Monday, May 23rd, 2016
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: Hiding Our Failures
Sunday, May 29th, 2016: 2016 Trips, Problems & Solutions, Road Trips, Society.
The War on Everything
On our way through the northern Mojave to help protect endangered toads from the worldwide epidemic of chytrid fungus, the conservation biologists and I finally overtook the legions of heavy machinery hungrily consuming natural habitat and extending the suburban sprawl of Las Vegas. Next, we passed Creech Air Force Base, where young suburbanites use flying robots to kill unknown villagers thousands of miles away, in the Middle East, without any risk to themselves, simply by pushing a button.
This is one way the dominant society exploits the desert to hide its violent, domineering nature, and this is how individual people try to do good while surrounded by destruction and denial. The natural landscape of the Mojave is divided up and fenced off by huge military bases from north to south and east to west, from the bombing range of the China Lake Naval Weapons Center to the Nevada Test Site, where scientists and engineers tested the apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction that Americans alone invented and used, unnecessarily as it turns out, against foreign civilians. From the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base, where trained killers practice urban warfare outdoors in simulated Mideastern villages, to the shadowy indoor evil of Creech, where technological innovation enables Americans to terrorize and kill from a distance, without risk or accountability.
Much more is hidden from us overseas, far beyond the borders of our country. The United States and its allies have not given up their 19th century global empires – contrary to rhetoric, maps, and popular belief, Anglo-European empires continue to expand, imposing their military bases, legions of trained killers, and high-tech weapons of mass destruction on the populations of almost every country in the world.
Peaceful societies like the Amish thrive by promoting cooperation, discouraging aggression and avoiding conflict. They refuse to use violence to defend themselves, and their long European martyrdom strengthened their communities, whereas the military and police culture of dominant societies breeds conflict and endless cycles of violence. Their history has taught the self-sufficient Amish to carefully observe trends in the surrounding dominant society, so they can locate new homes and migrate when necessary to avoid conflict and violence, unlike the victims of civil war in failed states like Syria, who are betrayed by their dependence on central governments and the institutions of civilization, ending up helpless in crowded refugee camps. Unlike urban refugees who look for jobs in cities, the Amish can always find a new home by settling the endless supply of farmland abused and abandoned by high-tech societies, which the Amish restore to productivity with their proven low-tech methods.
Virtually every day or night my friends and I spend hiking and camping in our remote desert wilderness, we have to deal with the U.S. military, in the form of bizarre aerial refueling maneuvers. These are pilot training exercises; both the tanker and the smaller plane are propellor-driven and loud, flying between 4,000′ and 6,000′ altitude. I’ve occasionally been hazed and nearly knocked over by showoff fighter pilots appearing out of nowhere in their multimillon-dollar jets, flying just above the ground at near-supersonic speed, but these refueling flights are relentless. The two planes fly in broad lazy circles, courting each other from afar and gradually converging, the big plane extending its penile hose and the little plane accepting it, as they continue locked in intercourse, finally detaching and withdrawing, their engines growling over our heads. It’s a real-life version of science-fiction’s machine sex. Now that our land is inside a new National Monument, I’m hoping I can get the BLM to pressure the military to use their own huge reservations instead of our smaller scraps of public wilderness.
Addicted to Punishment
On my way to the desert, driving across the beautiful high plains of northeastern Arizona, I pass the Apache Prison, isolated, like most modern prisons, far from any town. But in the Nevada part of the Mojave, a concentration of prisons clusters in view of commuter traffic along the highways near Las Vegas, joining the military bases and casinos in a sort of gauntlet of shame.
Many societies throughout history have successfully practiced restorative justice, but these societies have all been conquered and dominated by violent, coercive societies employing punitive justice. Despite centuries of failure to prevent crime, Anglo-European societies like the United States perpetuate this counterproductive paradigm, achieving ever-expanding mass incarceration, out of sight and mostly out of mind. The punitive paradigm is applied selectively, to isolate and contain poverty and mental illness without preventing or treating them, and to control problematic racial and political elements in society. But punishment fails by cultivating and perpetuating a culture of destructive antisocial behavior. By hiding prisons in the desert and other places which are invisible to the population, the dominant society tries to sustain its illusion of order, peace, health and harmony.
I learned on my trip that ironically, crime in Las Vegas is rising, because prisoners from other states have learned to converge upon the desert city after their release, finding easy pickings in the vast sprawl of walled bedroom communities which are often vacant and unsupervised in the daytime.
Innovating to Death
After camping with the Park Service archaeologist on the Mojave National Preserve, I headed north on Interstate 15, through Mountain Pass, between Clark Mountain and the Mescal Range. At almost 8,000′ peak elevation, Clark Mountain hosts extensive conifer forests, with much cooler temperatures than most of the California desert. It’s a beautiful mountain with spectacular canyons of limestone, but the Mountain Pass Mine, the only source of rare earth elements in the U.S., has been eating away at it for decades.
Both smart phones and wind turbines rely on rare earths, and their production generates toxic and radioactive waste. Every new technology comes out of a hole in the ground and poisons rural habitats and communities somewhere. This is the dark side and the hidden failure of technological innovation, realities which are hidden away from “consumers”, in the desert and other distant rural locations.
Peaceful societies like the Ifaluk focus on sustainable subsistence rather than technological innovation, minimizing their consumption of natural resources, living within their means rather than continually seeking to grow and expand.
Greenwashing
Grassroots solar energy activists promote “rooftop solar”, but an industrial society is not a grassroots society. Governments pursue large-scale, industrial solutions: interstate highway systems, transcontinental railroads, giant dams and reservoirs, power plants, transmission lines and regional power grids. Field biologists warn that our studies of natural ecosystems raise more questions than answers; we engineer what we don’t understand.
North of Clark Mountain, I crossed the broad, sloping Ivanpah Valley. Ivanpah comes from a Paiute word for “clear water”, and as in most desert basins, the valley’s creosote scrub provided a home for a large population of desert tortoises, jackrabbits, cottontails, and other rodents, many species of birds, and countless of species of wildflowers and their insect pollinators. This home and its diverse life were destroyed during the past decade by BrightSource Energy, with the approval of the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, which had originally opposed BrightSource’s Ivanpah Solar Plant, but accepted bribes to withdraw their opposition.
After destroying many square miles of wildlife and habitat, the huge, expensive “green energy” plant remains a failure, unable to generate more than a fraction of its planned output, but the State of Nevada, in its aggressive promotion of industrial energy development, has enabled many other facilities to destroy many more square miles of desert life and habitat, both in the Ivanpah Valley and along U.S. Highway 95 southeast of Las Vegas. I drove past them all on my trip.
A new proposal would install the world’s tallest wind turbines in a wild mountain range south of Las Vegas, on the very boundary of a national monument.
The dominant society hides its “green” energy developments in the desert, so that few can see the ecological destruction caused by these purportedly earth-friendly industries. As with conventional industrial developments, these highly political solar and wind power projects are rife with corruption and waste, and they accelerate the long-term destruction of critical wildlife habitat and hasten the extinction of endangered species.
White Trash
Approaching the Amargosa River, where we would locate and sample endangered toads, the conservation biologists and I caught a glimpse of Yucca Mountain, the Mojave Desert range that our government blasted and undermined with tunnels for its long-planned high-level nuclear waste disposal site. Under increasing scrutiny from environmental groups, scientists eventually admitted that they didn’t adequately understand the site or the proposed storage technologies, and Yucca Mountain was abandoned, perpetuating the history of ruined desert construction sites and settlements of the past.
Everywhere I go in the desert, even in remote areas designated as wilderness, I find the abandoned trash of Americans and the ruins of their ambitious engineering projects, many of them considered quite innovative for their time, preserved for posterity in the remotest corners of the desert. From the mining ruins now used as targets by antisocial gun nuts, to the acres of broken household appliances and plastic toys surrounding trailer trash homes. And the millions of neon-colored plastic balloons bought by thoughtless suburbanites at markets and fairs, abandoned by their children, and blown hundreds of miles out into desert wilderness, where they remain impaled on cactus thorns to represent us long after the dominant society collapses.
Colonize Now, Pay Later
Twenty-five years ago, when we acquired our desert land, one of the first problems we faced was the invasive middle-eastern shrub, tamarisk, which was introduced to the American West accidentally, in the 19th century, as a by-product of human colonization. Tamarisk emits salt, preventing the growth of native riparian plants, and it produces vast numbers of tiny seeds which are spread by wind and water until it forms solid thickets, where it consumes more water than native plants, drying up streams and springs and lowering the water table, killing still more native plants.
Most of what we think of as “nature” is being continually tranformed, degraded, and sometimes destroyed by alien species that we dominant societies introduce to native ecosystems as collateral damage of our exploration, trade, tourism, colonization, and expansion into new places. Although the examples featured here have historical origins, new invasives are being introduced constantly, and at a higher rate than in the past, as technological progress increases the mobility of our species. Our mobility is the enemy of nature.
While futurists fantasize about colonizing other planets and encountering alien life in outer space, alien invaders introduced by actual Anglo-European exploration and colonization continue to threaten native ecosystems across the planet.
Hiding Our Failures
If the least-developed and most-ignored region of the most powerful nation on earth is strewn with our failures, imagine the status of other places our culture has colonized but we’re now warned away from: Africa and the Middle East, for example.
Illusions of peace and progress are maintained in dominant societies by compartmentalizing or outsourcing problems. Our institutions, from government to industry and the military, hide behind cosmetic facades that obscure their primary functions. The media distract us with distant threats and celebrity scandals. Glued to our screens, seeking stimulation or comfort, and avoiding supposedly empty and hostile places like the desert, most of us avoid the inconvenient truths of our society. The desert is where our society hides much of the evidence of its ongoing failures, the blind spots that are edited out of our worldview to validate fantasies of success, progress, and the future.
Those who study deserts know them as places of rare beauty, priceless reservoirs and frontiers of biological and cultural diversity, teeming with undiscovered species and gaps in our knowledge and wisdom. But since the vast majority of voters and “consumers” have never experienced a desert, and assume deserts to be empty of life, politicians are able to designate desert habitats as “sacrifice zones” which are allowed to be consumed and exploited for industry, waste disposal, or industrial “infrastructure”. These deserts, some of our best teachers about how to adapt and live a sustainable life, are being destroyed to keep us ignorant.
We can safeguard our families and their future, not by following the masses in their pursuit of the chimera of progress, but by disengaging from the dominant society and its destructive institutions, to study and learn from the peaceful societies and focus on building sustainable local communities. This was demonstrated in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, during the misnamed “Dark Ages”, when instead of suffering from disorder and chaos, local communites thrived in the absence of oppression and exploitation.
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.
