The Joshua trees of Boron

by Ruth Nolan

Mojave Literary Laureate

June 25, 2024

They say every picture tells a thousand stories. 

And this is a story that went viral a few weeks ago when Basin and Range Watch, a desert environmental advocacy group, tweeted out an image of a map that showed a dot mapping out every one of the over 4,276 Joshua trees near the proud, working class Mojave Desert town of Boron – population 2,500 - that are slated to be bulldozed and mulched to make way for the Aratina Solar Project, which will generate electricity to be transmitted to power companies hundreds of miles away in Northern California. 

It’s a picture that racked up 4 million views from that one tweet, and the story has consequently been picked up by media outlets far and wide and in turn, raised a widespread cry of outrage that has resonated, in turn, across social media.

For who can deny that the Joshua tree is arguably the most recognizable and beloved icon of our region’s incomparable Mojave Desert? But they are also on a fast track to disappearing. A steady and substantial increase in Joshua tree habitat loss due to the impacts of increasing urbanization, large-scale renewable energy projects and transmission lines, the impacts of massive wildfires, mining and climate change are making a big dent in their numbers.

Joshua trees have created a map in global consciousness of the magic and uniqueness of this desert in a way that evokes an emotionally charged poem, a glass of fine wine, a quirky ignition of the imagination that invites and delights one to step into the magic carpet ride – fierce yet friendly - of one of the most stunning, complex, dangerous and alluring landscapes in the world.  It’s as if each Joshua tree twists itself into a one-of-a-kind dazzle, each its own masterful contortionist, spinning a trick of the eye that delights, haunts, fascinates and inspires. 

Back in the 1980s, when the Irish rock group U2 released its legendary album, “The Joshua Tree,” featuring, of course, a picture of the band members in front of a lone Joshua tree in the Mojave Desert, my friends and I huddled around the  in my small adobe cabin in the then-rural town of Apple Valley, amazed to see a symbol of our isolated desert. And in those pre-Internet days, we really felt isolated and far even from San Bernardino, just 40 miles on the other side of Cajon Pass, let alone the rest of the world. Could it be? The Mojave Desert mattered (really?) to famed and admired outsiders and music fans around the world – we were being seen.

Jump forward to the 2024, and the large uptick of public support for more protections of Joshua trees and their habitat across the great Mojave has picked up momentum never seen before. In the absence of state and federal protections, the passage of the Western Joshua tree Conservation Act in 2023 was a big victory for these trees and was generated almost entirely via grass roots activism. The fact that so many people have spoken against the destruction of the Joshua trees of Boron – something almost unimaginable to me, who having grown up in the Victor Valley and witnessed a widespread loss of Joshua tree habit over recent decades with little pushback – is a very hopeful sign. 

The Joshua trees of Boron have for centuries graced this arm of the Mojave Desert along where Highways 58 & 395 converge at Kramer Junction. Children play in the Joshua tree forest, and the trees serve as a shelter in a place that experiences extreme heat and relentless windy days during which the trees emanate their own songs to the land as their branches dance about. They are a signifier of home for the people of Boron, part and parcel of the thumbprint of this place. 

And they are a small but significant pieces of the puzzle of a much larger whole, part of the vast series of interlocked ecologies and topographic zones that together form the whole of the Mojave Desert, which is still one of the last contiguous ecologies left on the planet. Some are estimated by biologists to be up to 500 years old, and many are up to 25 feet high. It’s not hard to imagine the time when ancient sloths roamed this desert, propagating these Joshua trees through seeds in their droppings.

And this is the story of how the Joshua trees of Boron, have shared a complex ecology with the many other flora and fauna found in this small region that will soon no longer find sustenance here: the yucca moth, living in symbiotic relationship with the trees in a ritual of reproductive necessity. Then there’s the burrowing owls; the Federally Endangered California Desert Tortoise; the California Endangered Mojave ground squirrel; coyotes; rattlesnakes, and kangaroo rats. The blading of this site will also destroy 132,679 Mojave Spineflower plants; 196 silver cholla cacti, 69 Barstow woolly sunflowers, unknown numbers of creosote plants, and more.

Destroying the Joshua trees of Boron adds up to being something akin to ripping out the heart of a very special desert place and replacing it with something lacking a soul. This stunning forest is something of a rare miracle - because these trees exist in a relatively small cluster in a part of the Mojave Desert that isn't particularly hospitable to Joshua trees, at 2,4000 feet elevation.

And it hurts all the more with the knowledge that perhaps rooftop solar as an alternative to destroying desert habitats for renewable energy might be a more sustainable way to go than the obliteration of old growth Joshua tree habitats. And what's about to happen here is the tiny tip of a much larger iceberg of the clear blading of pristine Mojave Desert woodlands and other fragile ecologic zones for renewable energy project development taking place in large swaths of Mojave Desert, Nevada and Arizona wilderness.

Clearly, this is a story that doesn’t end well, as things are looking. The beloved Joshua tree forest where the children of Boron - lacking the entertainments of suburbia - have played for generations, will soon be gone. Perhaps someone will erect a copper statue in the memory of the mighty Joshua trees that flourished in this place to help us remember their magnificence after the limbs of these desert sentinels are bulldozed aside and piled up in corpse-like heaps before being ground into sawdust. 

Let’s honor and maybe weep for these Joshua trees, our living relatives, our shared flesh and desert blood, before they are replaced with blinding solar panels that the children of Boron will soon be instructed not to look at, lest they damage their eyes. Let's rally together in outrage. And let's continue to use our voices to be clear and loud: Aratina - and the companies purchasing the electricity to be powered here at the incalculable and un-necessary sacrifice of these Joshua trees - are a disgrace.

It’s a good thing – a great thing – that so many people from the desert and across the social media globe have made their voices clear: we care deeply about the Joshua trees of Boron. We deeply love them. And we are feeling the anguish of this negligent, ecocidal massacre in our own beating hearts.

Please sign the petition here  at Change.Org to voice your opposition to the bulldozing of these desert gems. #mojavedesert #joshuatree

Witnessing the Demise of the Mojave Desert to Renewable Energy Industry and Devastating Wildfire, Courtesy of the BLM

by Ruth Nolan, Mojave Desert Poet Laureate

In the late 1980s, I had the privilege of working for the Bureau of Land Management, California Desert District on a wildland fire engine crew and also on the Helicopter 554 hotshot crew, both out of the Apple Valley, CA fire station. 

We routinely worked on fire suppression across the huge Mojave Desert where it spreads its majestic, Joshua tree-carpeted swatch across California, Arizona and Nevada. Many fires were sparked by monsoon lightning strikes, and some were started by the carelessness of people. Most were suppressed by us and other BLM crews, such as the one from Hole-In-the-Wall, in remote and scenic wildlands that few are lucky enough to ever venture into due to their extreme remoteness. 

Working on a helicopter gave me a close-up view into the integrity of the Mojave Desert's contiguous, mostly-unbroken land flows as it is spelled out in sacred geologic-ecologic eco-tones as one of the world's few remaining such places. And in the late 1980s, as a young adult, I had no idea of the preciousness of this mind-boggling, soul-nourishing place and how quickly and swiftly, just a few decades down the remotest of dirt roads, its demise would be sealed into place.

In the year 2023, I bear witness with heartbreak and dismay as the BLM has established and continues its role as a land broker for the destruction and desecration of many of these wildlands for the construction of large-scale renewable energy projects. 

I bear witness as at least one massive wildfire, in the heart of the Mojave Desert at Cima Dome, not far from one of the first massive solar project at Ivanpah in southernmost Nevada, burned 43,500 acres in 2020, devastating what was once the world's largest Joshua tree forest. It took several days for H554 to arrive at Cima Dome, I learned from friends in the fire-suppression community, and without that and other support for critical initial attack intervention - the pandemic of 2020 and lack of fire crews across California was an unfortunate factor -, the region was doomed.

Wee Thump Wilderness is one area that has, so far, been spared. Ancient Joshua trees up to 600 years old, long honored by the Southern Paiute and other tribes as important and sacred ancestral part of the Mojave Desert, sit on a ridge with access views to both the horrors at Ivanpah - Bright Source Renewable Energy displaced several thousand endangered California desert tortoises and destroyed thousands of acres of ancient yucca plant communities - and the far reaches of Cima Dome. Imagine being one of these ancient ones, situated in place and time between the Colorado River - now dammed, of course - and the old trails to Las Vegas and the Mojave River and the ocean at California and all places between. 

Imagine being an ancient Joshua tree, bearing witness to the destruction of its cousins across the desert sea at Cima Dome and at Ivanpah, the precious Joshua trees and yucca, forever disfigured or completely gone. Bearing witness and posed precariously, profoundly, and beautifully with views all the way to Avi Kwa Ame / Spirit Mountain, sacred pinnacle of the Mojave and other indigenous desert people to the east. The ancient ones at Wee Thump, viewing all of this, holding that which sustains us all in a soulful sense, and that which sustains corporate greed. 

Having loved the desert to death in the unfortunate ways of recent land use planning - still loving the desert to life, this, clinging with shallow roots and a rugged, sun-shouldered tenacity through drought and unimaginable heat for centuries, to witness this. May we listen to these ancient ones and follow their ways, that which they point to, humming centuries of land-story songs and tossing and flowing in the omniscient desert wind, rather than the ugly prisons of death being mapped out by the BLM.