The Deserts of California

EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION, "A Promise of Life and Death: Journey into the desert heart"This is an adventure story. These maps could have been painted in my own sweat and blood. For decades, it was a happy albeit singular obsession of mine to make pilgrimages of ever-deeper expeditions into California’s arid backcountry. Across thousands of miles, I hiked through the heart of the desert, searching for the poetry that only the daily reality of disaster’s looming threat could deliver. Life meant more when death surrounded me as a promise, clearly written everywhere across this, one the world’s most arid landscapes. Salvation was found every day in every drop of precious water, in every sliver of afternoon shade, and in every desert wildflower, whose delicate truths spoke to me in dreams. Compelled by the whispered stories from trusted flowers, narratives that also seemed to emanate from deep in the warmed earth and that echoed across the empty sky, my desert years were spent as a walking piece of the desert land. It wasn’t that I was looking for death—the desert will give you death if you ask for it. I was looking for the edge of resiliency in my own body and my own mind. As I moved through the desert, I invited it to move through me. We had secrets to share. After returning to my modern life after each adventure, back in what seemed to be the anesthetized, urban landscape of my home, I was inoculated against the spirit-numbing virulence of modernity with the simple yet profound truths revealed to me, out there in the ancient dust. When compared to the rest of California’s cool and damp country, the deserts may seem like an alien planet, desolate to the eye that is accustomed to read green as the visual signifier of a thriving landscape, when in actual fact, the desert teems with life forms that view the greener places of the world as similarly intolerable. Gathered in the east, outside California’s mountainous wall that holds the cooling force of the Pacific to the west, the deserts of California exist inside an arid reality of their own ecological character. Where all manner of being acquiesces to the dictates of the constant sun, the land adopts an endemic palette of chalk, tan, and shadow accented by green-grays, ruddy siennas, and burnt ochers. Indulgent, saturated colors seem only ever to make brief albeit impressive, defiant appearances in the vernal bloom, in the iridescence of Mono Lake, or in other, anomalous places, when the dream of abundance belies the constancy of desiccation. Perhaps the most apparent expression of color in the desert is reserved for the celestial domain, in those twilight moments when perfectly infinite swaths of gradient genius spread across heaven’s dome. In those moments of grace, when I am enjoying good, bitter morning coffee at dawn, or at dusk when I am removing my dust-caked boots after hiking just a bit too far in the heat, when I find myself distracted from the constant attention needed to address the pervading lethality of my environment, lost in a moment of aesthetic arrest, the desert reveals something core and original about itself: a mystery wrapped up in just how beautiful life can be. Although I am tempted to linger, if I am distracted by the reveries for too long, the desert may claim me forever.  The adventure this story holds is not necessarily in the geography it describes but in the tension among the concepts it explores. The contrasting qualities that define the deserts of California reveal the ways I have chosen to tell this story as much as they reflect realities written across the terrain. In the contemplative dance of beauty and danger, drama and stillness, commonality and preciousness, life and death, resistance and fragility, I ask whether I am exploring external phenomena or an internalized projection of myself—how much of the experience of the deserts exists only in my mind? In that context, this book walks a metaphorical line between what is known and what is imagined. The expedition that I am inviting you to join me on is as philosophical as it is a geophysical journey across California’s arid eastern landscapes. This particular trail through the desert heart is blazed across a realm where science and art interact to reveal something greater than either might yield alone. It begins largely as an artistic survey of biogeography and land policy, but it becomes an exercise in sewing together potentially disparate conceptions of knowledge across vocational disciplines. From a poetic frame of reference, across a journalistic mindset, and into the domain of a scientific temper, The Deserts of California presents a metaphor for an even greater adventure: the quest for a holistic understanding of the world and our place in it.  [...] Since the coming of humans to California, nearly the entirety of its landscape has been altered to such a complete degree that to find landscape not altered by the human hand, you would have to go so far back that you were in a different geologic era. The tension between those aspects of California’s evolving character that are relatively recent and those that have a much deeper history is a preoccupation of this work. Much like the coasts, or the forests for that matter, the deserts of California at the beginning of the Holocene were much different than the deserts are today. Now, as we look forward to the evolving shape of the Anthropocene, we wonder what the deserts will become and how the ecologies of California (and the rest of the planet) will weather the industrial storm that rages across the land, water and sky. The effect of global warming is climate breakdown, a process that affects the biosphere by way of potentially disastrous effects on the hydrosphere. Water is the agent that governs all life on earth, including the resistant yet fragile living systems of the desert. What this book is not is the manifesto of an apocalyptic environmentalist—some alarmist proclamation of the pending end of life on all but perhaps the most extreme terrestrial environments. This work takes a steadied and unpanicked look at the many stressors that affect habitat structure across the desert biome, including the aforementioned storm that is climate breakdown by way of anthropogenic global warming. This book cautiously presumes that there is a vector by which we get it right—that our best efforts, our best predictions, and our best clever solutions engage extant systems toward their own progenerative capacity. It presumes that we can get to a post–carbon emitting society and that stewardship and mutualism become dominant human paradigms wherein we enter into a mutualized, reciprocal relationship with this precious landscape. Together then, we proceed toward a twenty-second century with a natural world in much better shape than even how we left it at the end of the twentieth century. This book is not preoccupied with prescribing cures for environmental damage. Instead, it finds its power in the democratization of ecological literacy across many different aspects of space and time within California’s complex desert landscape. In some respects, my book The Forests of California was about the past—how these unique living systems came to existence, organizing themselves over the past several million years. Similarly, The Coasts of California—with its opening line, “This is a time capsule”—represents a snapshot of the right now, of dynamic coastal systems being destroyed and built up constantly, ones that are very different than they were even in recent historical times and are very different from what they will be in the future, given a rapidly changing climate. It follows that The Deserts of California is an examination of a more arid future that is different from the California we know now.