Imagine this: After years of toiling in the Southern California rat race, you buy a parcel of land in the high desert. It is here, on a sunny lot thick with Joshua trees, that you plan to build your retirement home.
But before you can get a shovel into the ground, everything changes. Joshua trees become candidates for the state’s threatened and endangered species list and are then protected by an unprecedented conservation law. You must now apply for permits and pay fees — not just for removing the plants, but in some cases for disturbing the land around them. You must even get permits to pick up fallen branches.
You have two options: You can pay tens of thousands of dollars and navigate a morass of policies. If you want to someday add a pool or an accessory dwelling unit or even replace a sewage pipe, you’ll have to do the same thing again, potentially paying for work performed near the same trees.
Or you can walk away.
That’s the dilemma facing some property owners in desert regions outside of Los Angeles, according to Alec Mackie, who bought land in Yucca Valley in 2022. He had planned to build a home that required the removal of eight Joshua trees. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife said his project could affect 63 trees and billed him $32,961.75.
“Is it worth owning this land, or should we just let it go and go buy some other desert land with no Joshua trees?” Mackie said. “We’re seriously leaning toward just giving up because the state will never leave us alone. They will always be there to regulate every square inch of everything we do on our property.”
Two years after California enacted the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act, the protections conferred by both the law and the plant’s candidacy for the state’s threatened and endangered species list remain hugely controversial in many high desert communities, where Joshua trees are plentiful.
Environmentalists say these protections are needed because the iconic succulent is rapidly losing habitat. Large-scale renewable energy projects and human sprawl have eaten away at Joshua tree forests. And warming temperatures mean there won’t be many remaining places where the trees can survive by the end of the century, studies project.
But some residents and local politicians say the conservation measures were imposed on them by Sacramento outsiders who think of Joshua trees as existing only in isolated wilderness areas, and don’t understand that the plants can also thrive in developed communities. Implementation has been onerous and confusing, delaying critical housing and infrastructure projects and driving away needed jobs and investment, they say.
“Residents should not be forced to bear the economic burden of a policy that fails to balance environmental protection with the right to build and prosper,” San Bernardino County Supervisor Dawn Rowe, whose district includes communities around Joshua Tree National Park, said in a statement.
The western Joshua tree is one of two genetically distinct species that occur in California. It has been protected by the state since 2020, after the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned it be listed as threatened. Candidates for listing receive the same legal protections as species that are officially listed. (The other species, the eastern Joshua tree, also faces an uncertain future but is protected only by the California Desert Native Plants Act and local ordinances.)
In 2022, the California Fish and Game Commission deadlocked on whether to adopt the listing after hours of tense debate. State biologists had recommended against the move, describing concerns about the effects of climate change as premature. But many residents spoke in favor of the protections, saying that local governments weren’t doing enough to stop developers from bulldozing vast swaths of Joshua trees, said Brendan Cummings, conservation director of the Center for Biological Diversity.
Legislators then stepped in with the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act. The law was touted as a compromise that enshrined the interim protections while streamlining the permitting process to allow for affordable housing and clean energy projects. It enabled developers to pay fees in lieu of mitigating impacts on Joshua trees, with the monies earmarked for the state to purchase and conserve habitat.
Since the law was a supplementary measure amending the main budget bill, it sidestepped substantive public hearings. Critics have since pointed to that as evidence that its drafters did not adequately solicit feedback from locals.
Joshua Tree homeowner Susan Trost said she only learned of the regulations when she heard residents complaining about them at a civic meeting on something unrelated. The 80-year-old is on a fixed income and wants to build an ADU to rent out to a long-term tenant, but she’s worried she won’t be able to afford the up-front costs of surveys, permits and fees.
“The Commission must recognize that this is not simply about protecting a species,” Trost wrote in a letter to the Fish and Game Commission commenting on the regulations. “It is about setting a precedent for how California will balance conservation, housing, infrastructure, wildfire safety, and community needs in the future.”
“All I know is my future looks really terrible if I can’t get another unit and more money coming in,” Trost added in an interview.
The conservation act requires property owners to obtain a permit before they “take” any part or product of Joshua trees, which includes things such as seeds, roots, leaves — even fallen branches, said Isabel Baer, acting branch manager of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife habitat conservation planning branch. Exactly what that means has been the subject of much debate.
“The department had to make decisions about, for the purposes of the act, what is a ‘lethal take’ of a tree — at what point are you at risk of killing the tree?” she said.
The department has interpreted the law to require property owners to get take permits for ground-disturbing work that’s performed within a certain distance of a Joshua tree. CDFW gives its staff guidelines to determine the necessary distance based on scientific research, Baer said. But staffers decide the exact buffer requirements on a project-by-project basis, taking into account factors such as the location and size of the trees, she said.
Some homeowners said that has injected more uncertainty and unevenness into a process that’s already opaque.
Kerrie Aley owns a home on a 7.5-acre lot at the end of a dirt road in Pioneertown, a small community that was built to act as a film studio for western movie shoots. She’s renovating the property to bring it up to seismic and ADA standards, harden it against wildfires and install a septic tank for a guest house. An arborist determined the project would not result in the take of any Joshua trees, so Aley did not seek CDFW permission and forged ahead with construction.
Then she heard Mackie’s story and realized that CDFW staff had used different methods to calculate how his project would affect Joshua trees. If Aley had applied those standards to her project, rather than relying on the arborist’s recommendation, she would have owed the state about $22,109, she said.
On top of that, the retired engineer has embarked on a years-long effort to hand-prune plants within 100 feet of her home. Her goal is to create a buffer of “defensible space,” which experts say is crucial to help a structure survive a wildfire, and which Aley hopes will make her home more insurable — her fire insurance was canceled two years ago. The most affordable replacement she could find was about $12,000 a year, forcing her to enroll in the last-resort California FAIR plan.
Aley is not sure if the government could potentially interpret the work as illegal. In fact, given the abundance and density of Joshua trees on her property, she isn’t sure whether she can legally dig anywhere in her yard without the state’s permission.
“Frankly, how do they expect to enforce this?” she said. “They make it so hard for your regular person to comply with these regulations that people just ignore them.”
With its shopping centers and cul-de-sacs carved into Joshua tree woodlands, Yucca Valley is probably the developed community most profoundly affected by the conservation law, said town manager Curtis Yakimow. The town has at times felt buffeted by competing state interests of providing affordable housing and protecting a beloved species, he said.
“We’re very, very close to both the beauty as well as the difficulty of how do we meaningfully interact with this tree on individual private property parcels?” he said.
There, the conservation law swiftly came into conflict with a massive project to decommission thousands of septic tanks and replace them with a sewer system. The move was required by state water quality regulators because of groundwater pollution.
Homeowners initially faced steep Joshua tree mitigation fees for performing the work needed to connect to the new sewer lines. Per the law, the fees more than double in areas within two miles of Joshua Tree National Park, which sits on Yucca Valley’s doorstep. A consultant hired by the town performed case studies on three different single-family homes and estimated that connecting to the sewer would cost their owners between $46,700 and $62,900 in mitigation fees alone.
This month, the CDFW announced a compromise. It would issue a take permit to the Hi-Desert Water District that covers the individual homeowners within the project footprint, said Alisa Ellsworth, project manager for CDFW Region 6. The water district has conducted a Joshua tree census and paid a security, Ellsworth said. If any of the trees surveyed die within four years of the project, the district will pay fees from that security, she said.
Baer pointed to the agreement as evidence that the department is listening to the public and accommodating their concerns. “We really are doing our best to hear folks and be flexible within the constraints of the law,” she said.
Other towns could work out similar deals to shift most of the burden of permitting and mitigation fees from individual homeowners onto local governments, Cummings said. These jurisdictions could create community protection plans that identify areas where Joshua trees should be conserved and simplify the process for people seeking to build on or maintain their lots, he said.
“How to manage an imperiled species within a community can be difficult,” he said, “but ultimately, I’ve never met a community that regrets protecting trees and open spaces.”
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