Reply #1: Another persepctive: [View All]

[tabatha]

It’s a blackbrush forest out there, and it grows inconsequential, short-lived Joshua trees out of it here and there, ephemeral companions, barnacles on a whale. Though individual blackbrush plants in a stand may not be particularly old, a solid stand of blackbrush is an astonishingly ancient community.

This is how Webb, Steiger and Turner said it:

“Time span for recovery may be longer than past periods of climatic and geomorphic stability.”

They’re talking geological epochs here. They’re talking the blackbrush community beginning when there were standing lakes in the Mojave with sabertooth cats and ground sloths drinking out of them.

And we see it as less valuable than a few megawatts of power to run our swimming pool filters.

http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/unexpectedly_ancient/