'Like witnessing a birth in a morgue': the volunteers working to save the Joshua trees
The trees are not exactly imposing. Slim and spiny, with limbs that grip small poms of sharp leaves, they look like something a child might dream up. Or maybe Salvador Dalí. Even the name, Joshua tree, sounds kind of awkward.
On a wet and chilly December morning, I stood at a makeshift encampment in the Mojave national preserve in San Bernardino county, California, listening as a group of strangers fretted over the trees precarious future. Within the preserve is Cima Dome, a broad-sloping mound that, until recently, contained the densest Joshua tree forest in the world.
That changed in August 2020, when a lightning storm ignited the Dome fire, which ripped through over 43,000 acres of Cima Dome and burned about 1.3m Joshua trees. Given that Joshua trees which technically are not trees but a species of desert succulent are native only to the south-western US, the Dome fire represented an outright disaster to their survival.
Looking out that morning, I saw seemingly endless fields of the trees scorched and tortured carcasses. This was a terrible harbinger of things to come: a 2019 Ecosphere journal study determined that, if carbon emissions stay at current levels, just 0.02% of the species would survive.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/20/joshua-trees-climate-crisis-wildfires