Big Answers... but no Questions

by Pat Flanagan

Taking a walk is the surest way I know to enter into the desert. Driving through the national park I look for a wrinkle, a break in the ridgeline that promises an unexplored wash. I find one and descend the slope noticing the diversity of plant life – Joshua trees, Mojave yuccas – many different kinds of shrubs and cactus all with, as Edward Abbey described, a “generous gift of space.”

I think as I move along…I am loaded down with a head full of answers that plague me as I walk.

These answers were provided by botanist Jim André, Director of the Sweeney Granite Mountain Research Center during his presentation Recent Plant Discoveries in the California Desert. Jim spends the blooming seasons of the year surveying, discovering, mapping, and listing what he sees.

From these lists and others come some big answers.

Big Answer #1

• 29 million acres, or 28% of California’s landmass, is desert. …a word synonymous with arid and barren

Big Answer #2

• The coastal redwoods in Del Norte Co. contain 90-125 plant species per 2 1/2 acres
• An eastern Mojave Desert bajada has 85 – 120 plant species per 2 1/2 acres

Big Answer #3

• The California deserts have 2,341 known native plant species -- that’s 37% of the state’s entire native flora.

Big Answer #4

• About 350 species – or 15% --are listed by the California Native Plant Society as threatened, endangered, or of special concern.

Big Answer #5

• Of the listed species, 140 or 43% of the plants flower in the fall so are unlikely to be found during the spring survey season.

Big Answer #6

• About 35% of the desert plants are annuals which depend on seasonal rainfall (winter or summer) to germinate. Some may not be seen for years.

Big Answer #7

Only about 1% of the desert has actually been completely surveyed, meaning in both spring and summer, and over the number of years it would take some species to make an appearance.

Using the sun’s energy, this multitude of plants--rare, common, known and unknown--produces the food energy that sustains the desert’s animals, all of which do a hard day’s work pollinating the flowers, fertilizing and aerating the soils, and recycling the sun’s energy through the processing of dead materials. The desert’s biological diversity is not the big list of species but the list of small interactions, mostly unknown.

Alfred Einstein questioned what it would be like to ride on a beam of light – and his answer changed the way we think about the world.

The complexity of the desert ecosystem is dazzling but we remain shy of the right questions to guide us toward understanding its value and acting on its behalf. Why the concern?

More than 1.3 million acres of public land in the California Desert are being considered for industrial solar and wind development. If approved, the acreage will be scraped clean, sprouting devices for mining the sun’s energy and shuttling it on a one way journey to remote cities.

The selected lands are mostly pristine, not previously degraded or permanently fallowed agricultural land. It is a deep and tragic truth that we could destroy this mysterious landscape without identifying and comprehending its reality and our loss.

This essay is edited from its original length for this format. It was read at Desert Stories III.