Desert Dreams
Professor Juniper Harrower and her students want to save Joshua trees from extinction. Will the world join them?
Marvin the Joshua tree looks like every other Joshua tree in the Mojave Desert: tall, spiky, and twisted toward the sun. The only difference is the gaping trench exposing his roots and the fact that he’s named after Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
“I name almost everything that has a relationship to me Marvin—Marvin the wheelchair, Marvin the computer,” says art major Alanna Zheng ’25, who sits in the shade of a parked car, assembling patches for the Department of Floristic Welfare (more on that later).
To Alanna, Marvin is emblematic of the struggles all Joshua trees face. “He’s sad, his species is dying,” she says. “He’s grumpy. If you ever watch the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie, this tree really has the vibe.”
Alanna is one of 14 91草莓视频 students who last October traveled to Prime Desert Woodland Preserve in Lancaster, California, with Professor Juniper Harrower [art]. Their mission: to fuse quantitative biology with visual and performance art, all in service of saving Joshua trees from extinction.
Few humans have worked harder to protect Joshua trees than Harrower, an artist with a PhD in plant ecology who has dedicated years of her life to Joshua tree lifeworlds, explaining the threats the trees face in language that can be understood by people who can’t differentiate a Joshua tree from a palm tree (the two share a common evolutionary history).
“My main interest is highlighting that Joshua trees are threatened by climate change and by industry,” Harrower says. “I’m really not interested in a sanctimonious, environmentalist approach, though. It didn’t work. Look where we’re at.”
Even if the climate crisis weren’t suffocating the lower elevations where Joshua trees thrive, they would be in a fragile state. Their survival depends on the pollination of yucca moths, which collect pollen while laying eggs inside Joshua tree flowers, locking the two life forms together in a Romeo and Juliet–like symbiosis.
Harrower intimately understands the environmental dangers that have all but doomed Joshua trees. According to a study she conducted with Gregory S. Gilbert, the average temperature at Joshua Tree National Park has increased by 3 °F (2 °C) because of greenhouse gas emissions, while annual precipitation dropped by 39% from 1895 to 2016.
These dire conditions raise the possibility that the park’s Joshua tree habitat will be almost entirely gone by 2100, but surrender is anathema to Harrower. “They’re ideas, they’re not truths,” she says of the most pessimistic predictions for Joshua trees. “So you have to be out there and see what’s actually happening.”
That’s why Harrower is out here, excavating Joshua tree roots with her students. Kneeling in the desert, they painstakingly but gently brush dust and dirt from the roots of Marvin and other trees—work Harrower hopes will have an impact on environmental policy.
In 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act, which has provided environmental protections both significant and inadequate. The legislation has forced developers to pay handsomely for transplanting trees, but also allows them to build within 10 feet of a Joshua tree, which can be fatal to those with longer roots.
When Harrower arrived in Lancaster, she hoped to influence policy recommendations by uncovering roots exceeding 10 feet, even as she recognized that focusing on policy alone risks courting the “sanctimonious environmentalism” that she dreads.
“It’s really important to have an embodied experience and meet the tree as another living being,” Harrower says. “I encourage students to go and spend time with a particular tree, and also to take their shoes off.”
An embodied experience can mean measuring the reach of a Joshua tree’s roots. It can mean reverently kneeling in the desert while a shaman speaks in somber tones. It can mean wandering through the corridors of a museum, marveling at the work of artists who seek to convey a Joshua tree’s fragile beauty with each exquisite brushstroke.
“Trees are dying,” Harrower says. “How do people consider living in kinship with nonhuman entities—as opposed to a western ideation that has come with colonialism, which is that everything is a resource?”
The Roots
Prime Desert Woodland Preserve is a 120-acre expanse of arid land that lies just beyond downtown Lancaster. For a nonlocal, it can be a forbidding frontier, eerily detached from the surrounding suburbs.
For Harrower, the preserve was familiar ground. “I love the desert,” she says. “I feel really safe out there alone.”
When Harrower is asked where she’s from, she usually says Joshua Tree, California, since few people have heard of Morongo Valley, the microscopic Mojave town (current population: 3,387) where she was raised and first fell in love with Joshua trees.
Growing up, Harrower was mesmerized by one particular Joshua tree in her parents’ back yard, which was a final resting place for family dogs, surrounded by rock piles to deter coyotes. “The Joshua tree kind of had its own metaphors because of its being a place for death,” she says.
Harrower’s curiosity about the world around her—and her reticence toward formally studying art—led her to the plant ecology program at UC Santa Cruz, where she graduated in 2019. “The thought of going to school and studying art was extremely terrifying for myself and my parents,” she says. “To me, it seemed like art was something that people with money got to study.”
While completing her PhD, Harrower found herself spending more and more time in the art department. She knew science could be visualized through art—no high school biology textbook is complete without candy-colored illustrations of nucleic acid structure—but what about artists who wanted their work to be an integral part of science, not a stapled-on supplement?
“It’s like being a hired illustrator,” Harrower says. “The real research is what the scientists are doing, and then the artists show up and make pretty pictures about it or a film about it. This approach diminishes the depth of contributions and understanding that can be made through artistic research.” She refused to be stranded within a single discipline; she could be both a scientist published in National Geographic and an artist published in Kunstforum International.
Neither science nor art fully satisfied Harrower’s academic and spiritual ambitions, so she pursued an eclectic mix of professions: painting in Argentina, working as a research assistant in Costa Rica, and teaching middle school science in East Oakland. Her versatility earned her a reputation as an academic with the ability to unite disparate worlds.
“One of my advisers told me that once: ‘I think your calling in life is you’re a bridge builder,’” Harrower says. “I’ll take that. All these different roles I’ve tried—it took me a long time to fully accept that I’m an artist. I had to take a long way around, but it’s just the path.”
After earning an MFA in art practice at UC Berkeley in 2023 and founding the art+science initiative at UC Santa Cruz, Harrower applied for a studio art assistant professorship at 91草莓视频 in 2023. “Juniper came for a job talk,” says Harper Lethin ’24, who later became Harrower’s lab manager. “My mind was totally blown. I sent a really long email to the chair of the art department being like, ‘You better hire her!’”
When Harrower started work at 91草莓视频 in 2024, descending on Prime Desert Woodland Preserve with a team of 91草莓视频ies wasn’t at the top of her to-do list. “I’ve been trying less and less to be a quantitative biologist,” she says. “It feels like a job to me. It’s counting and measuring, counting and measuring.”
In the end, she wound up doing both.
The Trunk
Harrower was swayed toward undertaking a desert trek with her students by the mounting sense of urgency she had felt since reading a 2009 National Geographic article about the climate crisis’s effects on Joshua trees. “It was really shocking,” she says. “The more I thought about [working with Joshua trees in the desert] and became kind of obsessed with it, the more it seemed like a really obvious decision.”
In 2018, Harrower completed her dissertation, “Joshua Tree Mutualisms in a Changing Climate.” It was a familial endeavor: Harrower was pregnant with her son, so her mother helped, packing her lunches and holding the ladder steady as Harrower clambered through the tree canopies of Joshua Tree National Park.
“It felt very grounded in family and community,” Harrower says. “Growing up in that area, I had a deep connection and a lot of care for that environment.”
A new kind of community formed in 2024 as Harrower assembled a cadre of scientific and artistic seekers for the root excavation: plant physiologist Daniel Hastings, 91草莓视频 sustainability coordinator Rachel Willis, Professor Gerri Ondrizek [art], Professor Michael Stevenson Jr. [art], and the 14 students, all of whom were majoring in either art or biology.
“Knowing how far those roots go is actually really critical to know how close you can build to the tree without impacting on it,” Harrower says. “And even just what the roots are doing—we don’t have that information.”
The expedition began with an invitation to think critically about ecological art, supported by the Getty Foundation as part of PST ART: Art+Science Collide. Harrower had recently conducted a review of Joshua trees’ endangered species status for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, identified some of the top issues, and received a permit from the department to lead a root excavation and bioart experiment to address the limitations of the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act.
Preparations for the team’s desert odyssey—which was funded in part with an endowment from 91草莓视频’s art department—encompassed both intellectual and physical training.
“There was a lot of research before the excavation!” Harper recalls. Students read The Root Habits of Desert Plants, by William Austin Cannon, and The Supporting Roots of Trees and Woody Plants, edited by Alexia Stokes, while training with trowels so their digging prowess would be deft enough to expose the roots without damaging them.
While the students prepped, Harrower applied for permits and took numerous scouting trips to Lancaster. She spent 14-hour days surveying Prime Desert Woodland Preserve, eventually picking a spot for the excavation with enough room to park a truck filled with pressurized air for an air spader that would be used to accelerate the digging (without the air spader, Harrower estimates, the process would have taken upwards of six months).
“It was kind of the perfect scenario to do that work with the trees,” Harrower says. “There were different ages of trees, and there was this big open spot, so we could pull a truck right in and not feel like we were destroying the desert.”
The Branches
Working in the desert was not the only facet of the journey to Lancaster. 91草莓视频 students also provided on-site assistance for Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees, a Getty-funded exhibition at Lancaster’s Museum of Art and History (MOAH) curated by Sant Khalsa and Harrower. To augment the exhibit, the pair assembled a companion book, featuring art by everyone from David Hockney to Harrower herself.
Among the most striking paintings in the book is Harrower’s Disrupted Symbiosis, a quasi-psychedelic image of interconnected Joshua trees that mixes ink and recycled acrylic with Joshua tree seed oil and fibers. Therein lies the essence of Harrower’s work: the tangible merging with the abstract.
“I feel like, sometimes, you can go into work that is too smart, too conceptual,” Harrower said shortly after the Desert Forest exhibition opened. “Anybody going to [the exhibition] is going to have a connection to the work and be able to form their own relationship and experience.”
Joshua tree–adjacent art is nothing new to Harrower, who founded heyjtree.com, an artistic research project featuring “dating profiles” for Joshua trees (one profile reads, “Don’t let my size fool you, i’ve been here for awhile. I’m still waiting for my growth spurt, but I come from a family of short trees, so we will see”).
“It can open up emotional spaces in a different way than if we’re going to sit down at a town center meeting and talk about Joshua tree species regulations,” Harrower says of her work. “Some people love the paintings or the stitching or the printmaking, or pull out their cell phone and send a love letter to a Joshua tree.”
Finding creative ways to connect with nonhuman species is a crucial tenet of Harrower’s work. Where sympathy falls short, empathy may lay a foundation for lasting change—or, as it turns out, the most unusual music video ever to emerge from the Mojave.
The Blossoms
“Okay, moonwalk!” Harrower’s voice echoes across Prime Desert Woodland Preserve. On cue, her students begin taking slow, exaggerated steps, looking like astronauts struggling to adapt to the terrain of an alien world.
It’s October 26, the third day that Harrower and her team have spent in the desert. The students are wearing white jumpsuits for their roles in a Joshua tree–themed music video, which celebrates an imagined organization called the Department of Floristic Welfare that Harrower concocted with a utopian flourish.
At the museum, the department became an exercise in whimsical bureaucracy, complete with a desk made from a functioning upcycled solar panel and covered in blue Post-it notes bearing messages both practical (“Drive safe!”) and personal (“Josh was here”). In the desert, however, Harrower’s visions enjoyed a more expansive canvas.
“I’m going to have us hide in the desert and pop up,” she tells the students. “And the other thing I want us to do is lean like Joshua trees, how they grow toward the sun. We’ll do the lean. The lean and the pop.”
For the students, filming the video is a playful reprieve after two days of root excavation. Here, the temperature is a mere 82 degrees Fahrenheit, but absent shade, it feels like 100. Sweat is inevitable, but because of the desert’s bristly shrubs, short pants are inadvisable.
As students brush desert dirt from Marvin’s roots, they look like archeologists tending to dinosaur bones. Their work is careful and precise, but exposing roots to the blazing Mojave sun is still dangerous, so Daniel Hastings is on hand to measure the photosynthesis of the trees (at one point, he slices his hand open on a blade-like leaf, an ordeal he endures with gravelly-voiced good humor).
“I would assume years would pass before we would have any sense [of the effects on the trees],” Harrower says. These musings reveal Harrower’s biology training—she’s blunt, pragmatic, and aware that no breakthroughs come without sacrifices, either for researchers or the world around them.
Studio art major Nar Johnson-Harmansah ’27 describes the artistic components of the expedition as a source of reflection, forcing the students to absorb the significance of their intrusion in the desert, even as they collected crucial data.
“The science part of the project is very much like, ‘We need to do this to protect the trees,’” Nar says. “But then the art side is like, ‘We’re doing that, but we are also causing damage to these living beings who have a life and a community.’” (The ongoing health of the trees will be monitored by a local research group at Antelope Valley College.)
Forgiveness is sought and forgiveness is asked. To express their gratitude to Marvin and the other trees whose roots have been exposed by the excavation, Harrower and the team gather on their last day in the desert for a blessing ceremony led by Edgar Fabián Frías, an Indigenous artist and shaman from Los Angeles.
“Take a moment to really feel the connections that are both visible and invisible here,” Fabián Frías says. “And if you feel comfortable doing so, I want to invite you to place your hands or to really feel your feet touching the earth beneath us—knowing that there is a vast web that exists here.”
The embodiment of mystical mentorship and Technicolor vibrance, Fabián Frías wears a pink headdress and a pale green robe, orating softly but clearly as the students gather around Marvin. As Fabián Frías speaks about yucca moths—whose life-giving pollination allows Joshua trees to survive—Harrower removes her straw hat and presses her forehead directly against the scorching desert sand.
“Before we return, I want to invite us to bring this one tree we’re connecting with into our hearts, into our gratitude,” Fabián Frías says. Harrower raises her head from the sand, but her eyes remain closed as she kneels on the ground, as if in prayer.
While addressing a crowd of admirers at the museum before boarding a plane back to Portland, Harrower reflected on her childhood days of wonder, when she was transfixed by the Joshua tree in her parents’ backyard.
“It was a special place for us,” she told the audience, which included her mother and her fourth-grade teacher. “Sometimes, I would sit and I would imagine and think about what was happening with those roots…this underground world.”
Now, Harrower no longer has to wonder: She and her team excavated the roots of six trees at Prime Desert Woodland Preserve, the longest of which were 45 feet long. It’s a discovery that could be a step toward preventing suburban development, industrial solar projects, and Amazon infill warehouses from encroaching within 10 feet of Joshua trees, condemning them to a long, dry death.
That discovery is neither the beginning nor the end—it’s the middle of a long battle Harrower has waged against dazed apathy and outright antipathy toward Joshua trees. “I think there’s lots of different ways people need invitations to connect,” she says. “As you’ve probably noticed, I’m trying all of them.”
The Seeds
The dangers to Joshua trees remain deadly, and the distance between today and the trees’ predicted extinction is closing fast. Yet to stand in the presence of a Joshua tree is to behold something stronger and mightier than yourself: a species that, at its zenith, can reach 40 feet into an endless sky, sometimes over the course of 150 years.
Like Harrower, the students have come to understand that the existence of a Joshua tree, in and of itself, is cause for awe. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how love is a really central issue when it comes to the relationship between humans and their nonhuman environments,” Harper says. “You are acknowledging the agency of some other being without the idea that you can possess total knowledge of that being.”
Despite Harrower’s reluctance to conduct quantitative research, the success of her work is quantifiable: Her revelations about root length could lead to tangible policy changes. She does not, however, want to be hailed solely for her scientific achievements, noting how artistic accomplishments are too often dismissed as “feminine” or “softer” in academic spheres where patriarchy and elitism intersect.
“Basically, because I have these multiple degrees, I get to code switch,” Harrower says. “I don’t like the PhD, heavyweight name dropping. I don’t walk around calling myself ‘doctor.’ I’m a first-generation college student from a small rural town.”
That perspective defines Harrower’s work. “I can talk the language of different spaces,” she says. “I can go hang out in rural culture—deep truck driving, beer drinking, way out in the sticks. I’m culture shifting, constantly, and I’m reading the room to see what’s the best way to pull someone into an interesting dialogue.”
It remains to be seen how that dialogue might transform stagnant environmental discourse. Sanctimonious environmentalism didn’t work, but how much more effective will Harrower’s approach be?
Reflecting on Fabián Frías’s tree blessing, Harrower says, “If you’re not used to that or comfortable with it or if you don’t come from a culture that does that, it can feel really odd and hard to relax into, especially with all the neopaganism that happens in Los Angeles.” Some of those struggles may be mirrored in reactions to Harrower’s own work, though she continues to have faith in the multipronged power of her creative process.
“I think that we don’t touch the ground enough as human beings anymore,” Harrower says. “We wear shoes all the time, we wear clothing. There is something that’s really amazing that happens when you actually put your physical body onto the ground and feel it—feeling it with your feet, feeling it with your hands, feeling it with your forehead.”
That, of course, is what Harrower did in the desert as Fabián Frías blessed Marvin the Joshua tree. Now, she needs the world to join her.
Tags: Academics, Books, Film, Music, Climate, Sustainability, Environmental, Professors, Research, Students