Nature
Vision Quest 2016: Science in the Storm
Wednesday, May 25th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Animals, Mojave Desert, Nature, Regions, Road Trips.
The suburban sprawl of Las Vegas became less finished, less dense and more expansive, and more under construction, as we drove north in a tunnel of freeway, surrounded by noise-barrier walls, with the newly snow-covered peaks of the Spring Mountains and Sheep Range closing in at west and east. The Paiute reservation went by in a flash, then the military and prison complexes began, first the artillery and bombing range with its mock Mideastern villages, then the drone base and the prisons for women and juveniles.
After the long drive to Beatty, we checked into our motel and stopped for an early dinner of Mexican food at an outdoor table by the highway, next to a group of retiree Harley hogsters and their wives. In the dusk, Jef drove us up the road to the Spicer Ranch, which the current patriarch is developing into a private mountain bike resort. Wonderful news for me, because I’d love to see these adrenaline-fueled machines outlawed from public lands.
Jef had raved about this new-age rancher who rode bikes everywhere, but Dave Spicer turned out to be a mellow, friendly guy. His ranch compound stretched all around, consisting of the usual meandering dirt roads, abandoned equipment, vacant houses and ruined sheds, and half-finished dams, ponds, and corrals. The ranch was sited here by his ancestors because massive springs drain from the slopes back of the compound, out of an area of colorful badlands, to vivid reedy marshes along the highway. As darkness fell, we tried to follow his directions to where we might find endangered Amargosa toads around irrigated meadows and ponds.
Jef parked in a grove of trees and we fanned out, quickly spotting toads. I helped gather them, and we added each to a ziploc bag which was marked, either “out of water” or with the temperature of the water where it was found, taken on the spot with a digital probe. We each accumulated toad-filled bags in our left hands, until we had a dozen or so. When Jef occasionally encountered a big invasive bullfrog, he’d grab it and sling it hard against a rock; bullfrogs prey on smaller native frogs and toads. Wind was blowing hard when we started, with lightning and thunder over the mountains, and the low, heavy clouds began to spit rain.
When we returned to the vehicle, wind and rain were lashing the little SUV, which Jef and Anthony began efficiently turning into a field lab. I sat in the back holding the metal clipboard of data sheets. As Jef and Anthony sterilized a forceps and scissors and Anthony prepared the individual glass culture plates, Jef handed me paper packs of wooden-stemmed sterile cotton swabs, numbering the plastic caps of glass sample vials and returning them to their rack which he likewise passed back to me. Then they both sterilized their hands and put on sterile rubber gloves.
For each bagged toad, Jef would remove it from its bag, announce its number, measure its length in millimeters, determine the sex and read off the bag data, all of which I would quickly note on the data form. Then I would rush to tear open the end of a swab package, handing it to Jef tip forward, and he would begin to swab the toad. Meanwhile I’d pull a vial out of the rack and struggle to twist the cap open, holding it up for Jef to insert the swab, then carefully return it to the rack. Then Jef would hold the toad legs-first toward Anthony, who would clip off a tiny bit of webbing between the toes as a DNA sample, dropping it onto a culture plate. In the process, Anthony would sometimes recognize toads he’d caught before, on previous trips.
Back in the lab on campus, Anthony would test all the samples for the spreading chytrid fungus, which is considered “the most significant threat to the world’s montane amphibian populations”, allegedly contributing to mass extinction. But field research generally raises more questions than it answers. Jef, Anthony, and other scientists haven’t even been able to figure out the mortality rate – how many animals infected by the fungus actually die.
After Jef restored the specimen to its bag and set the bag outside the vehicle, he and Anthony would remove their gloves, sterilize their hands and equipment, put on fresh gloves, and start with the next bagged toad, all in the confined space of the front seat, with everything they needed stashed precariously on the sloping dashboard or between their feet on the floor, the doors propped open for extra maneuverability, and weather gusting in from outside.
When all the toads were sampled and all the data were entered, Jef and Anthony would clean up and pack up, while in the back seat, I donned sterile gloves and lifted each vial out of its rack, snapping the wooden swab off so its tip remained inside and screwing the caps back on, changing gloves after each vial. Then we moved to a different location, collected more toads, and resumed the lab work, with the wind and rain hitting harder each time, and the night falling colder.
At our final location, along the Amargosa River south of Beatty, I caught a chill in my legs – I hadn’t dressed for the wind – and my body temperature dropped so I had to quit and return to the vehicle, where I sat hunched and shivering for about an hour, feeling sick, as they finished processing the last sample set with the doors cracked open and the rain and wind intruding. It was 1:30 am when we got back to the motel, and I fell asleep instantly.
We returned in the morning, and Jef pointed out that the entire riparian area had been bulldozed free of invasive tamarisk. There was no tamarisk to be seen anywhere now in this sea of green at the base of multi-colored badlands. The tiny river flowed clear through a wetland of cattail, riparian grasses and coyote willows, shaded by young cottonwoods. I wondered why the ubiquitous seed stock of tamarisk hadn’t regenerated. Maybe they’d poisoned it chemically and replanted native vegetation. Quite an expensive, energy- and labor-intensive project, like all conservation, only possible in an affluent society.
After our rough night, we spread out in a leisurely, meandering search for chorus frogs, which Anthony would take back as samples for his broader study of the fungal infection. I was lucky to find the first specimen, a pretty green one. Admiring it through the ziploc bag, I wondered what its fate would be as a pawn of science, but my mind was too exhausted to dwell on it.
Vision Quest 2016: Challenging the Patriarchy
Friday, May 27th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Nature, Problems & Solutions, Regions, Road Trips, Science, Society.
The Chicken and the Egg
Driving the highway east across the desert in late afternoon, I looked south across the basin, watching the old cinder cones far in the distance. When I had a view between them into the Pass, I pulled over to try the field glasses. Sure enough, I saw a glint of sunlight on glass and chrome, ten miles away, at the campsite behind one of the low hills. I hadn’t been able to reach John after getting his email a couple of weeks ago, so I’d been taking a risk that their plans might’ve changed and I’d be spending the night alone, after shopping and driving hours to make this rendezvous.
With all the rain damage to the roads, it was an hour later when I pulled into camp behind the volcanic hill above the Pass. The first people I met were hunters who’d volunteered to help find and count bighorn sheep with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or “Fish & Game”. I drove further into the clearing at the center of the circle of pickup trucks, and asked who was in charge. An attractive young woman approached, saying “You must be John’s friend! He hasn’t showed up yet, but we’re expecting him any minute now.”
I parked my truck in an open spot across the circle, got out and took a look around camp. At first, all I could see was attractive young women with long, tanned legs, wearing skin-tight short shorts that looked like underwear. I’d attended many other sheep surveys with Fish & Game, and they’d all involved a bunch of rugged outdoorsmen overdressed in khaki, so this was quite a surprise. John later explained that the girls were biologists working with Fish & Game under a program he’d set up, and that they’d been doing all his sheep work for a while. Paige, the one I’d met at first, was the leader of this trip. The few women I’d met before in this role had been stereotypically plain. Later on my trip, another male scientist would complain that attractive young women are getting all the good jobs in biology now.
I laid out my tarp and unrolled my pad and bedroll. John drove up shortly and parked in the remaining spot next to me. The sun was setting, and Paige called everyone together to plan the next day’s work. As we stood in a circle, about a dozen of us, she passed out photocopied maps with the planned routes into the northernmost canyon system of the range. I could see immediately that they were beyond what I would be able to do, at least at the speed I expected John, and these younger people, to maintain. I didn’t want to slow them down, and I didn’t want to push myself trying to keep up, and end up straining the muscles and joints I’d spent months trying to rebuild since surgery. I said that, and Paige quickly grabbed my map back and handed it to someone else.
As I expected, John spoke up first, choosing the most difficult route for himself.
After the planning session, the group broke up. No hanging out around a campfire or lantern, getting to know each other, as we’d done on past Fish & Game outings. John returned to his truck and laid out his own bedroll, then brought a folding chair over to sit with me. I asked him if he’d memorized his route. He laughed. “I helped plan those routes! I’ll go wherever I damn well please!”
I questioned him about the respiratory epidemic, and how it might be spread. One topic of current research is the movement of sheep between ranges, and that led us into a discussion of climate. John scoffed at concerns over human-caused climate change. “There’s no question that humans are causing climate change in the near term, but my perspective, studying sheep populations, is much longer! In my perspective, global warming is just a blip. We’re still in an interglacial – in a few thousand years, this desert will be forested again. Where will the sheep go then?”
John took this as an opportunity to emphasize the primacy of evolution as the explanatory theory of life in the universe, reiterating the population biologist’s dominant view that genes are at the root of everything, determining everything important. So I had to point out that genes and evolution only apply to the individual organism, and no organism can live in a vacuum, without the context and interactions of its ecosystem, so ecology is really the foundation science. “No, no!” John protested, but I forged ahead. “Evolution is just popular in our technology-crazed society because it’s reductive and instrumental – we can easily crunch genetic data and manipulate the genome – whereas ecosystems are far too complex and chaotic for us. Ecosystems are the context for evolution, not vice versa, but they resist our understanding and hence our exploitation, so we say that evolution is more important than ecology!”
“So it’s a chicken and egg problem, which came first?” said John, starting to get my point. “I still say you can’t have an ecosystem without organisms, and you can’t have organisms without evolution.”
“It makes sense that genes are fundamental to you, as a population biologist,” I said. “But what biology traditionally sidesteps is the importance of non-living things in the ecosystem. Non-living things like rocks and clouds – geologists speak of the living rock – can be said to evolve, but not by means of DNA and genes.”
“Well, it’s not completely true that biology ignores the abiotic – climate and substrate are figured into ecological cycles…”
Fear of the Noble Savage
Night had fallen, the air was cooling, and the mass of the old cinder cone loomed beside us. The stars were out over camp, but we could still see the trucks and the silhouettes of people moving about, and hear the occasional rustle of pots, pans and other domestic affairs.
Thinking back to climate change, I wanted to restore humans to the ecological picture, as participants rather than detached, godlike manipulators. John’s interests are eclectic like mine, and it had been a long time since we’d had a good talk. I wanted to share some of my recent findings with him. I suggested that we Westerners needed more holistic paradigms, and that we might have lessons to learn from other, more traditional societies.
“There you go, romanticizing the noble savage again,” John cut in.
My biologist friends really don’t like to hear anything positive said about traditional or indigenous cultures. At the first hint, they tend to cut me off before I can explain, reacting to a stereotype in their own minds instead of what I’m trying to say, and accusing me of the romantic fallacy of the “noble savage”, a cliche of European literature and philosophy during the 17th-19th centuries.
Recent archaeological studies in widely separated parts of the world have shown that many prehistoric societies were like us, engineering their habitats for their own benefit and causing significant damage to local ecosystems. Reading these reports in the popular literature, scientists who don’t study other cultures conflate all traditional societies with the destructive ones, painting everything they don’t know with same broad brush. Worst of all, biologists blame ancestral Native Americans for “overkill” leading to the Quaternary Extinction Event in North American, a mass die-off of megafauna, even though this hypothesis is disputed by specialists who study it. Finally, coming from academia, they’re predisposed to dismiss traditional people as backward, ignorant, and superstitious.
My heroes in biology have been independent thinkers like Lyn Margulis and Gary Paul Nabhan, but my friends tend to work at the grass-roots level without power or influence, laboring away at their super-specialized studies and taking the dominant paradigms of their fields for granted because they’re not in a position to challenge them. They’re often frustrated in their careers, defensive in the face of anti-science political conservatives and religious fundamentalists, and helpless to stop the destruction of natural habitats & species that they see firsthand in their work.
But unlike my other biologist friends, John has worked with archaeologists and knows something of the history & philosophy of science.
“Our cultural bias leads us to focus on large-scale, technologically advanced societies of the past who were more like us,” I pointed out. “These were the aggressive societies that rolled over their weaker neighbors, like us against Native Americans. And societies that dominated people also tended to try to dominate nature.
“Jared Diamond popularized this idea that only the winners are relevant, that cultures who were conquered are failures that we can dismiss. After all, history is written by the winners.
“But let’s look at this rationally. Even the U.S., the most powerful country on earth, could be wiped out by an asteroid. Might doesn’t make right, and weakness and defeat don’t prove inferiority. In the 1950s, a multidisciplinary group of scientists spent 18 months on a remote atoll in the Pacific, studying every aspect of the terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and using native people as their assistants. And the leaders of the expedition came to admire the native culture so much that they would’ve given up their careers and stayed for the rest of their lives if they hadn’t had families back home.
“These peaceful people had achieved a stable equilibrium in their very limited habitat, cultivating food plants in patches of wetland without trying to engineer or manage the entire atoll, and harvesting seasonal resources from the ocean, sustainably. And they managed to keep their population from growing beyond its capacity.
“They’re part of a larger anthropological project by the University of Alabama called Peaceful Societies, and pacifism is roughly correlated with sustainable ecological practices. By focusing on the dominant winners and ignoring the submissive minorities, we may be missing some valuable lessons.”
John and I went on to have a long, productive, wide-ranging talk, our first in many years, until he realized he still needed a shower and good night’s sleep before the early morning start.
I, on the other hand, lay awake all night, watching the moon trail away over my shoulder to its own bed, watching the constellations rolling after, and the Milky Way rising in the final hours of darkness. My mind wasn’t racing, I wasn’t worried about anything. I just watched, resting my eyes occasionally, never falling asleep until dawn, when our camp came alive again, and I crawled out of bed, exhausted, to start the first day of the survey.
Challenging the Patriarchy
I always look forward to meeting grad students doing field studies at the desert ecological preserve, in hopes of learning about their work and deepening my understanding of the desert. This time, hauling my gear into the residence hall that I helped build 25 years ago, I met Ally and Haneen, beautiful young PhD candidates working together on a study of ecological facilitation in the understory of the creosote bush.
Traditionally patriarchal like all science, biology is undergoing a demographic revolution as female recruits increase. And at a much slower rate, the male-biased dogma of biology are being challenged as women gradually replace influential male peer reviewers.
The aggressive, coercive, domineering nature of Anglo-European society ensured that male biologists would see competition and negative interactions, rather than cooperation and positive interactions, at the foundation of both evolution and ecology, but female biologists are beginning to restore balance and a more accurate view of nature.
A generation ago, Lyn Margulis overcame male resistance to gain wide acceptance of symbiosis – interspecies cooperation – in evolutionary theory. More recently, some biologists have turned their attention to “facilitation” – cooperation and positive interactions in ecology. The distinction between positive and negative, competition and cooperation, is another historical artifact of Anglo-European tradition; the reality is clearly a continuum or spectrum of behavior and interactions that can go in or out of balance around a state of dynamic equilibrium.
The women and I got to know each other over a period of days in the common room of the preserve facility. Ally, from Toronto, was blonde and wholesome-looking; Haneen was raven-haired, tanned, more reserved and enigmatic. We were joined from time to time by Fred, an older botanist and plant illustrator, and Tasha and the kids, who had adopted the “girls” as big sisters. In contrast to my older scientist friends, Ally and Haneen were at the beginning of their careers, receiving a lot of support and encouragement from the establishment, excited about their future rather than discouraged by the setbacks that plague us all as we age and see more of life.
I talked about desert places and phenomena they hadn’t encountered yet. Haneen was interested in my music, and Ally pointed me to some background reading on facilitation. Her current work focused on the use of the creosote understory by other plants and by pollinators. Facilitation spans an infinite variety of natural phenomena that we really only need common sense to observe, from spatial structure (one species creating a nursery, home or workspace for other species) to community diversity (structuring interspecies interactions), from protection from stress and predation, to seed transport by birds and rodents. A male Anglo-European eye is likely to see selfishness behind it all, but that’s only one perspective, a form of anthropomorphism.
Hidden Underfoot
I arrived in the desert the day after heavy rain, and hiked up to the seep on our land, where I began to notice something I’d been only marginally aware of in the past. Here, the gravel slopes were laced with outcrops of white, sometimes translucent metamorphic rock, and my eyes were drawn to vivid black clumps of “stuff” that was neither plant, nor rock, nor soil, knobby mats swelling around cracks in the bright rock, as well as in patches in the pale gravel. I guessed that it must be biological soil crust, a community of lichens, bacteria and other tiny organisms that work together to build these structures on the interface between the living and the nonliving. Why hadn’t I noticed and studied these before, in the 35 years I’d walked among them? Probably it was the rain, the water they’d absorbed that made them more prominent, and their contrast against the bright substrate here.
I’d first encountered soil crusts, or cryptobiotic soil, 25 years ago during my Paiute skills course. The instructors had started by briefing and warning us about the extremely delicate crusts in the powder sand of the Colorado Plateau, an important part of the ecosystem which is instantly crushed when walked on and takes centuries to regenerate. I always work hard to avoid trampling these when I go back there, but I’d totally ignored their counterparts in the Mojave.
Now I was smitten. I got down on my knees and examined our local crusts. Unlike the Colorado Plateau crusts, which form a distinctive, modular architectural pattern, our Mojave crusts are free-form. They may swell around cracks in the rock like a spreading amoeba, or appear as small bumps across the bajada. My favorites are the scalloped rings.
Close up, their structures reveal a chaotic pattern of irregularly-shaped, variously sized knobs separated by gaps. The crusts in the white rock appeared black at first glance, but those out on the bajada showed more of a dark rust color. Whereas the Colorado Plateau crusts are delicate, these feel tough, like old leather.
Humble soil crusts were mostly ignored throughout the male-dominated history of biology and ecology. Macho male biologists tend to focus on charismatic megafauna. But crusts are finally getting more attention, which I suspect is a result of more women in the field. Per usual, there’s controversy over whether crusts are primarily competitors or facilitators in the ecosystem. A botanist friend told me that they’re essential for regeneration of shrubs, which may be set back by centuries when crusts are trampled or burned by wildfire. I remembered this the following week, when I hiked into a remote, heavily grazed valley where invasive bromus had replaced native grasses, encouraging a wildfire which had stripped the center of the valley of its shrub cover and significantly reduced its capacity to capture water in vegetation. I followed the tracks of the cattle and eventually saw them in the distance, half-wild, running away from me up a steep hill.
At the ecological preserve, I asked Tasha and she referred me to a female crust specialist, from whom I hope to learn a lot more about these fascinating communities of organisms working together at the foundation of life on earth.
Vision Quest 2016: Hidden Diversity
Tuesday, May 31st, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Nature, Plants, Regions, Road Trips.
After leaving the desert, I visited family in the Midwest and hiked in a lush temperate forest, an environment which is paradoxically much less diverse. In the desert, the lack of an arboreal canopy allows life-giving sunlight to reach the ground almost everywhere. The patchy nature of vegetative cover has resulted in level upon level of diverse flora, from lichen and soil crusts at ground level, to tiny forbs, larger forbs, sub-shrubs, shrubs, various forms of cactus, agaves and yuccas, riparian trees, and the conifers and hardwoods of upland slopes. More leafy annuals and perennials, as well as mosses and ferns, are found in the shade of boulders and cliffs.
While armchair adventurers dream of exploring outer space, the desert is a true frontier nearer at hand. Here, mysteries abound and alien life remains to be discovered. Scientists have identified only a fraction of plant species in the desert, and are discovering new ones constantly. Much of the desert’s diversity is hidden at ground level, or far from the highway. It takes an effort to find it, but the rewards never fail.
Worlds Apart
The day I arrived on my land, I eagerly hiked up the wash looking for water. The first thing I noticed was that the desert lavender was blooming, and the bees were swarming it. Desert lavender, Hyptis emoryi, is sparse in our canyon system, which is dominated by desert willow, Chilopsis linearis.
The following week, I hiked into the next drainage to the north, only two miles away, but separated by a high ridge. There, I found desert lavender to be dominant, and desert willow completely absent.
During my decades of exploring mountain ranges in distant corners of the desert, with their dramatically different forms, colors, and geologies – from sedimentary to metamorphic, from plutonic to volcanic, and mixtures of the above – I’d noticed subtle differences in the vegetative cover and isolated differences in the dominant plant species. But on this trip, prompted to revisit adjacent canyon systems in my home range, I discovered that even in a single mountain range, different drainage basins can have dramatically different botanical signatures.
The canyon system spanned by our property has a floral mix that I’ve known for so long that I take it for granted and barely notice it on a conscious level. From the alluvial fan at 2,500′ on the edge of the mountains to the watershed on the ridgetops at 5,000′, the dry washes and gullies are dominated, in succession, by desert willow and catclaw acacia, then catclaw with baccaris or seep willow, then coyote willow, and finally juniper, pinyon pine, and shrubby hardwoods. There are three small clumps of mesquite scattered far apart, noticeable but barely hanging on.
The beautiful canyon that I discovered on the second day of the survey was dominated by mesquite – perhaps 30 times as much as I’d found elsewhere – followed by long-established tamarisk, the destructive exotic.
These drainages may be separated by as little as two miles, but the intervening ridges create a barrier from hundreds to thousands of feet high. Still, it surprises me that certain plants haven’t been able to colonize adjacent drainages, using humans, birds or rodents as seed carriers, during thousands of years of relatively stable climate.
My last stop in the desert was one of our biggest ephemeral watercourses, a corridor of green draining a huge alluvial basin, shaded by a canopy of tall, old-growth palo verde, a tree which is sparse and generally of modest size elsewhere in the Mojave. Unlike many less arid habitats, the desert is surprisingly diverse.
My Mountains: Watercourses
Riparian diversity has been reduced in many parts of the Southwest by the invasion of tamarisk, a shrub from the Middle East which was accidentally introduced in the 19th century when its non-invasive cousin was planted in windbreaks. Once tamarisk blooms, it’s impossible to keep its zillions of tiny seeds from blowing across the landscape or washing downstream in flash floods. As a result, it’s in virtually every canyon in the desert, to greater or lesser extents.
Invasive plants generally only colonize soils disturbed by non-native intervention, by cattle or humans and their machinery, but riparian plants can take root in sand disturbed by natural flash floods. Once established, tamarisk emits salts that poison the soil and prevent native plants from thriving. My friends and I have worked hard, but in vain, to eliminate tamarisk from our land, and government agencies as well as volunteer groups have been attacking it for decades. Invasive species, and their damage, are here to stay.
But our native riparian flora hangs on in many places, and it’s always rewarding to come upon it.
My Mountains: Bajada
The bajada, a rolling shrubby upland at the foot of mountain slopes, is the hotbed of floral diversity in the desert. Toward the end of my trip, as the sky cleared after a morning thunderstorm, I ate some magic mushrooms that a friend had left with me years earlier, and spent the afternoon hiking the bajada, marveling at the blooming cactus and shrubs, as the sun went down and the multicolored plants seemed to glow from within as they were backlit from the west.
My Mountains: Upland Slopes
Slopes above 4,000′ host islands of conifers and hardwoods. I headed for this zone on my first big hike, and found both junipers and pinyon pine suffering from a mysterious blight. Fortunately it seemed to be confined to our drainage and didn’t appear elsewhere in the range.
Joshua Tree Woodland
After my arrival at the remote ecological field station, I was invited to join two botanists on an all-day field trip, looking for rare plants in the high desert. Jim, the leading plant expert in this region and one of my heroes, has worked tirelessly to catalog endangered species and fight solar and other developments that threaten desert habitat. He was taking Fred, a botanical illustrator, on a search for rare plants that will be featured in a book they’re working on. Jim brought us up to date on the dominant society’s greed and corruption as we drove from site to beautiful site.
People who follow the media may get the mistaken impression that our society is expanding its protection of desert habitat via a new series of national monuments, but in the fine print, these contain provisions that may actually accelerate mining and other developments.
The upland basins and gentle slopes of the Joshua tree forest that we visited first host a rainbow of blooming shrubs in springtime. They also tend to host more native bunchgrasses than other habitats, sometimes forming broad grasslands with abundant, nutritious forage for wildlife.
Limestone Slopes
From the Joshua tree grassland, we drove up onto an isolated ridge of limestone. These limestone mountains and outcrops are scattered among the dominant volcanic and granitic ranges of the desert, providing a substrate for some unique endemic plants.
Red Rock Canyon
Our final botanizing site featured a contact between granite and sedimentary rock, a literal rock garden for cactus and rare species, and an interesting canyon through gabbro, a coarse-grained plutonic rock with big embedded crystals.
Creosote Flats
The grad students I met at the field station were pioneers in the study of ecological facilitation, the beneficial cooperation of very different plants and animals in their habitats. The desert is a frontier of this new field, showing how little science really knows about the earth, as research continues to uncover more questions than answers.
The graceful, drought-tolerant creosote bush, a “medicine chest” for desert Indians, achieves nearly pure stands in sandy low-elevation basins. These basins appear barren to the inexperienced eye, but may provide critical habitat for desert tortoise, pollinators, and many other species. These habitats, with their austere beauty, are the first to be sacrificed for giant solar energy projects.
Granite Peaks
After leaving the ecological preserve, I camped out at higher elevation in a lush basin surrounded by granite peaks.
Overgrazed Valley
Next, I drove a couple of mountain ranges north and hiked into a remote valley hoping to find a beautiful canyon I’d discovered long ago. Instead, I found half-wild cattle and a trampled and overgrazed landscape. It was a mistake to introduce cattle to this landscape in the first place, and it should be a crime to run them here now.
Badlands Oasis
I joined conservation biologists on a field trip to the Amargosa River to study endangered toads, and we found a wetland and riparian corridor recently recovering from the removal of invasive tamarisk.
Tunnel of Shade
Before leaving the desert, I stopped at a huge dry watercourse with a forest canopy that had always intrigued me, far to the east of my mountains. This 20-mile-long wash channels the occasional powerful flash flood, but is dry at other times, providing a rare tunnel of shade from high on the alluvial fans to the distant Colorado River.
Sonoran Outliers
At the eastern edge of the California desert, iconic Sonoran Desert plants appear, in a narrow band along the western shore of the Colorado River: ocotillo here, and saguaro cactus farther south.
Vision Quest 2016: Bones of the Living Earth
Thursday, June 9th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Mojave Desert, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Rocks.
Two of the three reasons why I first fell in love with the desert had to do with rocks. One: I spent my early childhood in the foothills of the Appalachians, playing around cliffs and caves and outcrops, and I love that in the desert, the bones of the earth are exposed, dominating the landscape, instead of buried under forest and foliage. And two: the boulder piles I first encountered in the desert offered natural shelter.
Mountains Alive: Landscape, Weather & Orientation
Peaceful peoples around the world hold mountains sacred, unlike dominant societies that disfigure them with prominent castles, industrial mines, watch towers and antennas.
Mountains are part of the living skin of the earth, rising, tilting, eroding, shaking, or erupting. They shape climate and weather, channeling wind and forming clouds, storing their water and making it available for humans and wildlife, and providing habitat and shelter for level upon level of diverse ecosystems.
Those who live, work or play in mountains rely on their peaks, pinnacles and canyons as landmarks for orientation and wayfinding. This is even more true in the desert, where the lack of uniform forest cover makes unique landforms visible.
Joints, Contacts & Basins: Storing & Releasing Water
People talking about mountains and water often refer to the rock’s permeability or impermeability, but mountains rarely consist of a single solid mass of rock. Granite is a plutonic rock, formed as a great mass of molten material rises through the earth’s crust, cooling and crystallizing into bulbous shapes that continue to settle and deform as they cool, resulting in a three-dimensional network of internal fractures or joints.
Rainwater or snowmelt trickles into these fracture networks, which become storage reservoirs as they slowly fill with water. When the water encounters a solid, impermeable surface below it, it will look for a way out: a seep or spring.
Channeling Water: Erosion & Sediment
In granitic mountains, the shape taken by the cooling surface of the pluton provides the original framework for the landscape. Once the living rock is exposed to the air, wind, rain and snowmelt follow hollows and joints on the surface, polishing and eroding for eons, sculpting canyons and valleys, carrying sediment down and away from the mountains, spreading nutrients and creating habitat for diverse communities of life.
Alluvial Fans & Basins
Sediment carried down the mountains by streams and floods is deposited outside, building up for eons to form alluvial fans which gradually bury the living mountains up to their shoulders, separating mountain range from mountain range by broad alluvial basins.
In the bottom of each basin, the alluvial fans of opposing ranges may meet in a big arroyo, or they may drain into a playa, a dry lake with no outlet, sometimes accompanied by a salt marsh and/or wind-formed sand dunes. Alternately flooding and drying out, dry lakes collect, concentrate, and expose mineral salts which become another valuable resource for humans and wildlife.
Volcanic Rock
The southwestern Mojave is crossed by a belt of recent cinder cones and the extensive lava fields they produced. Volcanoes are both destroyers, in the short term, and creators, in the long term: creators of mountain habitat, and conduits elevating mineral nutrients to the surface from deep inside the earth.
Plutonic Rock
We desert dwellers know that the best drinking water comes from granite.
Metamorphic Rock
Sedimentary Rock
Interface With Life
Biological soil crusts, which have been around much longer than humans, were one of my major discoveries on this trip.
Shelter
Tools & Signage
Mining
Mining by dominant societies has been terribly destructive to both human communities and natural ecosystems, but ironically, my friends and I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the desert for all these years if these mountains hadn’t been full of valuable minerals, and if we hadn’t had access to the roads built and long abandoned by miners and prospectors. I actually bought my land from an old prospector who just loved being out there and used prospecting as an excuse for camping in the mountains.
As likely applies to the other sciences, many if not most geologists work for private industry, prospecting for minerals to be exploited. Compartmentalization in science, as in the larger society, undercuts accountability, since a specialist has little or no knowledge of the larger system his work will impact.
Landscape Engineering
The engineering of natural habitats for sole human use appears to be the critical error leading to the downfall of dominant societies across time and space, from ancient city-states in the jungles of Southeast Asia, to the modern United States. You can see examples of this all over the desert.
Wednesday, May 30th, 2018: 2018 Trips, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands, Wildfire.
Space vs. Earth
Some advocates of space exploration and colonization are also concerned about the damage caused by humans here on earth. Some of them believe we can give the earth a break by moving our civilization elsewhere. Others believe it’s too late to fix the earth’s problems, but now that we know better, we can move to another planet that’s in better shape, and start over, avoiding the mistakes of our ancestors.
Still other space nuts don’t care – they just want to hang out with all the cool aliens they’ve seen in Star Wars movies. Terrestrial life is passé – they’ve been there/done that on TV nature shows.
People who lack passion for either space or the earth may say “Why can’t we have both?” The answer is easy for the few of us who know where our resources come from. It takes big, energy-guzzling machines made on earth to study or explore space, and machines are non-renewable – every machine humans make comes out of a hole in the ground that used to be wildlife habitat. Space isn’t harmed by studying the earth, but the earth suffers when you study space.
Meanwhile, while living their lives as consumers, in cities far away from the ecological impacts of their consumer lifestyles, each generation of humans unknowingly destroys more of the earth. So-called “renewable energy” is a lie – solar and wind power equipment comes from nonrenewable mines, destroying nonrenewable habitat, and is manufactured and transported using fossil fuels. Wind farms and solar plants destroy habitat and harm and displace wildlife. Even if climate change were somehow stopped, or even reversed, the endless demand for consumer resources results in relentless industrial sprawl and conversion of wildlife habitat to toxic wasteland.
The next generation has no idea of what the earth was like for previous generations. If they experience rural environments at all, they view these now-degraded places as “nature,” just as city dwellers view their pocket parks full of imported vegetation as “nature.” In their ignorance of ecology, it looks fine to them – it has pretty flowers, and places to let their pets run off-leash – why should they worry about the loss of a few square miles halfway across the globe?
Sky Island on Fire
Returning home from a distant city, I decided on a whim to take a back road. The back road took me past a mountain range I’d flown over many times and had always been curious about. I knew there was a road to the top of it, where an astronomical observatory was maintained. In my homeward momentum, I drove past the turnoff, but a few miles farther, without making a conscious decision, I pulled over and checked my map. How far would it be? There were no services up there at all, but I had plenty of gas, a water bottle that was almost full, and a partial bag of trail mix.
This is the penultimate Southwestern “sky island” – an isolated mountain range that rises 7,000′ above the surrounding desert, allowing you to travel from the arid scrublands of Sonora to the alpine forests of the Canadian Rockies in just a dozen miles. It shelters species that have been isolated from their kin in other mountains since the last Ice Age, so that for those of us who love the earth, it’s a true frontier, a place with hidden wonders waiting to be discovered. But unlike most of these ranges, it has a paved road that goes nearly to the top.
A road that passes a Federal prison, at the northern foot of the mountains. A road that turned out to be perhaps the most dangerous paved road I’ve ever traveled. Narrow, and with more hairpins than any other I’ve seen. And you know those white lines they paint along the edge of the pavement? On this road, in many, many places, if you happen to cross that white line on the edge, your vehicle either disappears into a seemingly bottomless hole, or it falls hundreds of vertical feet down the side of the mountain. No shoulder and no guard rail, and in some places even that white line is crumbling.
The road’s so dangerous because this is one of the steepest mountain ranges I’ve ever been in. Even at the top, there are no large meadows or internal valleys. The paved road ends at 9,000′ elevation and turns to steep, twisting, washboarded dirt, and I followed it to its end. The entire mountain consists of precipitous slopes, with just a handful of small patches of grass on less steep slopes that are generously termed “flats.”
When I crested the first ridge it was all I could do to keep my truck on the road, because the views from this mountain range are mind-boggling in all directions. I could see the outline of the state prison way down there at the southern foot of the mountains, mirroring the federal prison on the north. But I was also surprised to enter a fresh burn area. At first I figured it to be a couple years old, but then I came to stands of slender fir, their blackened, drooping branches still holding charred needles. Later I passed slopes that were mostly clear except for big trunks white as bone, killed by a much older fire. The whole top of the mountain had burned in patches, at different times, and now, in springtime, the slopes were blanketed by virulently green ferns.
It was the day after Memorial Day. That’s one reason why I’d come up here – I figured all the vacationers would be gone by now. I had the mountain mostly to myself. I got to the small reservoir near the end of the dirt road, and the only people in the large campground there were a young couple taking a romantic stroll. Even the Forest Service information center was closed, but I did meet three kids playing blissfully in the forest outside the compound of staff housing. A tiny minority of children in our “advanced” society still get to experience a degraded form of what all our ancestors once enjoyed.
On the slopes above the road loomed rock outcrops and pinnacles, and throughout the shadowy forest rose the primeval shapes of lichen-encrusted boulders. Ribbons of water tumbled down from the peaks. Birds were everywhere, wildflowers were rampant. This magical range, isolated in the desert, is known to host the densest population of black bears in North America.
On the slopes that had been fully incinerated by the recent fire, it was easy to see why it happened: all the trees were spindly and had grown close together, a sign of generations of fire suppression by “experts” who were as ignorant of ecology as our city-dwelling consumers. This whole beautiful, damaged mountain range with deep-space telescopes on top, and mirrored prisons and a burning riverbed at its feet, was like a textbook case study of the cascading failures of Anglo-European society and its institutions.
Science vs. Nature
I only spent a few hours up there, so I’m by no means an expert. But I’ll try to summarize the story as it’s recorded by Forest Service ecologists and local historians.
For generations, white Americans stocked unsustainable herds of cattle on these slopes, overgrazing the forage and destabilizing the soil. They logged the old-growth timber while suppressing fires, encouraging dense stands of smaller-diameter trees. To get to the forage and timber, the road was built, and scientists – astrophysicists like media darling Neil deGrasse Tyson – began to covet that peak high in the desert sky as a site for the “world’s most advanced telescope,” to look deep into time and space to the beginnings of the universe itself. While Native Americans hold peaks sacred, white people see them as jumping-off points for their ambition to “conquer the cosmos.”
But environmentalists – that dying breed of obsolete earth-lovers – pointed out that the peak sheltered an endangered subspecies of squirrel, and a battle between scientists began. It became evident that astrophysicists are not conservationists. Different kinds of scientists have different values.
To most science buffs, this is inconceivable. At a time when science is under siege by right-wing fundamentalists and climate-change-deniers, scientists should close ranks! Science is science, and all science is good (except maybe those guys who work for Monsanto, and the oil companies, and pharma, plastics, the arms industry, those scientists who get paid lots of money to do nasty stuff that we don’t want to think of when we’re Marching for Science). Earth and space can live together in harmony – right?
Unsurprisingly, the astrophysicists – who by the nature of their empire-expanding work always have money and power on their side – won. A compromise was reached, because one thing you can never stop is “development” – i.e. replacing natural habitat with roads and buildings – and the astronomical observatory rose on the peak, with a few provisions to protect the squirrels.
It was then that the first fire hit, in 2004. Firefighters, being humans themselves, were naturally keen to protect the observatory, but not so much the habitat of the squirrels.
And last year, the second fire hit, spreading all over the mountaintop, decimating the squirrels. They are now expected to die out completely.
Consuming the Final Frontier
Squirrels are cute, and they’re also famous for burying nuts in the ground, to eat later. A little critical thinking might suggest that some of those nuts might germinate and grow into trees that would produce even more nuts. Like, the trees and the squirrels are working together in some kind of partnership. One will not survive without the other. That’s ecology – holistic thinking. Not so common in astrophysics, which like most science is reductive and mechanistic, treating nature as a machine which can be understood and controlled by breaking it down into its component parts.
The conifer forests at the top of these mountains, and the squirrels that are going extinct there, evolved together, along with thousands of other species – more than our science can ever identify and understand. But billionaires and popular media say we have to go to outer space to discover something new.
Meanwhile the sky islands – a unique frontier, one of a kind, that few people have ever experienced – are dying. The Forest Service, which as part of the federal government is one of our most conservative institutions, says that these high-elevation enclaves in the desert will be completely gone by the end of this century, due to climate change. Entire, incredibly rich and vibrant communities of sophisticated beings with their own priceless knowledge and wisdom, wiped off the face of the earth by our greed and ignorance.
Since conservative predictions are routinely being exceeded by reality, it’s likely that the magical sky islands will be gone in only a few decades. The scorched forests you see in my photos will not regenerate, nor will their squirrels return. It’s probably best not to take your kids out into nature. It will only depress them in the long run, and make them angry at the society that consumed their final frontier.
