Mastodawn

I wish I currently had more time on my hands to publicly deconstruct all of the absolute bullshit behind the rampant misinformation orgs like the Mojave Desert Land Trust spread regarding the local ecology of this region. I'm not saying their work isn't *good* in some ways, but the insistence that this is "scrubland" and what we need is bare soil to prevent fires instead of a total regeneration of the hydrological cycle (and yes, pioneer plants are a critical part of this! Even invasives! If you can't replace them you cannot just "rip them out" and call it good!) is outright harmful.

Did you know the mountains South of our land used to be about 10 miles closer than they currently are to the highway? As of 1938. What moves mountains? Mining! You're telling me they razed half a mountain range (and that's only in one mining district) in two decades and the flora and fauna that have repopulated the now completely flat valley in the last 75 years since the mines shut down are representative of *exactly* how the ecosystem should be? Give me a break.

#ClimateJustice #SettlerViolence #MojaveDesert #InvasivePlants #LandRegeneration

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Rancho de la Libertad Dec 22

I guess I don't know exactly why they think this land is scrubland, but based on reading things like "Desert and Dryland Restoration" by Bainbridge and the MDLTs own website it seems that we're studying the ecology of an ecosystem that we *know* has been decimated and then just going from there... Even though we also have the contradictory knowledge of this land's prior status as arid grassland.

It would be like going to a spruce monoculture set up by the timber industry and saying "huh, there are no bushes here, and where there are bushes there's fires. Obviously it's the bushes that are the risk!"

But ultimately the reason this shit keeps getting repeated and latched onto by local "activists" is because it removes the onus from us - our subdivisions are justified, our highways, our petitions to have the county support and pave our roads, our solar farms, our god-awful windmills. Woohoo! We can keep consuming, so long as we rip out that nasty puncturevine (though much of what is being ripped out is actually the native California caltrop) and that Sierra mustard (often mistaken for the native which also usually gets torched) and plant a palo verde or two in our yard. It justifies the excessive water use, the airbnbs, the new restaurants that are.. immigration farms for Australians for some reason?

Anyway, maybe you're latching onto excuses like this in your environment. My concrete slab and my whole house is fine, because I recycle. That kind of thing. I don't know.

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Rancho de la Libertad Dec 22

Like YES there are 13,000 year old specimens of creosote and that's really cool but creosote DOMINANCE is not the norm and indicates a very ill ecosystem

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Rancho de la Libertad

The Oasis of Mara is currently located in a very strange spot. It's at the East end of Twentynine Palms, outside of the park, kind of right across the street from a residential neighborhood. It's also completely flat!

Then you go to 49 Palms Canyon, for example, and hike the mile and a half down into the canyon to find the clever spring right at the lowest point. It's such a clearly strategic location: you're protected from invaders, should that be a concern, the water from rains would flow and pool there, and the Indigenous peoples chose to plant their fan palms and various other things right there, where the water would run.

I seriously doubt that those same people said "oh yeah, okay, that worked well, let's go to this totally flat spot five miles away where the water doesn't really go and just plant trees and see what happens".

And if you look at the 1938 map, they didn't. There were mountains there. What is left of the Oasis is basically a sham: the Park Service has kept it alive, kind of, and acts like this is exactly how it was -- we just put some houses nearby, no biggie.

But that's a lie, and it's an egregious and harmful lie! But what value would there be in pretending less damage was done? That those houses in that neighborhood simply do not belong there, that the highway interrupts water flow that fed fertile land for at least tens of thousands of years?

Yes this was a sea millions upon millions of years ago (according to geologists, assuming they're right). Yes if you drill deep enough you get saltwater -- that's the case *everywhere*, pockets of saltwater exist underground *everywhere* and it really doesn't prove anything. The bottom of the sea is not flat, anyway! These mountains may well be as old as an ancient sea, that doesn't mean the miners didn't cut down a significant amount of our mountain range and destroy literally everything that was growing here.

Because when we act like it's "natural" for trees to be so sparse, like Joshua Trees just "naturally" don't belong at my elevation (they do), like the only biodiversity here is hiding in the soil crusts that are conveniently just "naturally" so fucking delicate, we perpetuate a lie: that the world exists in the image of corporations run by settlers who came here to get their piece and nothing else.

What does the 1938 map show? Mines and ranches.

This is not a desert. Not a "natural" one, anyway.

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Rancho de la Libertad Dec 24

My favorite part of the whole lie is how manipulative it is. Because the Parks Service and the MDLT and everyone acts like *this* ecosystem just doesn't follow the rules of literally every other ecosystem because it's just *so unique* and that's why we have to *preserve it*.

But it's that really stupid John Muir or Teddy Roosevelt mentality. We can destroy "nature" all we want, so long as we carve out these special little parks and keep them exactly the same as they've been since we carved them out, and make money from them all the while. Pave roads through them. Make cute little trails, lots of which are disruptive in and of themselves.

There are so many lies here. Someone told me that every grass you see here is invasive. Elucidated his whole "weed control" strategy. But then, we know about ricegrass. How many other riparian grasses are just literally extinct now because the settlers destroyed *all of them*?

We know that the grasslands just East of here held over 400 species of grasses before the wheat craze that preceded the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl destroyed all of them.

How many species were never documented?

And if we assume *a lot* of the most delicate species of grasses and other plants and animals were simply never documented before they were destroyed, how do we replace their niche?

Well, maybe plants from other places have a role! Maybe all these pioneer plants could be utilized rather than destroyed! Creosote is the ultimate mother, we know that. And if you prune it, and if it has water, it grows pretty fast and upright and gives lots of amazing shade. it's more like a tree than a bush, under the conditions it was *supposed to thrive under* (wherein its population also wouldn't be able to dominate the entire ecosystem). But what's the first thing people do when they buy property here? Grade their land even flatter, and rip out every creosote bush. Then they plant a few teddy bear cholla and beavertail, and if they're rich a saguaro, for landscaping, and call themselves "good people" for being so "water wise".

#ClimateJustice #NationalParks #JoshuaTree #JoshuaTreeNationalPark #MojaveDesert

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Rancho de la Libertad Dec 24

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

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Rancho de la Libertad Dec 24

But the hope is not to totally solve the problem. Maybe in our great-grandchildren's lifetime, something will regulate the flow of people and water, and we'll see greater areas be able to be stewarded back to life -- hopefully by the people who are meant to be here stewarding it.

The hope is that we can demonstrate on our small acreage -- and hopefully more in the future -- that it is not only possible to regenerate the ecosystem but flourish within it. To educate: to bring light to these lies, to experiment with new methods of soil building, new methods of planting, new kinds of earthworks and relation with integrating foreign animals (livestock) where the native ones are missing.

Because maybe that matters! And maybe it doesn't, and we'll only feed ourselves, and make some art no one ever sees or hears, and that's okay. We're singing to the land, and it's listening. It is singing to us, and we are listening. Tonight it is howling, and weeping with joy: tonight there is rain.

It waited so long to be sung to again.