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 for every one of the over 4,276 Joshua trees near the small 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.
It is a picture that racked up 4 million views, and the story has consequently been picked up by media outlets far and wide. It’s raised a widespread cry of outrage that has resonated across social media.
Who can deny that the Joshua tree is arguably the most recognizable and beloved icon of our region’s incomparable Mojave Desert? However, by some estimates, the Joshua trees may be gone by the end of this century. Urbanization, large-scale renewable energy projects, the impacts of massive wildfires, mining and climate change are making a big dent in their numbers.
The Joshua trees of Boron have for centuries graced this arm of the Mojave Desert. The town’s children play in the Joshua tree forest, and the trees serve as shelter in a place that experiences extreme heat and relentless windy days. They are a signifier of home for the proud people of Boron, part and parcel of the thumbprint of this place.
John Steinbeck made notice of them on his drive past Boron from Bakersfield to Barstow in 1960, writing about them in “Travels in Charley,” in the dark of a hot summer night, the fictional Joad family in “The Grapes of Wrath” drove the same route in reverse and were no doubt mesmerized by the shadows of these unique plants.
The uptick of public support for more protections of Joshua trees and their habitat across the great Mojave has picked up momentum like never before. In the absence of state and federal protections, the passage of the landmark Western Joshua tree Conservation Act in 2023 was generated almost entirely via grassroots activism. The fact that so many people have spoken against the destruction of the Joshua trees of Boron – something almost unimaginable to me, having grown up in the Victor Valley and witnessed a widespread loss of Joshua tree habitat over recent decades with little pushback – is a very hopeful sign.
Can we imagine a Mojave Desert without Joshua trees? It’s unlikely. As writer Deanne Stillman has so playfully evoked in her essay, “Rocks in the Shape of Billy Martin,” seeing her first Joshua trees in Yucca Valley on a drive from Los Angeles, “Now this is the true Mojave! Hi, big guy!” and “To me, the Joshua tree is most appealing, a misfit that is the picture of beauty and terror, a forgiving although freaky mirror that doesn’t care what your name is, or what you do for a living…”
A forthcoming collection of writing, photography and art being published in September by Inlandia Institute, “Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees,” is generating a lot of buzz. According to coeditors Sant Khalsa and Juniper Harrower, this book is “a comprehensive collection of historical and personal stories and imagery that illuminates our deeply entangled relationships with the Joshua tree.”
They are a small but significant piece of a much larger puzzle, 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 on the planet. It’s not hard to imagine the time when ancient sloths roamed this desert, propagating these Joshua trees through seeds in their droppings.
The Joshua trees of Boron, some up to 500 years old, share a complex ecology with the many other flora and fauna found in this small region that will soon no longer find sustenance here, such as the burrowing owls the desert tortoise, the 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 and creosote.
Clearly, this is a story that doesn’t end as well as many would like it to. But this is also a story of celebration, for the enduring legacy of the Joshua trees at Boron, an elegy and celebration of life for what is soon to be.
Let’s cherish these stories, and honor them, and honor these Joshua trees 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. It’s these stories in print and spirit that will remain.
Ruth Nolan teaches English and creative writing at College of the Desert and is editor of “No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California’s Deserts” (Heyday Inlandia.) She is the current Mojave Desert Poet Laureate.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct an error. Juniper Harrower is coeditor of the forthcoming “Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees.”
