What's the plan to help Joshua trees recover? MARTÍNEZ: Now, I know firefighters are working to try to contain the York fire, but strong winds might be happening later this week - could make that really tough. And yet climate change is still threatening them. So we're talking about some of the most protected Joshua trees in the world. WELLS: And remember, this is in a national preserve. But in one day, you know, two days or three days, a major fire can take out a large percentage of those. HANFORD: Someone probably said, hey, look, the Mojave Preserve has millions of Joshua trees, so we're good. But in March, the verdict was, you know, no, they're too resilient, and they're too abundant. There was a push to designate both of those species as federally endangered, and that would have made it harder for, like, solar companies and real estate developers to kill them. The one that just protects the Western Joshua tree, which is the one that California passed, but the ones that are burning right now are Eastern Joshua trees. WELLS: It doesn't help as much as you'd think because - so there's actually two Joshua tree species. The state of California passed a law about a month ago to do just that. I know there have been efforts to protect Joshua trees. MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, that's rough to hear what he had to say there. WELLS: So you've got these bigger, hotter fires and these hotter, drier conditions. He's the co-executive director of a nonprofit in this area called the Mojave Desert Land Trust.ĬODY HANFORD: Really low recovery, unfortunately, is what we would expect, which is just devastating because this is burning one of the best Joshua tree forests ever, in the world, that I've ever seen. So then the question is, well, OK, how well do they resprout after fire? Cody Hanford told me the news there isn't great either. Seuss succulents with their spindly arms, and they twist up into the sky, and they burn really easily. And, you know, they're not like the big pine trees in northern California that can handle a certain amount of fire because of thick bark or something. There were 1.3 million Joshua trees that burned. But even that result was really devastating. We had the Dome fire three years ago in this area, and it grew to about half the size of this one. WELLS: Well, it kind of just means pretty bad news. What does it mean for them? What does this fire mean for them? MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, Joshua trees are treasured here in California. And unfortunately, the Joshua trees are kind of just sitting there in the crosshairs. Then we've got this big hot heat wave that dries all those plants out. We've got more plants from all this rain. And, you know, this is the recipe that we've all heard before. And so this year's flavor of extreme weather was we got way more rain than normal, and now we're in a much longer heat wave than normal. And then this really extreme weather causes extreme fires. So why are we seeing such a huge fire in California's southern desert?ĬALEIGH WELLS, BYLINE: I mean, the short answer is climate change, because that causes this really extreme weather. Caleigh, California had a really, really wet winter. Caleigh Wells from member station KCRW joins us now. The York fire is burning through the Mojave Desert Preserve on the border of California and Nevada, burning through a forest of endangered Joshua trees. California is seeing its first major wildfire this year.
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