Fire in the Anthropocene has become the environmental equivalent of nuclear war.
In Greener Than You Think—a 1947 novel by left-wing science fiction writer Ward Moore—a mad woman scientist in Los Angeles, one Josephine Francis, recruits a down-and-out salesman named Albert Weemer, described as having “all the instincts of a roach,” to help promote her discovery: a compound called “Metamorphizer” that enhances the growth of grasses and allows them to thrive on barren and rocky soils. She dreams of permanently ending world hunger through a massive expansion of the range of wheat and other grains. Weemer, a scientific ignoramus, thinks only of making a quick buck peddling the stuff door to door as a lawn treatment. Desperately needing cash to continue her research, Francis reluctantly agrees, and Weemer heads out to the yellowed lawns of tired bungalow neighborhoods.
To his surprise the treatment, which alters grass genes, works—only too well. In the yard of the Dinkman family, crabgrass is converted into a nightmare “Devil Grass,” resistant to mowing and weedkillers, that begins to spread across the city. “It writhed and twisted in nightmarish unease…inexorably enveloping everything in its path. A crack in the roadway disappeared under it, a shrub was swallowed up, a patch of wall vanished.” It continues to eat pavements and houses and finally consumes the city: a monstrous new nature creeping toward Bethlehem.
Greener Than You Think is both hilarious and slightly unnerving. But its absurd premises are being turned into current events by climate change: In reality, Devil Grass is actually Bromus, a tribe of invasive and almost ineradicable grasses bearing appropriately unsavory names such as ripgut brome, cheat grass, and false brome. Originating in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, some species have been around California since the Gold Rush, when overgrazing allowed the bromes and European oat grass to aggressively replace native species. But now fire and exurban sprawl have become their metamorphizers as they colonize and degrade ecosystems throughout the state.
The Eastern Mojave Desert is a grim example. En route from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, 20 minutes away from the state line, there’s an exit from I-15 to a two-lane blacktop called Cima Road. It’s the unassuming portal to one of North America’s most magical forests: countless miles of old-growth Joshua trees mantling a field of small Pleistocene volcanoes known as Cima Dome. The monarchs of this forest are 45 feet high and hundreds of years old. In mid-August an estimated 1.3 million of these astonishing giant yuccas perished in the lightning-ignited Dome Fire.
This is not the first time that the Eastern Mojave has burned. A megafire in 2005 scorched a million acres of desert, but it spared the Dome, the heart of the forest. Over the last generation, an invasion of red brome has created a flammable understory to the Joshuas and transformed the Mojave into a fire ecology. (Invasive cheatgrass has played this role in the Great Basin for decades.)
California’s Desert Fauna Will Never Recover
In Greener Than You Think—a 1947 novel by left-wing science fiction writer Ward Moore—a mad woman scientist in Los Angeles, one Josephine Francis, recruits a down-and-out salesman named Albert Weemer, described as having “all the instincts of a roach,” to help promote her discovery: a compound called “Metamorphizer” that enhances the growth of grasses and allows them to thrive on barren and rocky soils. She dreams of permanently ending world hunger through a massive expansion of the range of wheat and other grains. Weemer, a scientific ignoramus, thinks only of making a quick buck peddling the stuff door to door as a lawn treatment. Desperately needing cash to continue her research, Francis reluctantly agrees, and Weemer heads out to the yellowed lawns of tired bungalow neighborhoods.
To his surprise the treatment, which alters grass genes, works—only too well. In the yard of the Dinkman family, crabgrass is converted into a nightmare “Devil Grass,” resistant to mowing and weedkillers, that begins to spread across the city. “It writhed and twisted in nightmarish unease…inexorably enveloping everything in its path. A crack in the roadway disappeared under it, a shrub was swallowed up, a patch of wall vanished.” It continues to eat pavements and houses and finally consumes the city: a monstrous new nature creeping toward Bethlehem.
Greener Than You Think is both hilarious and slightly unnerving. But its absurd premises are being turned into current events by climate change: In reality, Devil Grass is actually Bromus, a tribe of invasive and almost ineradicable grasses bearing appropriately unsavory names such as ripgut brome, cheat grass, and false brome. Originating in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, some species have been around California since the Gold Rush, when overgrazing allowed the bromes and European oat grass to aggressively replace native species. But now fire and exurban sprawl have become their metamorphizers as they colonize and degrade ecosystems throughout the state.
The Eastern Mojave Desert is a grim example. En route from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, 20 minutes away from the state line, there’s an exit from I-15 to a two-lane blacktop called Cima Road. It’s the unassuming portal to one of North America’s most magical forests: countless miles of old-growth Joshua trees mantling a field of small Pleistocene volcanoes known as Cima Dome. The monarchs of this forest are 45 feet high and hundreds of years old. In mid-August an estimated 1.3 million of these astonishing giant yuccas perished in the lightning-ignited Dome Fire.
This is not the first time that the Eastern Mojave has burned. A megafire in 2005 scorched a million acres of desert, but it spared the Dome, the heart of the forest. Over the last generation, an invasion of red brome has created a flammable understory to the Joshuas and transformed the Mojave into a fire ecology. (Invasive cheatgrass has played this role in the Great Basin for decades.)
California’s Desert Fauna Will Never Recover