Terror Sloths and Joshua Trees: A Photo Essay

Joshua Trees are weird. They look like a pine cone that thinks too highly of itself. They look like the plant the Lorax was cheating on with a Truffula Tree. They look like a Decepticon trying to hide in a place without cars.

They’re a species of Yucca plant confined to a relatively small geographic range in the Mojave desert. They can reach nearly five stories tall before they fall and crush everything in the path of their spiny rage.

The Joshua Tree is like Mitt Romney in two ways: it was given its name by mormons and has never been the President of the United States. Early Mormon settlers gave the tree its name because they saw in its curly arms the urgency of a biblical Joshua reaching to heaven in prayer.

I dreamt once about waking up in a dark Joshua Tree forest. The sky was stamped with stupidly bright stars like a shitty photoshop project from a first-year graphic design student. They swirled around the fulcrum of one impossible nebula.The desert around me echoed with the yips of coyotes, and I tried to remember if there were any records of Coyotes attacking people. There are.The Joshua Trees rattled their branches in rapturous prayer. If they’d had hands, they would have picked up rattlers and garter snakes from the dens between their roots and shaken them in true revivalist fashion. They reached and grabbed at the sky.In a breath, the night ended, and a coming sunrise poured syrupy gold on the horizon. I stood, now able to see where I’d be stepping. I touched the trunk of one of the plants and found my hand to be covered in bleeding pinpricks when I withdrew it.Smash cut. Dream over. Monday morning. Time for work.

How’s this for metal: the Joshua Tree’s range has been shrinking for thousands of years since the extinction of the Shasta Ground Sloth, a giant furry sloth the size of a rhinoceros and claws like deadly bananas. The sloth devoured the Joshua trees and in the process distributed their seeds.If the Joshua Trees had sentience and a concept of genetics and an independent economy, reviving the Shasta Ground Sloth would be their top priority. After stopping ISIS.

The pernicious fact of climate change is further threatening the range of the Joshua Tree. Even in Joshua Tree National Park, their range will likely be significantly reduced by the end of the 21st century.What will they call the park then? AbsenTree National Park? Maybe we’ll all just go to Death Valley Instead.

Photos and words are original