The Fight to Protect the Joshua Tree

Is not the species, is the old valuable individuals that are alive monuments. For example, ashes are frequent species, but 500 Yo ashes are very rare (The species can live this time but 99,99% are killed when they are less than 100 Yo). If you have a 500 Yo ash you may want to protect it. At this moment many temperate forests are like seeing a city when all inhabitants where 10 years old or less. This is not really OK. There is a problem here. People in cities are very afraid of trees and chomp it at the tiniest ludicrous excuses.

In any case Yuccas, like the Joshua Tree, are very easy to transplant and even easier to clone, so is just a question of throwing more engineering efforts at this problem because the trees can be moved and stand drough periods. Their biology allows to put a Joshua tree in an hangar and let it without any soil or water for a month. They just don't care. The main problem is to avoid breaking the branches. Easily fixable if you wrap the tree before

In the desert each tree counts also, as water container, so the more they have of a frequent species, the better for humans inhabiting the area.

To be honest, I'm not sure which side of this conflict I come on. Sure, 40% of the trees live on private land, but only a fraction of that would need to actually be razed for new housing, and with the changing landscape, that housing should be much more denser than previous sfh. I'm not sure how much new development is responsible for the reducing population.

On the other hand, while the trees exist, the ending quote is telling that no new trees seem to be growing because of the changing climate. Just mere numbers currently existing seems too simplistic to apply as a metric to determine whether something is endangered when that species is not really reproducing well. By the point it becomes endangered, it will be too late.

The existing bill sounds like a good compromise. May be another (or instead of legislation, an administrative plan) could be to slot a certain number of allowances, say for 1-5% of the existing tree population, and grant permits for removal up to that number, and require the new housing to be above a certain density requirement to get the permits. That way everyone gets a little of what they want, yimby's get their houses, the trees are somewhat protected and it's not open season on them, and the only ones who lose out are lazy individual homeowners who want to kill their tree so they can put up another boring grass lawn.

I have lived in California. If there is serious concern for saving the Joshua Tree, then California needs to make another sanctuary for it in a place where people do not want to live: north of Barstow. Yucca Valley is a nice place to live and should have more people (much nicer than in the deserted wastelands north of Victorville.)

“It simplifies the process for builders to get a permit to remove trees and requires a fee that would go toward a conservation fund. ”

One problem has been that the penalty fee for ignoring the process was (at least historically) lower than the permit. I read multiple articles about developers ignoring permitting and paying the penalty when/if caught. My favorite was one where they claimed they “didn’t know” it was required, but were caught while digging a ditch to hide the evidence.

I don’t know enough about the new legislation to know if that imbalance would still remain.

They can deal with this by mandating a desert ecology. I see huge amounts of water in Ca pumped from declining aquifer to maintain huge areas of lawns on houses etc. I wonder if this is a nimby based mechanism to maintain house prices by limiting new home builds? People in million dollar tar paper shacks in Ca simply do not want more/denser housing = arcane zoning laws in Ca.

> Hotter, drier conditions are already hurting them, according to Cameron Barrows, a retired conservation biologist at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Barrows said his research indicates climate change will threaten much of the Joshua tree’s habitat by the end of the century. Even inside the national park, the tree could largely disappear, conservation groups say.

In that case, what's the point of protecting any individual tree, if they'll disappear anyway?

>the species was “abundant and widespread,” with between 4.3 million to 9.8 million of the trees in California.

That is neither an endangered nor a threatened species. Tough shit.

>according to environmentalists, because around 40% of the plants grow on private land. The Joshua trees could be razed to make way for homes and infrastructure.

The environmentalists can propose to buy the private land, if they can't (or won't) then tough shit: They aren't the landowners and thus should have no say.