just for Joshua trees and for tortoises, but for humans as well. We are part of these self-regulating systems that provide clean air and water and healthy soil. If oil companies hadn’t spent decades running these disinformation campaigns that have put us in this real bind—where we’ve got solar and wind and batteries at our disposal as our main solutions, and we’ve got to do it as quick as we can or we are in really big trouble—maybe there would be other ways.
Ah yes, blame it on “Big Oil,” the evil entity responsible for everything you take for granted including the disposable mask you wore outdoors to prevent you from getting COVID in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming when you visited to worship the eagle killers and eye sores thousands of miles from your palm and open air drug market infested LA streets.
Who can speak for the Joshua Trees, allegedly threatened by the climate crisis? Not Corporate Press thugs. Perhaps the damage was really done, long before the mind parasite of climate crisis politics, and if that’s the case then it’s utter salt on the wound whatever it is the Corporate Press thugs are doing here.
So if it’s true that the Joshua Tree is really going the way of the dodo, you may as hop on that ocean-boiling wide-body, rent a car, scream in traffic, and venture out to see them while they’re still here.
I only ask that if you’re in Los Angeles, visit to the former LA Times HQ downtown to pay a tribute.
Perhaps I’m the only one who said, “to hell with Apple II it’s staged furniture and the mannequins, did the Joshua Trees survive the blasts?”
Sacrifice of the Joshua Trees for poorly understood and probably unattainable climate goals will make for interesting environmental history and lessons in what-not-to-do. Plus, placing industrial-scale solar farms in the fragile desert environment destroys far more than Joshua Trees. If you want to see the damage done so far, take a drive through the desert portions of California Highways 14 & 58 and Interstates 10 & 15.
It's interesting how the righteous will bend their views to serve their views ... the collection of quotes from the Joshua tree killers in the name of saving the planet shines a light on their little corruption. I'm going to call this, "the Elsa Schneider Fallacy" -- where one claims to love something, then misses the entire bigger picture of that thing and their own moral standing, as they make the entirely wrong decision based on greed and only briefly have to face the consequences of their broken thought process. (Elsa Schneider ... ala Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)