4 Reasons Joshua Trees Aren t Saved Yet

Twilight in Joshua Tree National Park | Photo: William Shewbridge, some rights reserved

Joshua trees recently took a small step closer to being protected by the federal government, but there's a long uphill battle still facing the ungainly desert trees.

On September 14, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the Joshua tree, Yucca brevifolia, may merit protection as a Threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), and that the agency would begin the theoretically year-long process of examining the species' need for protection more fully.

That finding came in response to a 2015 petition by the group WildEarth Guardians that asked USFWS to grant the Joshua tree protection. The group cited climate change, habitat loss to development, wildfires, and air pollution among the main threats to the trees' survival.

While the September 14 announcement by USFWS was welcome news for fans of the Joshua tree, some of the reporting gave the impression that protection is close at hand for the species. While headlines along the lines of Feds Move to Protect Joshua tree may be literally true in the absolutely strictest sense, they can mislead casual readers into thinking the fight to protect the iconic trees has been won.

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USFWS' decision to examine listing the trees is a positive development, make no mistake. But Joshua trees are still a long way from gaining Federal protection. If that protection is granted, many Joshua trees may still be at risk of damage both from climate change and from efforts to fight climate change.

Here are four reasons that Joshua tree defenders can't let their guard down yet.

Joshua trees in Castle Mountains National Monument | Photo: Chris Clarke

USFWS could still say no

The WildEarth Guardians petition emphasizes climate change as the major long-term threat to the survival of the Joshua tree species, and with good reason. Joshua trees, a relic of a colder, wetter time in the southwest deserts, are already close to the edge of their heat tolerance over much of their range, and it's unlikely they will be able to disperse their seeds to cooler parts of the desert before their present range is too hot for them.

That would seem a slam dunk reason for listing the species, but USFWS' record on listing species put in danger by climate change is mixed. On one hand, the agency agreed in 2008 to list the polar bear as a threatened species, citing declines in the sea ice the big white bears rely on for hunting marine mammals. On the other, the same agency decided climate change wasn't a serious threat to the American pika, an alpine relative of rabbits whose habitat is literally being pushed up mountains by warmer temperatures. In 2010, USFWS found that listing the pika wasn't warranted. And in 2014, USFWS brass ordered an end to attempts to list the North American wolverine, even though the agency's own scientists agreed the carnivore is critically imperiled by loss of its deep snow breeding habitat.

So there's no clear precedent for how USFWS will decide on protecting species threatened by climate change. But even if USFWS scientists and administrators agree that climate change poses a significant enough threat to the Joshua tree that protection under the Endangered Species Act makes sense, the agency might still not do so.

In Joshua Tree National Park | Photo: Chris Clarke

Warranted but precluded

That's because the USFWS does have a track record on delaying protection for species it agrees merit protection under the ESA. If the agency eventually finds that the Joshua tree does deserve a spot on the Threatened list, it's very likely the tree will actually end up as one of the agency's long list of warranted but precluded species, referred to by some activists as extinction's waiting room. Warranted but precluded essentially means that USFWS agrees a species is in peril, but that other species are in worse danger and the agency doesn't have enough bandwidth to do the paperwork on every species that deserves protection.

More than 250 species are on the warranted but precluded list. The Fish and Wildlife Service is supposed to review each such species annually, but a majority of those species have been on the list for at least a decade. Several dozen plant species on the warranted but precluded list were first proposed for listing by the Smithsonian Institution in 1975.

Given some of the species on the warranted but precluded list, it's hard to imagine just how much peril a species would have to be in to not be precluded. Witness California's Delta smelt, currently listed as Threatened, whose down-listing to Endangered was found to be warranted but precluded despite the fact that the smelt is one of the most-endangered species in the United States.

Why would USFWS find that listing the Joshua tree might be a lower priority? In part, because a large percentage of the trees' current range is on protected land in National Parks, State parks, and designated Wilderness areas. That's not a big help when it comes to climate change, but it does mean that Joshua trees might be deemed to be at less threat of habitat loss than species that don't live in National Parks or wilderness areas.

Loopholes

Even if the Fish and Wildlife Service lists the Joshua tree as threatened without precluding it, the very habitat destruction threatening the tree might force USFWS to write compromises into the trees' protection.

Under the Endangered Species Act, Threatened species by default get nearly the same protection as do species listed as Endangered. The main difference is that State and federal resource management agencies have a bit more leeway in working with federally Threatened species.

But there's another tool in the Fish and Wildlife Serv

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