‘Like witnessing a birth in a morgue’: the volunteers working to save the Joshua trees

The August 2020 Dome Fire in the Mojave national preserve burned more than 1m Joshua trees to varying degrees. Now, a year and a half later, a wide-ranging group of volunteers are working alongside the National Park Service, which manages the preserve, to replant Joshua trees. In December 2021, a group of volunteers traveled to the Mojave national preserve to plant 1,500 eastern Joshua tree seedlings. Though they look pretty similar, there are in fact two different species of Joshua trees: western and eastern. Soon enough the volunteers were packing their infant plants into the soil, all under the mournful gaze of the thousands of burned Joshua trees.