Owning land is a foundational concept of modern capitalistic societies, and a problematic one. Our public lands, especially in the American west, offer an imperfect but important idealogical construct of collective trust and care as a counterpoint to private ownership.
The cracks in the concept of ownership become apparent to me when I think about owning a few acres of land in the desert that include ancient creosote rings that are many thousands of years old.
How can we claim ownership of something so profoundly transcendent of our human horizon of time and place…? And yet, of course claim ownership we do!
The Lucerne Valley around the King Clone creosote preserve is filling up, and ancient plants are being scraped off as rural development encroaches.
Since a residency at High Desert Test Sites in January 2025, I’ve been asking myself if purchasing a modest plot of land and conserving, at least for my time, an ancient creosote ring vulnerable to development might really be the heart of this project… a way not just to document, but to literally invest in roots.
Part of me fears this would be a pointless or indulgent gesture as conservation rightly moves toward preserving ecosystems, not individual specimens. And yet having something tangible to visit and touch is, perhaps, a helpful, even necessary, scaffold to conceptualizing much bigger and more abstract things about this landscape, ecology, human development and climate change.
Left: nothing says “progress” like scraping every last bit of vegetation off the land and putting up a fence. Right: ancient creosote ring for sale in the Lucerne Valley in the top right corner of this 2.5 acre plot.