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Wright replied that it was only after about 10 years of research that the data began to make sense. “Then I start believing,” she said. So many things can happen between now and then, and early growth may not end much. After all, those dead Douglas fir that shook me so much in Oregon did a great job in the first few years of research.
We found shade under the trees that survived the fire in 2014 and sat down to lunch. To consider the future of forests means to fit into such an abstract timeline that it is difficult to imagine, but scientists like Wright have been in this for a long time, imagining life expectancy far beyond theirs.
“I will not see this great high forest that we are planting now,” she said. Her child can see him, or maybe her grandson. Striving for any kind of future is a gesture of optimism, she admits, especially so far away. “But I’m good at it.”
As a member it can be difficult for the living to understand how unlikely it is, statistically speaking, to become alive. Healthy beech, explains Volleben in The hidden life of trees, will produce approximately 1.8 million beech nuts in its lifetime. “One of them will become a full-fledged tree,” he writes, “and in forestry it is a high success rate, similar to winning the lottery.”
For Joshua trees, the chances of successful reproduction are even greater. In order for Joshua’s tree to be born – a tree that lives in far worse conditions than beech – its mother must also bloom a seed when it reaches sexual maturity. The seed, which looks like a flat black putty hat, smaller than a penny, must find a home conducive to germination and flowering. This is difficult enough in the dry space of the desert and even more difficult as the landscape warms up. His best case scenario is to find his way to a place under a bush or a black brush where he can germinate, protected by the bat of mobile rabbits. It would be especially helpful to find a place on top of a symbiotic soil sponge that lurks beneath the sandy clay soil and can help baby Joshua grow. If the tree overcomes the dangers of early life, it needs another 30 to 60 years before it is ready to reproduce. Then he would rely on the yucca to pollinate it; otherwise it will not bear fruit. Then, and only then, after this confusing and unlikely glove has been released, will a Joshua tree be able to sow a seed, repeating the entire weak cycle.
Scientists have mapped the survival of the Joshua tree against the worst weather conditions – that is, if humans continue at our current rate of consumption and emissions – and found that by 2100, essentially zero habitat of the Joshua tree will remain in California’s Joshua Tree National Park, even for trees that are already among the most drought-resistant.
Lynn Sweet, a plant ecologist who studies Joshua trees at the University of California, Riverside, told me that her team calculated that in milder scenarios where carbon emissions were reduced, “we could keep up to 20% or more habitat in the park and the surrounding area ”, assuming that the moth and mycelium will succeed in this scenario as well.
When it comes to conservation efforts, people usually think of the most expensive forests for them – the places they grew up, the places they got married, the places where they got married or spent their weekends, the national parks known for their emblematic trees. These places – Sequoia National Park, Olympic, Muir Woods, Everglades – are emerging large in our collective consciousness. “I often joke with reporters,” Sweet told me, “that no one goes out to write an article about climate change on the blackbrush bush,” an equally endangered species in the desert.
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