ShareThisA breeze stirs the silence at Joshua Tree National Park, as a red-tailed hawk takes flight from the spiky arm of one of the namesake plants in search of breakfast.
It's a scene that national parks protector Mike Cipra has witnessed many times. Still, he can't contain his enthusiasm on this early morning outing, despite the gloomy topic he's discussing with a visitor -- the probable extinction of the Joshua tree in the park that bears its name.
Experts expect the Joshuas to vanish entirely from the southern half of California within a century.
The ancient plants are dying in the Joshua Tree National Park. Already finicky reproducers, Joshua trees are the victim of global warming and its symptoms -- including fire and drought -- plus pollution and the proliferation of non-native plants.
The loss would be devastating, said Cipra, who is California desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit group that evaluates conditions at national parks and lobbies for their preservation.
"Joshua trees aren't just iconic pictures on a postcard. They're essential to a functioning ecosystem," he said. "We're going to be losing a lot of what makes this place special."
The quirky, almost comical trees are really plants, a relative of the yucca.
Pictured on U2's 1987 album "The Joshua Tree," they look like desert sentries, with fibrous trunks and twisting, outstretched arms.
Joshua trees are a foundation species, providing habitat for other animals that otherwise would disappear, said Cipra, 34, his brown boots crunching on the desert floor as he surveys the boulder-studded Queen Valley. Besides the foraging hawk and a scrub jay calling nearby, there are Scott's orioles that build hanging nests in the trees, rodents that pry food from its seed pods and the Yucca night lizard, the smallest lizard in North America, which nests under its fallen branches, he said.
Growing up in Long Beach, Cipra discovered Joshua trees at 16, when he asked his parents if he could ditch school to camp and explore with a friend in what was then the national monument. The city boy, who went on to USC on an academic scholarship, drew up a list of reasons he wanted to visit the park, top among them the variety of animals he would see.
Cipra said his experience in the desert was life changing. He went on to become an interpretive ranger at the park -- where his wife works as a biologist -- and now lobbies for governmental policy to protect it. Among the causes he supports is the pending congressional cap-and-trade plan that would limit carbon dioxide emissions and provide money from refiners and power plants to manage the effects of climate change.
"Some experiences in the natural world can be transformative. That's the power of national parks," Cipra said.
Predictions for the fate of the Joshua trees, and the web of life they support, are based on six models of climate change developed by Ken Cole, a biologist and geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz., and plant ecologist Kirsten Ironside of Northern Arizona University.
In all of the climate models that looked ahead 100 years, there were no new trees in Joshua Tree National Park, and significant death of existing trees.
"With the Joshua tree, it's like a worst-case scenario. Maybe 80 percent of the current populations will be unable to persist," he said.
The plants were prolific and widespread 11,000 years ago, Cole said, when their seeds were carried long distances from Mexico north to Nevada in the dung of the Shasta ground sloth, now extinct. Now, seeds are transported only short distances by rodents.
The future will bring a temperature increase of about seven degrees, similar to the change between the Ice Age and modern time, Cole said, and with that will come drought and fires.
"The big question that a lot of people are asking about Joshua trees and plants in general: 'Can they (plants) move into new habitats fast enough to keep pace with climate change?' They are running a very slow race," said Christopher Smith, an assistant professor of biology at Willamette University in Salem, Ore.
E-mail reporter Janet Zimmerman at jzimmerman(at)PE.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.
