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

If carbon emissions stay at current levels, just 0.02% of the desert tree would survive. Volunteers are now banding together to plant seedlings

The trees are not exactly imposing. Slim and spiny, with limbs that grip small poms of sharp leaves, they look like something a child might dream up. Or maybe Salvador Dali. Even the name, Joshua tree, sounds kind of awkward.

On a wet and chilly December morning, I stood at a makeshift encampment in the Mojave national preserve in San Bernardino county, California, listening as a group of strangers fretted over the trees' precarious future. Within the preserve is Cima Dome, a broad-sloping mound that, until recently, contained the densest Joshua tree forest in the world.

The August 2020 Dome Fire in the Mojave national preserve burned more than 1m Joshua trees to varying degrees.