S1E9: Saving the Western Joshua tree

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast was made possible by the generous support of our Patreon patrons. They provide us with the resources we need to produce each episode. You can join them at 90miles from needles.com Patreon.

0:00:25 - (Bouse Parker): The Sun is a giant blowtorch aimed at your face. There ain't no shade nowhere. Let's hope you brought enough water. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast with your hosts, Chris Clark and Alicia Pike.

0:00:44 - (Chris Clarke): You don't have to know me very well. You don't even have to have listened to every single episode of this podcast to know that I'm kind of a Joshua Tree fanatic. Have been for much of a lifetime, I'd say ever since 1996, when I was driving through the desert and stopped into Joshua Tree national park for the first time. Stopped at a bookstore at the Cottonwood entrance to the park run by the Joshua Tree National park association, and asked the person behind the counter if there was a general interest book on Joshua trees.

0:01:15 - (Chris Clarke): No, she said. Someone really ought to write one. I decided right then that I was going to be the person that wrote that book. And 26 years later, I'm still working on it. I know that's not the slowest book writing project in world history, but it's probably in the top hundred. At any rate, that's when I started spending as much time as I possibly could with Joshua trees. And this was in a period when I don't think there were 10 published scientific papers on Joshua trees.

0:01:43 - (Chris Clarke): There's quite a bit more than that now. One of the things that intrigued me about Joshua trees was the way that people had tried pretty much since the settlement of the west by European colonists to turn the Joshua trees into some kind of raw material that would be profitable, some kind of way that they could take Joshua trees and turn them like they would turn oil or water or ore, turn them into fuel for the growing capitalist economy in the West.

0:02:12 - (Chris Clarke): But they're way too weak to be made into timber for construction. One enterprising company tried to harvest a whole lot of them to make paper pulp. That company went out of business after a boatload of Joshua Tree pulp got stranded in the Colorado river and went rotten. There were no beneficial chemicals in the bark that could be extracted. There were no really good uses to which you could put the leaves, at least not in the viewpoint of settler society.

0:02:43 - (Chris Clarke): Native people, of course, use Joshua trees in a relatively sustainable way for millennia, but we settlers didn't figure anything out. The closest Europeans came to making the Joshua trees profitable or at least so the story goes, was those real estate developers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who stuck oranges on the leaves of Joshua trees in the Antelope Valley, hoping to persuade gullible outsiders to buy land.

0:03:11 - (Chris Clarke): In a way, those oranges kind of parallel the chief economic value of Joshua trees today, which is generating tourism, bringing people to the desert to take pictures of Joshua trees, use them as backdrops for music videos and Instagram photos. And of course, the more people you attract with the Joshua trees, the more places they need to stay, and so the more Joshua trees you need to cut down. Joshua trees are basically the anti capitalist tree.

0:03:41 - (Chris Clarke): They're a bone in capitalism's throat. That's one of the reasons I like them as much as I do. The main range of the western Joshua Tree, which is the one that grows in Joshua Tree national park and in Death Valley national park and in the mountains near the settled cities of California, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Bakersfield. The range of that species of Joshua tree is in a sensitive spot. If you remember that scene in the first Star wars movie, not the fourth one that came out, but the first one that came out, the fourth movie, episode four, the walls of the trash compactor start sliding in, threatening to compress our heroes.

0:04:22 - (Chris Clarke): That's pretty much the appropriate metaphor to describe the spot that the western Joshua Tree is in, at least in the southern part of its range. To the west, the approaching wall is Los Angeles and its development. To the east, Las Vegas, which is trying to make up for lost time, catch up with Los Angeles and the development department. It's pretty much inevitable that we would find ourselves in the position that we find ourselves in now, those of us who care about Joshua trees, where we have just a few weeks to get our acts together, to make sure the state of California takes the one chance we've all got to protect this tree.

0:04:58 - (Chris Clarke): Two years ago, Brendan Cummings of the center for Biological Diversity, from whom we will hear in a moment, petitioned the California Fish and Game Commission to protect the western Joshua tree as threatened under the California Endangered Species Act. By law, that started a process in which a sister agency, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, would evaluate the justification for protecting the Joshua tree as a threatened species.

0:05:25 - (Chris Clarke): Habitual listeners to 90 Miles from Needles know, because we talked about it in our last episode, that CDFW came out with a recommendation against protecting the Joshua Tree that was based on scientific claims that range from the misguided to the laughable. And now the California Fish and Game Commission has to decide whether to take that Recommendation seriously. They don't have to. They can disregard it.

0:05:47 - (Chris Clarke): There's precedent and it's recent precedent. During this episode, you're going to hear what's at stake. Alicia and I will go out to one comparatively small piece of desert that is threatened with development that doesn't make a lot of sense. And for which protection of the western Joshua tree could prove a very useful tool to keep that piece of desert in relatively intact shape, to keep it as wildlife habitat, migration corridor, just open space for the people that live nearby.

0:06:19 - (Chris Clarke): But that spot is neither the largest nor the worst of the projects that would rampage through the desert if we fail to persuade the California Fish and Game Commission to protect the Western Joshua tree. It's just one I've been working on in my day job, close at hand, accessible not only logistically because 40 minute drive from my house, but also because you can kind of feel the size of it, you know, a square mile. We know what a mile is.

0:06:49 - (Chris Clarke): A 10,000 acre solar project and premium western Joshua tree woodland in the Antelope Valley. That's a little bit harder to imagine. It's harder to picture a square mile of land that's easier. So that's this episode and we'll talk with a couple other people about why protecting the Joshua Tree is important. What's at stake if we don't. And then we'll round this up with ways that you can take part. Thanks for joining us.

0:07:42 - (Chris Clarke): Here and there, purple, purpley guys. A bunch of big yucca clones. Dried yucca flowers on the ground, which is cool. Some desert senna and some Mormon tea, creosote, diamond cholla.

0:08:23 - (Alicia Pike): And that looks like the grizzly bear. Oh, I love those.

0:08:28 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, Grizzly bear, prickly pear. It's beautiful.

0:08:33 - (Alicia Pike): You don't see those too often. Looks like there is a pack rat nest under there too. Oh, yeah, there's the active hole.

0:08:40 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Towering over everything is a well established forest of Joshua trees. The road noise is really obvious. We're close to a major thoroughfare. This is not wilderness, but it is intact habitat. There are tortoises that have been seen here, Leconse thrashers, lizards and snakes. This is a piece of intact desert that has not been plowed, hasn't been bulldozed. It's definitely a, a little the worse for wear, but it's still here.

0:09:38 - (Chris Clarke): And this is one of the places that is going to be a lot easier to develop if the state of California decides not to include the western Joshua Tree on its list of threatened species. So this is an area that would become the Flamingo 640 glamping resort with 800 square foot lean tos enough to host 200 guests. There would be a helipad, there would be a restaurant and a bar that would be open only to guests.

0:10:15 - (Chris Clarke): Four fire pits.

0:10:16 - (Alicia Pike): When I was texting you before coming out about the wind, I was thinking, well, maybe we could go tomorrow. And I don't know, how many days is it really calm?

0:10:28 - (Chris Clarke): People are worried about fire safety. You know, having four fire pits going pretty much every single night, at least every single weekend night. Regardless of how fast the wind is blowing or whether there's a burn ban that the county or the BLM or Cal fire has enacted.

0:10:46 - (Alicia Pike): It's really kind of astounding how much people don't believe that you can't have a campfire. I had a conversation with some of my own friends when they camped out at Joshua Tree national park during the last burn ban. And they're like, really? We're not allowed to have a campfire? Is that true? And I said, yep, yep, you can't. Not a single person in this campground has a campfire right now. Have you noticed?

0:11:10 - (Alicia Pike): And they're like, no. You don't think they would notice if we did it right? And they're negotiating with me. And it's like, no, that's a, that's a hard no right now. No.

0:11:21 - (Chris Clarke): Okay. We're getting into the area that would be the main focus of the development, where the structures and the parking and the fire pits and the restaurant and such would be all strung out along the west edge of a really deep wash called Pipes Canyon Wash.

0:11:45 - (Alicia Pike): Wow. Is this the wash?

0:11:47 - (Chris Clarke): This is the wash. That's huge. And this is one of the reasons why people are concerned about this development, is that it's an immense and valuable piece of wildlife habitat connectivity corridor. This is a link between the San Bernardino Mountains and Joshua Tree national park and parts of the desert that are well up into the the Barstow area and beyond. You know, this wind is going to carry sparks. There's a whole lot of burnable Joshua trees down there.

0:12:25 - (Chris Clarke): There is nothing that would keep the flames from just tearing across this half mile wide canyon going up the other side. There are homes on the other side there. And even without that, just the air quality is going to take a hit. But I think one of the biggest issues really is just that this is a development in a habitat corridor. The Mojave Desert Land Trust has identified this as an important parcel for wildlife connectivity. Of concern to the conservationist folks and the neighbors is the prospect of losing some of the Joshua trees that are here.

0:13:07 - (Chris Clarke): The county is trying to get away without any environmental impact review under the California Environmental Quality Act. They're saying there are no tortoises on the landscape. But neighbors have documented tortoises on the landscape in the last year.

0:13:20 - (Brendan Cummings): That's a perfect example of the failure of the wildlife agencies as well as local jurisdictions. I'm Brendan Cummings. I'm the conservation director at the center for Biological Diversity. We're a nonprofit organization focused primarily on endangered species protection. I'm actually based in Joshua Tree, California where I've lived for 17 years and visited for at least twice that long. Among the many things my organization does is we work to get species that are imperiled protected under either the state and or the federal Endangered Species Act.

0:13:58 - (Brendan Cummings): And both of these laws protect species that are determined to be either endangered, they face some likelihood of extinction or that are threatened species that are not currently endangered but are likely to become so in the foreseeable future unless things change dramatically in the act of getting species designated threatened or endangered, technically they get put on a regulatory list. So when you hear the shorthand of saying we're trying to get the Joshua Tree listed, that's what we're talking about.

0:14:32 - (Brendan Cummings): Years ago there was a bigger development proposed for this parcel. And that larger scale development triggered environmental review and surveys. And they found quite a few tortoise on it. Now what is it? Fifteen years later, the current developers and whoever they hired to do surveys somehow found no tortoise, no sign of them. Tortoise were never here, which is not credible, but hard to disprove. In contrast to the tortoise, you can't tie them Joshua tree, you certainly can't tie it in adult Joshua tree. They're literally visible from space.

0:15:05 - (Brendan Cummings): You can go on Google and look at the satellite images and tell if there are Joshua trees on a given parcel of land. So part of the reason San Bernardino county is so so oppositional towards listing protection of the western Joshua Tree is They've had a 30 year free pass from the Endangered Species act and the tortoise has suffered greatly during that window. The Joshua Tree listing will mean an end to that free pass because they will be forced to enter into some form of conservation planning.

0:15:39 - (Brendan Cummings): And that's not just necessary and fair and it's not just essential for the conservation of the Joshua Tree. It's critical if we're going to have a livable desert community in the face of climate change.

0:15:54 - (Chris Clarke): Do we want to keep walking and Maybe dip into a wash or find some more tortoise habitat. I mean, this is kind of a strange choice for a glamping campground because it's so far away from our area's main features. Joshua Tree National Park. What would you say this was about probably a 40 minute drive from the west entrance, at least?

0:16:22 - (Chris Clarke): Something like that, yeah. And then that's with no traffic, especially on weekends. You'd get the traffic in Yucca Valley and then the line to wait in line to pay your way into the park.

0:16:35 - (Alicia Pike): And the road getting up here, it's a treacherous stretch of road. It's got some turns coming up a little bit of a hill and people try and pass when it is not legal to pass. And there are loads of accidents on this road.

0:16:57 - (Chris Clarke): And always that traffic noise in the background.

0:17:01 - (Alicia Pike): We've been walking for a while now and it's still quite loud.

0:17:13 - (Chris Clarke): I mean, I can definitely see the appeal of staying in a place like this. The view from here is spectacular. It's a beautiful piece of land.

0:17:24 - (Alicia Pike): If the threatened status isn't granted to the Joshua tree, are they still going to have to pull permits to do any work on Joshua trees on this property?

0:17:35 - (Chris Clarke): The Joshua trees will still be covered by state laws regarding harm to certain desert plants, of which the Joshua tree is one.

0:17:44 - (Alicia Pike): Okay, so at least there's still some protection there.

0:17:48 - (Chris Clarke): On paper there is protection. But the difference between the California native desert plants law and listing under the California Endangered Species act is, is that under the first law enforcement is up to the municipality or the county. And with a second, it would be the state doing the enforcing. It would be the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, essentially game wardens, except for plants.

0:18:16 - (Chris Clarke): We are just outside of the town of Yucca Valley where town officials have taken a lot of well deserved heat for failing to enforce even their own laws about protecting Joshua trees. And San Bernardino county is famously one of the most development friendly, environment hostile county governments in the state of California. There is no way that they would let protecting Joshua trees get in the way of a development that would generate tax dollars.

0:18:53 - (Christina Sanchez): Before the Joshua tree was listed under cisa, it was under the Desert Native Plants act before the town of Yucca Valley. When we audited their permits from 2017 and 2019, we found that there's a lot of rubber stamping occurring and we found that many were not up to standards and they were just, you give us the money, we give you the permit kind of a deal. So even then it was protected per se. They weren't doing their good job of protecting it.

0:19:20 - (Christina Sanchez): My name is Christina Sanchez. I'm a resident in the Morongo Basin. I'm a local activist. I do a lot of work with Joshua trees from restoration work, climate study, volunteering for that, and then also taking folks out in the desert, teaching them about biodiversity, protecting biodiversity, ecology and botany. My approach is especially for folks that don't live in the desert. My stretches with working with plants that are non not just Joshua trees is educating folks on. You just can't. We just can't be picking plants. And I educate them as to like why the desert is a sensitive ecosystem.

0:19:53 - (Christina Sanchez): I do that. I've been helping out with the Joshua Tree national park, doing the vegetation department, rare plant monitoring, and then I also am a subcontractor for an environmental consultation firm. So I've actually gone out and done surveys for those Joshua trees in Yucca Valley. So I've done that as well. I wear a lot of hats. When the topic became a big thing, especially on like social media, Facebook in particular of protecting Joshua trees, the many constituents of the town of Yucca Valley were listening to disinformation and misinformation.

0:20:29 - (Christina Sanchez): So what I started noticing is people were posting online. There was this one person who was digging up saying they grow like weeds. And she dug up a pup, a vegetative clone. And I was just disgusted. And I was disgusted by how many people were saying, yeah, they grow like weeds. I do that all the time. And it just broke my heart. And then I just started seeing, I just, I started watching conversations on social media and it was. I felt like on Instagram there, those people that are on Facebook may not be on Instagram, but there was a lot of discussions in the community against protection. And I just noticing people hauling big truckloads of Joshua Trees out and people illegally taking Joshua trees.

0:21:13 - (Christina Sanchez): And I had that incident with a developer and his employees where they followed me at home and he tried to hit me in the truck. He tried to basically assaulted me. And the police wouldn't do anything when I did call them because I had gotten into my vehicle just in time. So I started to see where there was this aggression and hate towards this species that people don't come up here to go go shopping at one of the like little shops in town. They want to come to the park, they want to see these iconic species.

0:21:41 - (Christina Sanchez): I just was really just heartbroken by the lack of education and the lack of compassion for a species that's imperiled. There's money involved. Some developers are buddies with some of these folks. That work in the town. There has to be some type of conflict of interest. And this developer, we pushed to have him fined. And then a week later, an incident occurred with another developer in this town. It took over eight months for the town of Yucca Valley to issue a fine.

0:22:12 - (Christina Sanchez): And the fine for what this developer had, he had one of those U haul truck trailers full of yuccas and Joshua trees. The fine that he received was like a little over $3,000. And it's, it's to them, it's a small pinch to pay. It's not going to impact them. And they did this right before the commission meeting. So that occurred August 10th and then the, the commission meeting was like September 20th, I believe.

0:22:36 - (Christina Sanchez): We're finding a lot of Joshua trees being disposed of off the sides of the roads in ditches. So it's, it turned into a thing where you better hurry up and cut your Joshua trees down before they're protected. I'm really concerned. I am. I just feel like we're going to see more of the Joshua trees being killed and they don't really survive relocation. The ones that I've seen that relocated, they didn't survive.

0:23:04 - (Christina Sanchez): So it just makes me think that yes, these, this has to be protected because if not, we're going to see solar farms, we're going to see more strip malls, there's going to be just more development.

0:23:15 - (Chris Clarke): We will have more on it after the break.

0:23:17 - (Chris Clarke): After the break.

0:23:52 - (Brendan Cummings): Joshua trees we think of as long lived and we see adult trees and we think those look pretty healthy to me. If Joshua trees are threatened, isn't everything threatened? But in the very beginning of this century, circa 2001, 2002, we had unprecedented drought. And that led to scientists studying the impacts of that drought on Joshua trees. And they showed that Joshua trees were having significant mortality in those dry conditions. And that mortality for some was just the heat stress of drought itself.

0:24:28 - (Brendan Cummings): For others it was the impacts of rodents of herbivory in a very desiccated desert. In at the time historic drought, rodents would turn to Joshua trees to eat and could kill them. In unburned study plots. Over a quarter of Joshua trees died due to a combination of drought and herbivory. Two decades ago, when we had that drought, scientists for the most part were not saying climate change is here. We're in a new era in the desert.

0:25:02 - (Brendan Cummings): It was more along the lines of droughts like this are expected to be more frequent in the future. And if these become more common, these are the kind of impacts we might see 20 years later. It's consensus that the impacts of climate change are already here, already being felt. And so there were a few other studies. One in 2011 was a pretty stark study. We mapped out where they would be, where they could be, where they might survive if we moved them.

0:25:35 - (Brendan Cummings): And that study projected almost complete loss of Joshua trees from the southern part of their range, with a few little spots in the north where suitable habitat would likely remain at the end of the century. So the Joshua trees were projected to decline pretty much throughout their range. There would be certain in areas where they were most likely to persist. What really pushed me over the Edge was a 2019 study by Lynn Sweet that looked at the future of Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Park.

0:26:06 - (Brendan Cummings): And those findings were incredibly stark. It under sort of best case scenarios of we as a society keep warming to moderate levels, we, we lose perhaps 80% of the Joshua trees in the park. And under business as usual scenarios, these high emission scenarios that unfortunately we're still close to being on, we lose essentially all of them, 99 plus percent. And even looking back at the 2012 study, there were a couple things in that that were really striking to me. The scientists there compared where you currently find adult trees versus where you find a fair amount of young trees recruiting into the population.

0:26:53 - (Brendan Cummings): And if you map those, the areas where you have significant recruitment is about half the range of where you have adult trees. And so if you think about it, the adult trees in Joshua Tree national park and elsewhere today were recruited into the population under a climate that no longer exist. It is hotter now, it is drier now. And even if we could magically end warming at today's levels and just keep this current climate we have now, we still lose 50% of the area occupied by Joshua trees.

0:27:28 - (Brendan Cummings): So a 50% loss of Joshua trees in Joshua Tree national park is the best case theoretically possible scenario, a scenario that is certainly not going to happen because warming is going to continue. It's only a question of how much.

0:27:44 - (Chris Clarke): We're standing close to the west edge of the Pipes Canyon Wash and the view to the north of Goat Mountain and the Rodman Mountains and Mount Ord. It's just absolutely fantastic. It's really stunning view. The sun is going down behind the mountains. Our shadows are getting pretty long. Let's walk a little bit down into the wash.

0:28:08 - (Chris Clarke): This is a really gorgeous piece of property. It may not be a dense forest, but it is a beautiful wide open space with quite a bit of shrubbery. And that can be hard to, hard to come by. I mean the area I Live in doesn't have this much shrubbery.

0:28:31 - (Chris Clarke): We're at around 3,500ft here, maybe higher. And it's close to the mountains, so there's runoff. There's little extra rain here compared to places that are further east.

0:28:44 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, we live in the rain shadow. This is one of those areas that gets action before the rain shadow effect really takes place.

0:28:51 - (Chris Clarke): And if the state of California decides to keep Joshua trees protected under the California Endangered Species act, it's suddenly going to get a lot more expensive to do damage to this habitat because they're going to have to pay for every single Joshua tree that they kill or move. You know, they're going to have to have a plan to mitigate the damage to the trees. And that is not only going to be an incentive to reduce damage to the trees because it's going to cost them, but the money that they pay for the damage they do is going to go into conservation and buy other pieces of Joshua tree habitat.

0:29:28 - (Chris Clarke): Some very large percentage of this western Joshua tree's range is on private lands. It's not protected. But even on public land that's protected by even the park service, they're still under threat.

0:29:44 - (Chris Clarke): It's kind of unbelievable how little wilderness we have left. And we don't seem to have any desire to spring into action and protect it. And when we had a hole in the ozone layer, it was like, okay, we are making a big mistake. We gotta backtrack immediately. And we did. I wish the same urgency could be applied to preserving wilderness areas across the world. The desert is a really important piece of that.

0:30:17 - (Chris Clarke): Looking out at Pipes Wash, I mean, that is a big wash. Looks like it's a couple football fields across. And it's just chock full of Joshua trees, creosote bush, and I can see acacia and desert mistletoe and all sorts of stuff down there. And we're on. We're currently standing on plan. Some deep drainage slopes coming off the property. So to me, this says there's definitely some significant water flow coming through this parcel.

0:30:56 - (Chris Clarke): Moving to the east. The variety of plant life out here is. It's thrilling for me because I live in the creosote flats where there's really only a few. Few types of bushes that are out there. And out here there's double, triple, quadruple.

0:31:15 - (Alicia Pike): That.

0:31:17 - (Alicia Pike): Ephedra, Mormon tea is everywhere. Little baby Joshua trees, bur sage.

0:31:24 - (Chris Clarke): I'm seeing a lot of indigo bush on the land.

0:31:27 - (Alicia Pike): Just a huge diversity of plant life. And there's loads of active rodent Holes, Pack rats, trade rats, desert wood rats, whatever you want to call them, they are one of my favorite desert denizens. Clever little buggas. And there's definitely, I've seen at least half a dozen big old nests which they pass down from generation to generation. So even the simple act of bulldozing an area with an ancient looking pack rat nest, that's, that's uprooting hundreds of generations.

0:32:08 - (Alicia Pike): And they've just got to go figure out a new place to live. I mean, try to imagine that feeling you've inherited from your ancestors. A place. And it's yours. It's home. It's where you know all the trails, you know where all the good food is. And then one day, with no warning, it's gone and you have no choice but to move on. We're doing that to critters and we're doing it to ourselves.

0:32:40 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. And then the Joshua trees are kind of towering over everything else. And in a way, they can also metaphorically shelter these other plants and the animals, the pack rats, the antelope, ground squirrels that help distribute Joshua tree seeds, kangaroo rats. If we list the Joshua trees permanently, they can provide protection for everything else that's growing on this property.

0:33:13 - (Alicia Pike): You gotta protect the whole habitat, the whole ecosystem. It often starts with focusing on one endemic toad or one endemic bird or fish or something like that. But then you realize it's not just that one thing you need to save, it's the whole system within which it's thriving and surviving.

0:33:35 - (Brendan Cummings): What we've seen in areas where there has been conservation planning triggered by endangered species listings is it's the first sort of large scale regional planning. And you design blocks of habitat that you decide are off limits to development, and those ultimately become not just species habitat, but community open space. I've never met a community that complains about open space or protected land. You will always meet a developer who will complain about not being able to develop on their particular property.

0:34:06 - (Brendan Cummings): But once that land is set aside, not only are the species living on it happy, the whole community tends to benefit from it. And I think at the end of the day, listing of the western Joshua tree can prompt that landscape level conservation planning that we absolutely need to do in the face of climate change, we need to do it to give the Joshua tree itself hope of survival in the very, very difficult decades ahead.

0:34:35 - (Brendan Cummings): And we need to do it if we want to have functional desert communities that also are taking climate change seriously, so we can build our human infrastructure in a manner that's as most compatible as Possible with the very, very difficult decades ahead as it gets hotter, drier, and often on fire. So the state listing process. Look, the state listing process involves two related but distinct government entities.

0:35:05 - (Brendan Cummings): There's the California Fish and Game Commission, the politically appointed body that actually makes the decision, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the agency that implements and enforces the law, but also makes recommendations to the commission. And here the problem we have is the commission vote has yet to happen. That'll be in June. But the department, which was tasked with presenting a recommendation, came out with one in April.

0:35:31 - (Brendan Cummings): And that recommendation was against protection. And if you look at the actual recommendation, it's almost embarrassing how bad it is in its treatment of climate change. In one area, it compares Joshua trees today to the changes that occurred at the end of the ice ages, 11,000 or so years ago. And the department says, because end of the ice age, changes in Joshua tree distribution took several years to manifest.

0:36:02 - (Brendan Cummings): We anticipate Joshua tree changes in the face of climate change will occur over a very long time frame, perhaps thousands of years. This put charitably, whoever wrote that sentence suffers from a profound misunderstanding of climate change. There's a scientific consensus, but the changes we're experiencing now are at least an order of magnitude faster than they were at the end of the ice ages. Climate we don't have 1,000 years to save Joshua trees. The temperatures that will be unsuitable for Joshua trees across their entire range, that will pretty much end recruitment and lead to increased adult mortality will be here within two or three decades at most. Yeah, the department status review in that context was just, it seemed like a results driven decision.

0:36:51 - (Brendan Cummings): Notably, the department completely discounted the species distribution model. The peer reviewed, published scientific studies modeling the future of Joshua trees basically said those weren't really credible. This was the exact same rationale that the Trump administration used to deny federal protection for Joshua trees. And last fall, a federal judge overturned that federal decision by the Trump administration on the grounds that was arbitrary and unlawful.

0:37:22 - (Brendan Cummings): Yet California is proposing to do the exact same thing, the exact same rationale as Trump. You know, Governor Newsom and the state of California prides itself as being the leader on climate change. But the state agency tasked with protecting our biodiversity, our natural heritage in the face of climate change is acting. It's carrying out a soft form of climate denial. They don't say climate change isn't happening, but they say we don't really know that it's going to be harmful. And if it's harmful, it'll take 1,000 years for the impacts to be here.

0:37:55 - (Brendan Cummings): We're already suffering under the worst drought in a millennium, and that drought's going to continue, and Joshua trees are already dying from the limited changes that have already occurred. The law requires independent peer review of the department's recommendation, and there were five peer reviewers. Four of the five, notably the four who actually study Joshua trees, disagreed either explicitly or, or at least implicitly with the department's recommendation against listing and or the rationale the Department relied on to downplay the threats to Joshua trees.

0:38:32 - (Brendan Cummings): Notably, the only peer reviewer who agreed with the Department that Joshua trees should not be protected was chosen by the Department upon the recommendation of San Bernardino county, an entity that has been vehemently against the protection of Joshua trees and in its previous submissions has completely downplayed the impacts of climate change. But fortunately, the majority of peer reviewers disagreed with the department, and that provides a scientific rationale for the Commission to disregard the Department's recommendation and vote to protect Joshua trees anyway.

0:39:09 - (Brendan Cummings): While of course I would have preferred a department recommendation in favor of protection, the Commission has the authority to disregard it. And in fact, last year the commission on two occasions voted to protect imperiled populations of fish, even though the department recommended against those protections. So I'm hopeful that once again, the Commission will follow the science, follow the law, follow the popular will, and do what's necessary to establish themselves as climate leaders in a world sorely lacking and such.

0:39:45 - (Brendan Cummings): And if they do that, then we will get permanent protection for the western Joshua tree under state law, and that will ultimately, hopefully not just save the species, but lead to a better, more sustainable, more livable desert for all of us. The ultimate decision as to whether or not to list the species is made by the California Fish and Game Commission, and they will be voting on June 16 at a meeting somewhere in the Los Angeles area on whether or not Joshua trees will continue to receive the protections they have now, which exist on an interim basis, or whether state protections will end and the fate of the Joshua trees will be handed back to San Bernardino County, Kern county, and the local jurisdictions that have already demonstrated their complete inability to protect the desert tortoise or really manage desert ecosystems more broadly. So the most important thing is to participate in the run up to that meeting.

0:40:46 - (Brendan Cummings): So there will be you can show up to the meeting in person, and we're hoping to have literally hundreds of people there in person. The Fish and Game Commission only recently returned to in person meetings. It's likely they're going to do it in a hybrid way, so there will be an opportunity to participate virtually via zoom. In addition to showing up in person on June 16, we need a mass influx of public comments in support of Joshua Trees. There will be public comment windows that officially open probably the last week of May. These comments can be the very simple I like Joshua Trees. You should support them. They can be in the form of action alerts. You can go to my organization's website, biologicaldiversity.org

0:41:31 - (Brendan Cummings): there's an action alert on Joshua Trees that is a really easy way to send a letter to the commission. Detailed comments. If you're a scientist, chime in and explain why you believe they're threatened. If you have personal history or involvement in Joshua trees, if you followed how San Bernardino county or Yucca Valley has managed or mismanaged Joshua trees, putting that information in front of the Commission is very useful.

0:41:58 - (Brendan Cummings): But additionally, I think the thing that will ultimately swing the Commission votes our way is they're individuals, they want to be on the right side of history. And protecting Joshua Trees is clearly the right thing to do. But often people who want to take the right action to do the right thing need that sense of this is not just right. It's popular, it's essential. And having hundreds of people show up, many thousands of people, writing and chiming in on the need for it will hopefully compel them to do what's necessary and vote to protect the species.

0:42:36 - (Christina Sanchez): I would like for folks to get involved, pay attention of what's going on in your community, go to the town planning department meetings, look at the agendas that's coming up with. I know it's a big deal and it's hard work, it's time consuming. If we could just keep ourselves aware of what's happening because there's many development projects that occur that go under our nose and we don't know about it because we didn't know to check the BLM site. We didn't know about Fish and Game, we didn't know about the local town and county meetings. So it's really good to educate ourselves.

0:43:07 - (Christina Sanchez): Getting active and becoming aware of what's happening in our community is really important.

0:43:14 - (Chris Clarke): Okay, so now that we've persuaded you that you got to do something, go to 90 miles from needles.com Joshua to reach the center for Biological Diversity's action Alert. If you want to learn more about the Flamingo 640 development near Joshua Tree national park in California, check our show notes for a way to join a community email organizing list. Do you have similar glamping projects or other misguided tourism based development affecting your desert community.

0:43:44 - (Chris Clarke): We want to hear from you. Whether it's Moab, Tucson, Boulder City. Let us know Chris@90miles from needles.com or you can go to our website at 90miles from needles.com. click on the Leave a voice message bar on the right side of the page and the software will take it from there. Thanks as always to those of you who support us through Patreon. We couldn't do this without you and we hope to see you at a special camp out in Joshua Tree National Park.

0:44:16 - (Chris Clarke): Exclusive to our Patreon supporters. The weekend of September 9th through 11th should be a good time. There may be. There may be hijinks. There may be some desert protection talk. We are, after all, desert protection talkers and you don't have to be a Patreon subscriber right this second to camp out with us. You just need to join us sometime before the beginning of September. As little as five bucks a month, so we certainly welcome more.

0:44:44 - (Chris Clarke): Most of our supporters give us $5 a month and it allows us to do what we're doing. So thank you again and we look forward to seeing you. Don't forget to reach out to the California Fish and Game Commission. Call into their meeting on June 15th. Those of you who are going to come with us to Los Angeles on that day, we will see you there. In the meantime, be kind to each other. Be good to yourselves.

0:45:07 - (Chris Clarke): We need you.

0:45:12 - (Bouse Parker): This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced by Alicia pike and Chris Clark. Editing by Chris podcast artwork by our good friend Martin Mancia. Theme music is by Bright side Studio. Other music by Alex under the Sky Audio, Zen, Low Tone, Olksander Ignatov, Prated and Blacksmith via Renvato. Follow us on Twitter or Instagram @90from needles and on Facebook at facebook.com 90miles from needles listen to us at 90miles from needles.com or wherever you get your podcasts. To help save the Western Joshua Tree, go to 90miles from needles.com

0:45:51 - (Bouse Parker): Joshua thanks to our newest Patreon support supporters, El Malette, Cristiana Saldana and Monica Gorman support this podcast by visiting us at 90miles from needles.com Patreon and making a monthly pledge of as little as 5 bucks. Our Patreon supporters enjoy privileges including early access to this episode and an exclusive Joshua Tree National Park Campout in September 2022. Stay tuned for info. Crucial support for this podcast came from Tad Coffin and Lara Rozzell. All characters on this podcast shivered in those solitudes when they heard the voice of the salt in the desert. This is Baus Parker reminding you that you are that part of the desert that has grown aware of itself. And that with this knowledge comes the responsibility to protect the whole. See you next time.

0:47:31 - (Chris Clarke): Sit, heart, Sit.

0:47:33 - (Chris Clarke): Good dog.