Okay, okay, but creosote is easy to accept. It's a native pioneer, not an invasive one. But what about brome?

It's not that aggressive in our climate. Yes, yes, it seeds during rainy years, and it's everywhere, but what is it outcompeting? The natives that can reseed in rainy years are thriving, usually alongside it, at least until we get a drought again or the off-roaders return. They're sharing nutrients, and it's feeding herbivores that can digest it (sometimes better than the woody, spiny natives that survived and often coexist with it). Why not allow soil coverage? Root systems?

Our soil is hydrophobic. What that means is that when it rains it floods and doesn't fill our aquifers. There is a very clear issue with that: people are pumping water out of the ground from 300-1000 feet deep. In the 1970's someone could come out to where I'm at in the valley and hand dig a well at 10 or so feet-- the evidence is half a mile from me, by the way, I've walked to that homestead.

Can you really fathom how many acre feet of water that is that's been pumped out of the ground and not replaced? No one should be living here. It should be the most egregious social taboo to go to a drilling company and pay upwards of $65k to drill a well that deep. And yet what's coming in? More short term rentals. More resorts. More businesses. More restaurants. More! We shouldn't even be here, and if this wasn't a literally ancestral calling, we wouldn't be.

So why is the grass the enemy? It's *helping* by all accounts. We need roots in the ground, desperately. Like, decades ago. We need more trees. We need to stop building homes that the ecosystem cannot support. So why is the MDLT getting millions of dollars in donations every year telling people to get rid of the grass? "Come on in! We've got plenty of *space*! Come to our plant sale, let us tell you how special we are for nursing some chollas! Okay, great, thanks for your money, enjoy your multi-million dollar second home!"

We *have* to be here. We *need* to solve this problem. But for it to work everyone who lives here needs to be invested in solving it -- not just in ripping out "weeds", but in actually doing the work to repair what's been done to this Valley. We need to literally move mountains.

And that's never going to happen.

And we're well aware that one day all of our work may wither and die because of it, but we have to be here, and we're doing it anyway.

#NativePlants #InvasivePlants #MDLT #MojaveDesert #Ecology #ClimateJustice #ClimateChange