Juniper Harrower
Juniper Harrower is an artist and ecologist currently serving as an art professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Born in Palm Springs and raised in the high desert, Harrower has a profound connection with desert ecology. Her work is deeply intertwined with Joshua tree ecosystems, blending art with scientific inquiry to explore the impact of climate change on desert habitats. Harrower's work has been featured in academic and artistic spheres, with a focus on ecological relationships and environmental restoration.
Sant Khalsa
Sant Khalsa is an accomplished artist and curator who has been actively engaged in environmental issues through her artwork for over four decades. A professor emerita from Cal State San Bernardino, Khalsa has contributed extensively to eco-conscious art practices. Her curatorial work, especially on the exhibition "Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees," highlights her commitment to the intersection of art, environment, and activism.
Chris Clarke
Chris Clarke is a presenter and writer with a keen focus on environmental conservation, particularly involving desert ecology and Joshua trees. He has a history of extensive research and analysis on ecological subjects, bringing both scientific and cultural insights into discussions on plant conservation.
Episode Summary:
Explore the rich intersections of art, ecology, and desert life in this episode with Juniper Harrower, Sant Khalsa, and Chris Clarke. As curators and contributors to the "Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees" exhibition and book, Sant and Juniper provide in-depth insights into their journey from conception to realization of this comprehensive project. Highlighted by compelling storytelling, the episode delves into their deep-rooted connections to the desert, blending scientific research with artistic expression to illuminate the pressing environmental issues affecting Joshua trees today.
The conversation covers the inspiration behind the exhibition, aiming to elevate the dialogue around Joshua Trees through a blend of factual inquiry and creative artwork. The exhibition, part of the Getty-supported PST art and science Collide, explores the rich ecological, cultural, and historical narratives surrounding Joshua Trees. Sant and Juniper share the collaborative process of engaging over 50 artists, writers, and scientists (and some contributors that fit into more than just one of these categories) to create multidimensional representations of the desert ecosystem.
Key Takeaways:
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Integration of Art and Science: The "Desert Life with Joshua Trees" project successfully merges scientific research with artistic expression to present a comprehensive understanding of Joshua trees and their ecosystems.
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Curatorial Approach: Sant Khalsa emphasizes the exhibition's unique curatorial approach by highlighting its breadth and the synergy between artists who live in the Joshua Tree area.
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Community Involvement: Both the book and exhibition foster community engagement by raising awareness of ecological issues and promoting proactive environmental stewardship.
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Environmental Threats: The show underscores the urgent threats faced by Joshua Trees, including climate change, industrial development, and habitat destruction.
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Cultural Significance: Juniper and Sant explore the deep-rooted cultural symbolism of Joshua Trees and address historical and current challenges through art and science narratives.
Resources:
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Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees: Inlandia Institute
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Museum Of Art and History: https://www.lancastermoah.org/
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Juniper Harrower: Juniper's Work
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Sant Khalsa: Sant's Work
Immerse yourself fully in the "Desert Life with Joshua Trees" exhibition and book to appreciate the intricate dance of art, science, and nature presented by Juniper Harrower and Sant Khalsa. Consider this episode a portal into deeper understanding and appreciation of desert life, with a wealth of knowledge that emphasizes sustainability, cultural identity, and ecological balance. Stay tuned for more from the 90 Miles from Needles podcast, illuminating the vast and vibrant landscapes of our deserts.
Become a desert defender!: https://90milesfromneedles.com/donate
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
[uncorrected transcript]
0:00:01 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast was made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out 90milesfromneedles.com/donate or text the word needles to 53-555.
0:00:24 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast.
0:00:44 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you, Joe, and welcome to another episode of 90 Miles from the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and those of you who know me, or who've been listening to the podcast for a little while, know that I have a special relationship with a species of yucca. Actually, two species of yucca known commonly as Joshua trees. I live in the desert because of Joshua trees. I've been really fascinated by them and writing about them for almost 30 years at this point, and so I was really excited to see an exhibition at the Museum of Art and History at Lancaster, California, almost as far west in the Mojave as you can go and still be in the Mojave.
0:01:27 - (Chris Clarke): The exhibition is called Desert Life with Joshua Trees, and let me just read you part of the short paragraph of the description of the exhibit from the museum's website. The project integrates natural history, indigenous knowledge, public policy, scientific research, and artistic expressions to emphasize the challenges facing the Joshua tree and conservation efforts. With a focus on climate change, development, wildfires, and other threats, the exhibition explores a symbiotic relationship between Joshua trees, soil fungi, and moth pollinators, engaging a diverse audience interested in art and environmental issues.
0:02:15 - (Chris Clarke): It's an amazing exhibition, and I highly recommend you take a look if you're anywhere near Lancaster, California, just sort of spitting distance from LA any time between now and December 29 of 2024, which is when the exhibition closes. But if you don't catch it, you're in luck. You can still see the artworks that are in the exhibition in book form. So many art exhibitions have companion books that come out with them, and this one's no exception.
0:02:41 - (Chris Clarke): The companion book is called, coincidentally enough, Desert Forest Life with Joshua Trees, and this book was edited by two remarkable women who were responsible for putting this exhibit together. Full disclosure, I have an essay in the book, as do a significant number of other writers who are quite talented and entertaining to read, and we're going to be speaking with those two women, Sant Khalsa and Juniper Harrower, in our virtual studio.
0:03:11 - (Chris Clarke): But first, I want to just remind you that this podcast doesn't happen without the support of its listeners. If you are supporting us, we are grateful. If you aren't supporting us yet and you've meant to, or if you're just hearing about this idea right now and you think it's a great idea. You can go to nine zeromilesfromneedles.com donate, and you'll get a bunch of different options for providing us with a little bit of cash either one time or on a recurring basis, just as our most recent contributor, Parker Lloyd, did on October 13, which is just yesterday, as I record this. So, Parker, thank you so much for joining the family.
0:03:50 - (Chris Clarke): We are going to have a good time bringing you interesting episodes of this podcast, as well as other projects of the Desert advocacy Media Network, which is our nonprofit mothership. If you don't have it in you to provide a financial donation, but you like what we're doing and you want to help us out, there are a bunch of other things you can do. For instance, if you are my age and therefore on Facebook, because of the federal law that requires everyone over 50 to have a Facebook account, share the episodes, find the link at 90 milesfromneedles.com to the episode you want to share.
0:04:23 - (Chris Clarke): Copy that link and share it. It's really kind of surprising, to be honest, how little progress we're making in the number of listeners that we have for each episode. And, you know, these things take time to build. It's not unusual for a podcast to sort of plateau in listenership after a couple of years, and, you know, we want to grow it. So if you want to do something concrete that actually helps us out, absolutely brings us to new audiences.
0:04:55 - (Chris Clarke): Sharing our episodes on social media is one of the most helpful things you can do. Possibly the most helpful thing you can do. Okay, that's enough development talk right now. Let's go into the virtual studio and talk with Juniper Harrower and Sant Khalsa from the Desert life with Joshua Trees exhibition and book project. I am joined in our virtual studio by juniper Harrower and Sant Khalsa. Thank you so much for joining us on 90 miles from needles.
0:05:54 - (Juniper Harrower): Thanks, Chris, for the invite.
0:05:57 - (Sant Khalsa): Yes, thank you, Chris.
0:05:58 - (Chris Clarke): Let's go to just what prompted you to put this book together? I know you both have really deep connections to the desert. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about where you and the desert are in the relationship that you have. How did it start? When did you first meet the desert? How long have you been going out?
0:06:18 - (Sant Khalsa): Juniper? I think you should start since you were born in the desert.
0:06:21 - (Juniper Harrower): Okay, sure. Yeah. So I was born in Palm springs, actually, but my family moved up into the high desert shortly thereafter. I did grow up on five acres down a long dirt road. I rode dirt bikes probably long before I should have. We had one really amazing Joshua Tree in the backyard that I grew up with. And it's actually where we would bury all of our family pets when they passed away. And so it became pretty significant and meaningful tree for all of my family. And I actually go into that a bit in the book, in the essay I wrote.
0:07:03 - (Juniper Harrower): And yeah, the desert back then, that part of the Mojave, it wasn't a national park yet, it was the monument. Yeah, that's what we'd always call it, the monument. And it just wasn't such a happening spot. Joshua Tree. It's funny now when I tell people, because I live up in Portland and I've been in the Bay area for the last 20 years before that, and I would tell people I from Joshua Tree and they were like, oh, it makes so much sense. You're an artist. And that's where all the artists live. And it's, oh, no, it wasn't like that. When I was growing up, there were some artists scattered, like, way back in the rocks, few and far in between.
0:07:39 - (Juniper Harrower): But the community that's blossomed right now is. It's very exciting in many ways. And of course, with that, you get all of the problems with gentrification that always come with on and on. But it's just been totally amazing to me to watch the transformation of the desert culturally in many ways. And yeah, I have a deep, abiding love and respect for desert habitats and also interest for the people who live there.
0:08:11 - (Sant Khalsa): So I was born and raised in a very different place than juniper. I'm from New York City.
0:08:17 - (Juniper Harrower): New York City.
0:08:19 - (Sant Khalsa): And I first came to the California desert when I was doing a road trip, actually to Phoenix. So that seems a little odd because I ended up over here. But I came down the west coast, I went through Canada, I came down the west coast. And then that was the first time that I went to Joshua Tree National Monument and saw Joshua Trees. And I was newly out of college. I had majored in photography, and of course I photographed them and I was totally intrigued because they were so different than trees that I had grown up with in the northeast.
0:09:01 - (Sant Khalsa): In 1975, I moved to San Bernardino and Joshua Tree at that time. I am trying even to think if there was anything there. I remember going to 29 palms, actually, you couldn't get into the park through Joshua Tree. You had to go out to Twentynine Palms to enter the park. That's my memory of it. And I spent a lot of time, I'd say I came out to the national monument several times a year and camped and photographed, and really was not only intrigued with the trees, but the entire habitat of this region and how expansive it was and the dark skies and all the wildlife. And it was a learning experience for me, having grown up in New York City.
0:09:56 - (Sant Khalsa): And I found the space very magical and beautiful. And then I moved to Joshua Tree. I was a professor at Cal State San Bernardino for over 30 years in the art department. And when I retired, there was only one place that I wanted to live, and that was Joshua Tree. And in 2010, we purchased a small house, some five acres. And six years ago, in 2018, I moved to Joshua Tree full time and have been building my relationship, an intimate relationship with this place, with the trees, with the wildlife.
0:10:42 - (Sant Khalsa): It's home.
0:10:43 - (Chris Clarke): That's great. And I want to talk about some of the work that you've done, each of you, before this book and exhibit started. I know that probably each of your personal histories with Joshua Trees, exclusive of this project, would be episodes all on their own. But I did want to touch on the work you've each done a little bit. But how did this.
0:11:05 - (Sant Khalsa): What.
0:11:06 - (Chris Clarke): Where was the seed of this whole big, overwhelming project planted? How did it start out?
0:11:13 - (Sant Khalsa): I think that we could talk about our individual work, our individual research. Juniper as a research scientist and an artist, and myself as an artist who has been working with environmental issues for over four decades. But we could tell those stories. We could also tell the story of how this project began, which includes you. During the pandemic starting, I believe it was July of 2020, I was curating and hosting a Zoom program for eco arts space, which is a artist group that focuses on environmental and ecological issues that's run by Patricia Watts, directed by Patricia.
0:12:09 - (Sant Khalsa): I'm not doing it anymore, but at the time I did it for two years, it was called tree talk. Artists speak for trees. And I'm losing my voice again. Sorry. I think it's because I turned off the mini split. I don't know.
0:12:28 - (Chris Clarke): No worries.
0:12:29 - (Sant Khalsa): I apologize for that. And I was, because I feel this very strong connection with Joshua trees. I thought it would be great to do a segment just on Joshua trees. And for all the tree talks, I would typically invite several artists and then sometimes bring in a scientist or a writer or someone in another discipline who was also doing work about trees and forests. So with this program, which was in August of 2020, towards the end of the month, I invited Chris Clark as the special guest on our program.
0:13:13 - (Sant Khalsa): And Juniper was one of the artists and also a scientist. And Diane Best and Fred Brashear Jr. And during that program, actually the first speaker was Chris. You were the first speaker, and it was right at the end of the Cima Dome fire, and you showed photographs and told us about your personal relationship with the place. And we were all crying. It was so heart wrenching to see and to hear you speak about the more than million Joshua trees that had burned in that fire.
0:14:01 - (Sant Khalsa): And then Juniper talked about the science and showed her fabulous work. And the same with Diane and Fred. Both of them had been making art about Joshua trees for a very long time, and they shared their work. And at the end of the program, I thought I should curate an exhibition about Joshua trees. And at the time, it was just going to be this small exhibition. I thought, oh, it'd be perfect, because, Chris, you could write a catalog essay, and I have these three amazing artists, and Juniper can write about the science.
0:14:42 - (Sant Khalsa): And then it exploded over a period of four years into what it became, which is an exhibition that fills an entire contemporary museum and a 304-page book that is multidisciplinary, very comprehensive, that brings together all aspects about.
0:15:06 - (Chris Clarke): So, Jennifer, how did you get roped into this thing?
0:15:09 - (Juniper Harrower): Oh, yeah, it heard about sunt for some years, and we had this meeting long coming, I think, moving towards each other. And so this was really the first time we got to connect in that treetalk episode. And so I'm just really grateful to Patricia Watts for building these communities and to sont for doing the tree talks for so long. Yeah, it was an interesting group. I had been working with Joshua Trees for my dissertation research, and I can share a little bit more about that later.
0:15:44 - (Juniper Harrower): And also had an ongoing artistic practice for the past 20 years that more recently, really was primarily focused on Joshua trees. And after the conversation, which was very rich and just interesting for everyone, Sant reached out and asked, who would like to be a part of pushing this forward and thinking about reaching out to places to curate an exhibition and a small thing. And it just steadily grew as time went on. And then, yeah, it basically exploded into a massive project and learning experience.
0:16:24 - (Juniper Harrower): And, yeah, none of us saw that coming.
0:16:28 - (Sant Khalsa): The reason that it grew, I think, was the synergy that happened when Juniper joined me as the associate curator together. There were so many ideas that were going back and forth between the two of us.
0:16:48 - (Juniper Harrower): Yeah, we were a good fit.
0:16:50 - (Sant Khalsa): Yeah, exactly.
0:16:52 - (Juniper Harrower): And detriment and peril.
0:16:55 - (Sant Khalsa): Yeah, exactly. So we would. We probably looked at. Let me clarify that. Before Juniper joined as associate curator, I had already been doing a lot of research for the exhibition, and had been looking at that point, probably over 100 artists. I think throughout the project, probably the two of us looked at over 200 artists. And then we ended up with about 50 artists in the exhibition. But also when we started thinking about the catalog for the exhibition, we just kept on coming up with new people, new ideas, new directions.
0:17:41 - (Sant Khalsa): And usually an exhibition catalog will have maybe two or three essays, and we ended up with 17 essays. And so it just kept on growing, which we hope Joshua Trees will continue to do. And the project just took off. And I reached out to Andi Campognone, who is the director of MOAH, the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, about the exhibition being there. And we had one gallery that was going to be the show, and then it grew to two galleries and eventually grew to the entire museum.
0:18:23 - (Sant Khalsa): And she was very excited about the exhibition being there because it's a major museum in the Mojave Desert, and they are connected with the prime desert Woodland Preserve, which is a preserve for Joshua Trees. And then once we had the exhibition venue, I reached out to the Getty and we put together a proposal, myself and Juniper and Andy, and we became part of the Getty supported PST art in science Collide.
0:18:57 - (Sant Khalsa): And that gave us the support of the Getty Financial support so that we could really grow the project. Desert Forest Life with Joshua Trees is one of the more than 70 exhibitions that is part of the Getty supported PST art and science Collide. This is a project that the Getty does about every four years. And when I'm talking about the Getty, I mean the Getty foundation, though, of course, the Getty Museum, which is an incredible museum in Los Angeles that includes antiquities to contemporary arts and has massive collections and has numerous shows going on at any given time. And it's a wonderful museum because of not only the quality of the work, but it's free to the public.
0:20:01 - (Sant Khalsa): And the Getty is supported by the Getty foundation, as is the PST art project. And we realized also while doing our research, that there wasn't that much out there that had been published about Joshua Trees except for scientific research and science journals, and that there really was a need.
0:20:25 - (Chris Clarke): Okay, so you were talking about. There wasn't a whole lot published on Joshua Trees other than scientific publications. And that was interesting because it made me remember when I first started paying attention to Joshua trees, there were extremely few scientific papers that had been published about Joshua trees. In fact, I think I had copies of both of the papers that I found when I first started looking in 1996 or thereabouts.
0:20:55 - (Chris Clarke): And just the explosion of scientific interest over the last 2030 years has been really wonderful to see. And that is reflected to a large extent in the book Desert Forest book, which was interesting because you have obviously juniper, but also people like Lynn Sweet and Jeremy Yoder, Joshua Tree, scientific experts who are eloquent enough in a non-academic setting to be able to convey stuff. There's a really nice blend of the artistic and the scientific.
0:21:26 - (Sant Khalsa): I also want to mention some of the other important scientific researchers that are involved with the project, especially Cameron Barrows, who I really think was an inspiration for a number of the younger scientists to approach doing research on Joshua trees. And also Chris Smith is involved, and a truly newly minted PhD, Daniel Oren Hastings, who Juniper brought into the project, who has been working on a Burke.
0:22:02 - (Chris Clarke): James Cornet, a longtime naturalist out of the Coachella Valley; Cane West, who's a historical researcher and who I had a great time eating dinner with during the opening of the exhibition. It's really nice to see the science blended in with the artistic and literary, and it was just one of the things I like most about the book.
0:22:26 - (Sant Khalsa): Well, also not only the artists, but the art writing in the book, Greg Levine wrote an essay. He is an art historian who focuses on trees and his research, and this was the first time that he wrote about the Joshua Tree and its representation in art. And then also Shana knives Dambrot, this incredible critical art writer, wrote an essay about Joshua Trees as an icon, and not just of the American west, but a pop culture icon.
0:23:10 - (Sant Khalsa): And so that's a really wonderful essay. And then bringing in Sean Milanovich, who is a Native American scholar and also very involved. I believe he's vice president of the Native American Land Conservancy. To write this wonderful essay from an indigenous perspective is such an important between.
0:23:34 - (Chris Clarke): Sean and Gerald Clarke would definitely have the Cahuilla perspective represented better than most books on Joshua trees do. That's a wonderful thing. I wonder if you could set the stage, because it's likely that people will be able to click on a link that we'll provide to buy a copy of the book. And just to keep from engaging in suspense, I'll just say that it's nine 0 mile from needles.com desert forest, but it's less likely that everybody that listens to this because we have folks in Salt Lake City and El Paso and Marfa, places like that, will make it to Lancaster to see this exhibition, even though I strongly encourage you to do so, even if you have to drive from Marfa. But can you describe what it's like to walk into the museum with this exhibit in place?
0:24:27 - (Chris Clarke): What's the sense that people get with, what do you see first? How is the exhibit arranged logically? I know you didn't just put stuff up randomly, that there are things that had relationships to each other. The things that are in the room together have some kind of relationship. Can you describe a little bit about the physical setting of the exhibit?
0:24:49 - (Juniper Harrower): I'll say one thing that many people who came to the show, many of the artists kept saying to me that they had no idea it was going to be this big. And I think the scale of this space and the work was just. It was like a surprise for everyone. This is a really big show on Joshua trees, but also desert ecology, too. The Joshua tree, as a unique being, is centered, but it's definitely within a much bigger sociopolitical history.
0:25:25 - (Juniper Harrower): And there are all those narratives ongoing, definitely thinking about the entanglement with the American west as a colonial project and deeper histories of the native groups that lived and have lived with Joshua Trees for many years, the Cahuilla and the Chemehuevi. And so when you come into the exhibition, the first thing is actually a really big image from Cara Romero, who's a Chemehuevi artist of a road in the desert with many Joshua trees and a person holding a baby.
0:26:04 - (Juniper Harrower): And I feel like that sets the tone of some of the space. And Sant, you want to talk about some of the next elements? I know you're used to telling the story. Sure.
0:26:16 - (Sant Khalsa): So after you see this very panoramic landscape, you also actually see two other photographs by Kara Romero. One is the photograph that's on the COVID of the book, which is called for the Kuia boys. And the other photograph is a recent photograph that she made in the national park, which is titled we are Home, which I think is a very important statement for us to remember that the national park lands is the home of indigenous people.
0:26:58 - (Sant Khalsa): And then across from these three spectacular photographs by Cara Romero is a photograph by Carlton Watkins, made in 1880, we believe, which is the oldest photograph of a Joshua tree. And seeing that Photograph in relation to these three photographs is really important in terms of thinking about the colonization of the American west and the fact that he was working for Pacific Union Railroad when he made that photograph.
0:27:37 - (Sant Khalsa): They were considering milling down all the Joshua trees to turn into pulp to use for the us dollar, which had just come into existence a little more than a decade before he made that photograph. And the whole notion that Joshua trees were only looked at is, what could we use them for? And so this sort of sets up the experience for the exhibition. And then you walk into the next gallery, and I'm going to ask Juniper to speak about this, because the first thing when you walk in the gallery is this beautiful installation piece that she's done about Joshua trees.
0:28:20 - (Sant Khalsa): That entire first gallery, main gallery in the museum, really speaks about ecology and the diversity of the Mojave Desert. Juniper, why don't you speak about that?
0:28:34 - (Juniper Harrower): Yeah. It was important for us to situate the Joshua tree story in the histories of cultural, societal and political relationships, especially given that Joshua trees are threatened by climate change, by large scale industrial solar projects, excessive heat and wildfire development, Amazon intel warehouses, all of these things. But that's. It's a lot to get hit with when you first walk into a museum or any space.
0:29:10 - (Juniper Harrower): And it's really overwhelming the scale of all of these issues that are not just about Joshua Tree. Right. It's deeply entangled in people's lives and many other living beings. But after giving you a little taste when you walk in, you go into that big exhibition space. And we really wanted to surround people in just the incredible being and entanglements of the Joshua tree life that also make it really start to disentangle the idea of Joshua Tree as a solitary, single entity.
0:29:49 - (Juniper Harrower): It would be really easy to just make it the lone cowboy, Joshua Tree hero type figure thing, that if we're going to save it, the tree becomes the icon that it's got so much iconic weight. We really wanted to make sure that people had a sense of the incredible relationships that are entangled with Joshua trees and with desert communities. And so one of the first big installations you see down there is a structure I built out of upcycled wood from a jackrabbit homestead from the Mojave Desert. The skeletal frame, and it I'm using as a greenhouse in the museum space, and it is glowing with grow lights inside of it and covered in silk.
0:30:42 - (Juniper Harrower): A silk painting of a desert ecosystem that's softly abstracted, and the different organisms are merging and blending into each other. The boundaries are. There's this sense of no hard individuality and boundary in the relationships between the different organisms. Where does one end and another begin? And I put thousands of threads into this painting as well that give the sensation of the painting both unraveling, but also being stitched back together.
0:31:18 - (Juniper Harrower): So there's this sense of an act of caregiving happening, but also this bit of decay. And so I was thinking, with ecosystems, part of my work is also as a restoration ecologist, but that itself has some interesting problematic histories with it to think about. What are we restoring back to? And so I really was thinking about this piece as ecologies of repair. And I think with reparative act. Part of that is not just restoring, but it's actually making amends for the damage that was done and really looking to address that and then dealing with the now there's no going back. How do we do? Right in the now and then? Within that greenhouse are a number of desert nurse plants.
0:32:09 - (Juniper Harrower): These are the plants that closely live with Joshua trees and Joshua tree communities, and help the tree in numerous different ways, both for seedling, establishment, microclimates, other organisms living nearby, mycorrhizal networks, underground fungi, which we can get into a little bit more. And then there are two young Joshua trees that I've had for a number of years. They're about six years old, that I had special permits to be able to bring into the museum and have growing in the space, really holding some amount of future hopefulness, thinking about how we can do this work to help these plants.
0:32:49 - (Juniper Harrower): And then soil spills out of the structure onto the museum floor. So it's almost, you go into the desert and you see these jackrabbit homesteads. They're all decaying, the ones that haven't been turned into Airbnbs. And they're decaying and the animals have moved back into them, and the tumbleweeds have blown in, and there's like packrat middens. And so in this case, I've turned it inside out to where it's like the desert is on the inside, coming out to colonize the museum space.
0:33:16 - (Juniper Harrower): And then I have a big painting next to that, because I'm also. I'm a painter. And that touches on similar concepts of ecology, use and problematizing the histories of botanical illustration, which has really wild colonial roots. And how do we rewild the understanding of ecologies and ecosystems back into that? And then as you make your way around this really large room there, there's just. There's so much interesting work, I think, of the massive, almost renaissance style painting done by Mary Rose Crook.
0:33:55 - (Juniper Harrower): Thank you. Done by Mary Rose Crook, that looks at nursing practices with Joshua Tree and Joshua Tree ecologies and just pulls you right in. There is a piece that takes up the center of the wall when you walk in, done by Kathryn Ruan, that looks at all of the different Joshua tree like an assemblage of Joshua tree physiology flowers and the leaves and the pollinators. And it's all in circles, arranged as a.
0:34:33 - (Chris Clarke): That is a very striking piece.
0:34:36 - (Juniper Harrower): Yeah, that's amazing.
0:34:38 - (Chris Clarke): Don't go away. We'll be right back from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. Sunscreen is your friend. We're back with Saint Khalsa and Juniper Harrower, who are the co-conspirators behind Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees, which is both an exhibit at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California, and a companion book published by Inlandia Press.
0:36:40 - (Sant Khalsa): One of the things that's really interesting, juniper, I hadn't even thought about this until this moment, is that the majority of the works that are in that main gallery are done by artists who live in the Joshua Tree area. It just dawned on me, because Mary Rose Crook, Catherine Ruan, Claudia Boucher, Diane Best, Bill Brewer, Jenny Kane, there's, I think, Gerald Clarke.And that gallery is so much about artwork that's been made about the Joshua tree by people who have very close relationships, intimate relationships with these extraordinary beings.
0:37:33 - (Juniper Harrower): I love that.
0:37:35 - (Sant Khalsa): Yeah. And you can really feel that when you're in that gallery. Also in that gallery, Gerald Clarke's piece, which is called going gone, and it is made up from him stamping tens of thousands of the word going to create a Joshua tree. It's so powerful. And next to that are the six words on the wall that are in the different native language of the people who have lived in the Mojave Desert, and a prayer by Sean Milanovich in both Cahuilla and English.
0:38:19 - (Sant Khalsa): And it's just seeing those together is just such a powerful statement about what existed and where we are now.
0:38:29 - (Chris Clarke): And one of the things that I really like, and Juniper, you went into this in some detail, is just the refusal to single out the Joshua tree as, like an iconic libertarian hero of the desert. I keep thinking of the real estate photos that you see in the high desert, especially around Joshua Tree, where people have, before selling a property, gone out there with earth moving equipment and bladed every single plant off the ground, all the black brush, all the chollas, all the creosote Mojave yuccas.
0:39:04 - (Chris Clarke): But they leave the Joshua tree standing, partly because right now it'd be extremely financially ruinous to bulldoze Joshua trees, given that they're protected. But I think that probably has a lot more to do with the fact that people think Joshua trees are these symbolic, individual icons of the desert. And so they leave them standing while bulldozing the community that they belong to and the community that actually gave rise to the Joshua trees with nurse plants.
0:39:33 - (Juniper Harrower): And such and plants that can be thousands of years old like the creosote, people will tear out and these old, long-lived, deep-rooted plants. Robin Kobaly is a lifelong dear friend and mentor of mine who's a desert botanist. And she's written expansively on the desert ancients and really inspired my work through the years. Actually was a major inspiration for my dissertation research. Going into Joshua trees.
0:40:05 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I think people just don't get how old some of the stuff here is that isn't Joshua trees. Joshua trees are lucky if they make it to 300 years old. Right next to them, waiting to be bulldozed, could be a black brush that's 700 years old and a creosote that's 2400 years old.
0:40:23 - (Sant Khalsa): It's very upsetting to me that creosotes are not a plant that are protected. I became very aware of that recently. They're putting in a new water line in Joshua Tree and they've been told not to bulldoze every plant except creosotes they can take out in mass. And I tried to stop them and I learned that creosote wasn't protected.
0:40:55 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I think that is definitely a failing of some of the ways that our laws are created, which some of the people who use those laws to protect species that are having trouble, including Brendan Cummings, for instance, frequent guest on this podcast and a contributor to the book, would readily agree that the tools are flawed even though we use them because they're the tools that we have. There's no protected ecosystem law. There's no protection for vegetative assemblages.
0:41:26 - (Chris Clarke): If the only thing you have to go by is rarity or threats to a population, then you get these things where incredibly old plants that are common across the desert don't get protected. So there's no reverence for the age of the plants. It's just, I think, a flaw in the way things are set up.
0:41:44 - (Sant Khalsa): Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Brendan, because Brendan Cummings, as you said, wrote an essay for the book desert forest Life with Joshua Trees. And it's really such an important essay because he looks at over 100 years of the litigation, all of the public policies, all the laws, everything that relates to Joshua trees. And we feel that this is really critically important that people understand this not only for the Joshua tree, but for all fauna and flora, that they understand that the process of protections is so intense and takes so long and takes someone like Brendan Cummings, who is so committed to the cause just by way.
0:42:44 - (Chris Clarke): Of explanation Brendan is the conservation director of the center for Biological Diversity, and he is the person that wrote the petition to the California Fish and Game Commission asking that Joshua Trees, the western Joshua tree in particular, be listed as threatened under the California Endangered Species act. Yeah, it was a good person to have write an essay, for sure.
0:43:06 - (Juniper Harrower): I met Brendan years ago when I was doing my dissertation research on Joshua Trees, because I also work as an ecologist as well as an artist. I'm actually an art professor now, of all things. Art is where my heart lies. I'm at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. And so when I was doing my dissertation research, I did not expect to land back in the desert. I had been working in the tropics with fungal systems.
0:43:31 - (Juniper Harrower): Cameron had just done that study showing how Joshua trees are really threatened by the changing climate and maybe gone in 100 years. And I happened to pick it up in the National Geographic Review at that time. And it just sent me into this deep dive into desert ecologies and back to do work in my hometown, where my family still lived, and began the study on what was happening with Joshua trees and their pollinators across climate gradient in the park. And just were plants reproducing?
0:44:04 - (Juniper Harrower): How is climate change impacting their distributions? And with that as well, I started a project to understand the underground fungal systems. Mycorrhizal fungi, which are soil fungi that make relationships with plant roots. And they grow into the plant roots and then out into the soils, foraging for water and nutrients, and trade that in exchange to the plant for plant sugars. And it's considered that's how plants can grow bigger, faster, better, stronger, more resilient to pest pathogens and droughts.
0:44:39 - (Juniper Harrower): And we didn't know if Joshua Trees formed these kinds of relationships. And so part of my dissertation research was to look into this, and I found that they do, and it changes across climate gradients. And so there was a lot of really interesting things that came out of that, that I was able to start to understand how the changing climate is going to impact these relationships, which will have major impacts on plants demography, which means where plants can live. And that's when Brendan reached out to me. He read those publications and wanted clarification on so what's going on here?
0:45:15 - (Juniper Harrower): And we had a lot of really deep, ongoing conversations for a year. He decided he needed to start this big journey and consulted with all of the leading research that was happening with Chris Smith and Jeremy Yoder and Lynn Sweet and I. Pulling from that, the end of that journey is Joshua Trees became the first species in the state of California to be protected due to threats mainly from climate through the western Joshua Tree Conservation act, which is brand new. So the exhibition in the book is also timely in that this all came together at about the same time that these protections happened.
0:45:52 - (Juniper Harrower): Which don't mean that you can't cut down Joshua trees. You absolutely can if you're willing to pay enough money. That does throw a bit of a wrench in the calculus for systems for industrial solar projects. And as I mentioned before, Amazon infill warehouse developments. The more trees you cut down, the more you have to pay. And we think desert solar is good, but large scale industrial solar is actually a big problem. And that's a whole other podcast that Chris has covered numerous times, so I won't go into it.
0:46:27 - (Juniper Harrower): Your writings actually, Chris, just to minorly digress here, on solar projects, like ten years ago, 15 maybe? It was like 15 at this point. I used to read those when you.
0:46:37 - (Chris Clarke): Would write, oh, so you're the one.
0:46:39 - (Juniper Harrower): Back when I was a grad student, they were so informative, they're so good. And I just have always appreciated the work that you do to get the word out. And you're such a good writer. Yeah, part of this. So to wrap it back up into the exhibition, we get into some of these issues. When you go upstairs, there are another three, four galleries. I don't know how many galleries, it's just upstairs.
0:47:06 - (Sant Khalsa): One, two, three, plus four.
0:47:10 - (Juniper Harrower): There's video work that is done. Diane Best and Casey Kiernan and I, we actually. So this ongoing project I've had for a few years now, really like digging into the solar issue and also the California's various systems of management, which again, probably another podcast of how complex and inefficient these systems can be, while full of many incredible hardworking people who are all trying to do the right thing.
0:47:46 - (Juniper Harrower): But we have a department of floristic Welfare up there, and it's taking on some of these issues and concepts. And if you go to my website, you can see one of the videos I've made about that. But there's a solar powered desk up there, and there's little black brush seedlings sprouting under it from that light font. Did this really great, like whodunit murder mystery, Wall of Joshua trees that are being impacted by developments.
0:48:14 - (Juniper Harrower): Solar boron. There are Tina project, Fred Brush here has some work up there. It's a fun space. There's a file cabinet with a little peekaboo that you can look into and see things. And so it's interactive space.
0:48:27 - (Chris Clarke): It was interesting to go to the opening on a day that I started in Boron at a demonstration of sorts over the Aretina solar project, which, as it's currently planned, would kill thousands of western Joshua trees. It was grandfathered in during the discussions of the western Joshua Tree Conservation act, and you got to do that sometimes to get laws passed. But the people in Boron are not feeling like they were consulted, and they're worried about a lot of the things that people worry about with large solar everything from valley fever to urban heat, island style effects to property values, etcetera.
0:49:06 - (Chris Clarke): And it just really gives you the sense that this is not an art exhibit that is divorced from the world outside of the gallery.
0:49:18 - (Juniper Harrower): I think that's such a good point, Chris, is we were really wanting a deeply embedded community project that, you know, not only from an artistic perspective, but all of these different knowledge, practices and cultural points coming at it. And then it also connects to. We didn't even talk about the immense amount of community programming associated with this project, too. One of the things I'm personally working on is a project out of the prime desert Woodland preserve to figure out Joshua tree roots and how far they go. I'm actually taking a bunch of students down to help me do this research in a couple weeks, working with Daniel Hastings, who's in the book, as well as Joshua Tree physiologist.
0:49:56 - (Juniper Harrower): And then I'm also looking into restoration strategies for Joshua Trees and growing bio art containers out of fungal mycelium, based on some of my previous research, and just how we can help, think about ways to prevent underground root predation, which is a big deal, and then doing the restoration planting with nurse plants. And how do we think about this as an ecosystem active repair in this work, and Satan, maybe you want to share some more about the other programming.
0:50:29 - (Sant Khalsa): Yeah, there's going to be a zoom program. It's going to be on December 5 from six to seven, and there'll be. All the scientists are going to be speaking, discussing Joshua Tree and Zirk's current research. We're also having a big, what we're calling a day in the desert happening in Lancaster. And by the way, I just want to mention that Lancaster is 238 miles from needles, and the day in the desert is on October 26.
0:51:06 - (Sant Khalsa): It's our big full day of programming, supported by the Getty, which is going to include a guided Joshua tree meditation and performance by Edgar Fabian Friaz, which will be just a beautiful experience in the prying desert woodland preserve. Adrienne Jenik, who is from this Joshua tree area, is going to be doing her public climate future readings with her eco tarot deck. Then we're going to have a panel called co creating new futures for Joshua Trees, which I'll be moderating.
0:51:43 - (Sant Khalsa): And Juniper Harrower will be on that panel with Brendan Cummings, Fred Brashear, artists Matthew Brandt and Chelsea Mosher. And then we'll end the day with a curator led exhibition walkthrough through the exhibition. So that's really going to be an incredible day of protagonist.
0:52:03 - (Juniper Harrower): There's also going to be critiquing with my Joshua tree dating site. So I have a site called hey j tree where you can meet Joshua trees from my field sites in Joshua Tree National park, but then also out at the prime Desert Woodland Preserve. And we have all kinds of hand carved relief prints that will teach people how to make their own Joshua tree print. You can take it home, send it the love letter.
0:52:28 - (Juniper Harrower): The prints have guest contributors, right? Little profiles like dating style profiles for the trees. There's music videos. It's an ongoing project, so we're still updating and adding things all the time. But there'll be a big printmaking component. And I meet people sometimes years later, who have made a print and still will put them in their house and be like, it's in my living room. I love my tree print. I went and visited my tree and it's so funny, like these sometimes these somatic experiences of making work and thinking how we become connected in all these different ways besides just living with Joshua Trees and reading about Joshua Trees and caring for them, making art wits by.
0:53:10 - (Chris Clarke): Might be because I grew up in the seventies, but I just can't imagine committing to one Joshua Tree.
0:53:20 - (Juniper Harrower): There's I have many Joshua trees, and especially this one tree that's very excited about kitchen table poly relationships, which might be your thing.
0:53:29 - (Chris Clarke): okay, and we will have links to all of the upcoming events in the constellation of things going on about this book and exhibit in our show notes. So if you're curious about joining one of the really fascinating events that have been described here, just check out our show notes and there will be more info there.
0:53:50 - (Sant Khalsa): I'd like to mention a few other things. One thing is that the first essay that you read in the book is titled the Joshua Tree Myth, Mutualism and Survival. It's a slightly updated version from an essay that you wrote for the Mojave Project, which is Kim Stringfellow's project. And also I want to mention that Kim Stringfellow, who is a spectacular photographer, is in the exhibition. And I'm curious to ask you, Chris, about why you wrote that essay in the first place. And I believe you've been writing a lot about Joshua trees.
0:54:32 - (Chris Clarke): Well, yeah, I decided in 1996 that I was going to write a book on Joshua trees. And I still have not, 28 years later, finished that book. Don't tell any publishers because that makes me look really bad. But I wrote that piece for Kim, basically because Kim asked me to write a piece and I want to make Kim happy. It was an interesting thing because I had just come off a couple of years of not writing really anything at all. When I was at KCET, I wrote something like 1700 articles in the course of five years, some of which were trivial and just, hey, California produced x number of megawatt hours yesterday from solar.
0:55:15 - (Chris Clarke): Not really of much value, but there were a lot of longer pieces and my writing muscles got burned out. So I had gotten the job with NPCA. Anything I wrote was not bylined by me. I ghost wrote some stuff for op eds and things like that, but it was not me writing. And so it was just a good re entry back into the world of writing after writing become a painful thing. That piece is pretty near and dear to my heart, and I'm really grateful to Kim for sparking it and for paying money for me to write it.
0:55:49 - (Sant Khalsa): When you come to this exhibition, or if you're thinking about coming to Lancaster to see this exhibition, I know that everyone has seen millions of images of Joshua trees. They see them in the media all the time, photographs, paintings, printmaking. But a lot of those idealized Joshua Trees and this exhibition is nothing that. And we had a critic come by and look at the show and say that this was the most beautiful, disturbing exhibition they've ever seen.
0:56:26 - (Sant Khalsa): So just know that we're really dealing with the issues here. These are all artists that are truly concerned about the future of the Joshua tree, and they're making work that relates in some way to all of the impacts that us humans have put on Joshua trees, from climate change to invasive species that are causing fires, industrial solar and development. So you're not going to see all pretty pictures of Joshua Trees or pretty art of Joshua Trees. So I think that's really important for the audience to know. The way that Juniper and I approached this exhibition was different than the way most curators who come from historical backgrounds might approach an exhibition.
0:57:19 - (Sant Khalsa): Because we're practitioners, we are art makers and researchers. And one of the main reasons that I curate as part of my art practice is because I believe that the issues that I am most passionate about need more than one voice. And that by bringing together artists, scientists, historians, writers, experts in the environmental area, that we're looking at, the specific issue that we're looking at in a project, or I personally am looking at in a curatorial project, makes the exhibition that much more powerful for the audience experience, because they're seeing art from very different perspectives.
0:58:15 - (Sant Khalsa): Juniper has her style and her approach and her perspective. I have mine, and then the other 50 artists in the exhibition have theirs. And so it really gives the audience an experience that allows them to make decisions for themselves about how they look at the issue, how they, in this particular case, how they experience Joshua trees, what they think is most important. And as practitioners, we have an understanding of what each of the artists in the show are actually doing, because we ourselves make art.
0:59:00 - (Sant Khalsa): We worked very closely with a number of the artists in the exhibition, in the creation of their works. We had numerous meetings with artists who had made work about Joshua Trees, but were making new work for the exhibition. And Juniper and I would meet with the artists, and we brought in our team of scientists to have meetings with the artists so that the artists could ask questions about that. They learn things about Joshua Trees that they didn't understand.
0:59:37 - (Sant Khalsa): I remember one meeting that we had where one of the artists was surprised to learn that the yucca moth wasn't white, because on the Internet, when you google yucca moth, you see all these white moths. We haven't really talked that much about the Yucca moth on this podcast, but the western Joshua tree has its own specific yakimoth. The eastern Joshua Tree has its own specific yucca moth. And there's very few photographs of these yakimoths for people to see. By the way, in the book, you will see amazing pictures of the yucca moth, the western and eastern Joshua Tree, yucca moths.
1:00:29 - (Sant Khalsa): So we had these meetings where they would have these discussions so that the artists would actually understand the science, and they could interpret the science and express it through their work without it being just arbitrary, but really understanding what was going on. I've been making work about Joshua Trees since the eighties. And the early work that I did in the eighties directly related to what we used to call global warming.
1:01:04 - (Sant Khalsa): Now climate change. And I think it's more than climate change. I think we're in a climate crisis. And I started making work that spoke to what I envisioned the world to look like in global warming. And I couldn't think of anything as a photographer that was more appropriate than to photograph burnt Joshua Tree. Landscapes. And that became how I visualized global warming was through those images, because I learned that unlike other trees, fire kills Joshua trees unless the root system survive, and then they can have clonal growth.
1:01:57 - (Sant Khalsa): So I was researching that, learning about that, and just visually, it's so just horrific what a burnt Joshua Tree landscape looks like. So I started doing these altarpieces where the altar itself was made out of warning symbols, distress symbols. There's one in the exhibition that I made in 1991 that's made up of triangular photographs of a burned Joshua Tree landscape. And when those images come together, the way that they're hung on the wall, the negative space becomes a fallout shelter symbol.
1:02:46 - (Sant Khalsa): So I'm talking about, like, the fear of what could happen. But then on the small altar in this meditation installation space that I created for the exhibition, like I said originally, this piece was made in 1991, I did a new book, and it's color photographs of young Joshua trees, and it's a prayer book, and it has the Morse code for so's on it. And the whole idea is that you look at these photographs of young Joshua Trees and that there's hope for the future.
1:03:29 - (Sant Khalsa): So even though we're talking about all of the negative impacts in the exhibition that are threatening JOSHUA trees, there's also in my work and in other artists works, including Juniper's hope for the future, that we can make a change, that we will change our policies and our life habits, and that we can curtail or stop climate change, and that Joshua trees will be with us 100 years, 500 years, a thousand years from now.
1:04:13 - (Chris Clarke): Let me just thank both of you, Sant Khalsa and Juniper Harrower, for joining us on 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast, and for the wonderful work you're doing promoting one of my favorite organisms in the world and raising awareness of its need for our help. Just very grateful on a personal level for that and for you joining us here today.
1:04:36 - (Juniper Harrower): Thanks so much, Chris. Thanks for all of the work that you do. I really also deeply appreciate what you do for desert communities of all kinds.
1:04:44 - (Sant Khalsa): Yeah, thank you, Chris. And this has really been a pleasure.
1:05:36 - (Chris Clarke): Well, that wraps up another episode of 90 Miles from the Desert Protection podcast. Want to thank you for listening. I hope that you got something out of this episode. If you want to take a look at the book Desert life with Joshua Trees, you can go to nine 0 mile from needles.com desertforest, and that will let you order the book from your local independent bookstore or an independent bookstore of your choosing through bookshop.org dot.
1:06:10 - (Chris Clarke): I want to thank Juniper Harrower and Sant Khalsa not only for coming on the podcast and talking to us, but also for putting this exhibit together. Honestly, it's worth the drive from wherever you are to Lanciestre. If you're driving here from New Mexico or Texas or something, you could probably find something else to do in Los Angeles as well. But it's really worth seeing this exhibit. It's got some amazing artwork in it. It's just a really lovely tribute to this tree.
1:06:38 - (Chris Clarke): In the meantime, I definitely want to thank Joe Jeffery, our voiceover person, and Martine Mancha, our podcast artwork person. Thanks again to Parker Lloyd, our newest donor. 90milesfromneedles.com/donate to join Parker our theme song Moody western is by Brightside Studio. Other music in this episode is courtesy Tiger Gang, which did the reggae piece earlier in the episode and by Desert Dive. looks like we have finally escaped the hold of summer temperature in this part of the Mojave. Today was comfortably in the mid to high eighties because the studio seems to collect all the possible heat that surround. I did have to put the AC on for a few minutes, but only for a few minutes.
1:07:28 - (Chris Clarke): The turn of the seasons is pretty lovely. Some of the trees are starting to have a little bit of fall color. You have to know where you're looking for it and you have to be satisfied with fall color. That wouldn't really qualify for that name in some place like Vermont, but it's what we have and it's beautiful. We're coming up with another episode next week that I think you're going to find really interesting. Talking to the Texas Lobo coalition about their efforts to persuade people that Texas isn't Texas without the mexican wolf prowling around the west side of the state.
1:08:01 - (Chris Clarke): So look for that next week. In the meantime, take care of yourselves. Be good to your body. The desert needs you. Get some exercise, but don't overdo it. You can still get heat injury when it's in the mid eighties. Hiking times are coming soon and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now.
1:10:32 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy media network.