Listen to an extended interview with Executive Director Kelly Herbinson.

Produced by Odelia Rubin, podcast producer and Mojave Desert Land Trust volunteer.

01:12 Kelly’s first desert tortoise encounter.
15:10 Renewable energy and the California desert.
21:07 What MDLT is doing and why.
39:52 A labor of love: growing plants from seed and the annual native plant sale.
46:24 Preventing biodiversity loss: the Mojave Desert Seed Bank.
51:34 Ants!

Transcript

Note: This interview was produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page.

Odelia Rubin

Hello! My name is Odelia Rubin. I'm a podcast producer and volunteer at the Mojave Desert Land Trust in Joshua Tree. As a volunteer, usually I do things like clean seeds or do land monitoring, but we thought it would be neat to make an audio snapshot of what desert conservation at MDLT looks like right now. So today I'm mixing up my volunteer work-life and I'm interviewing Kelly Herbinson, MDLT's Executive Director.

Kelly is a wildlife biologist by training and a wealth of knowledge about the desert. We chatted in her office, which she shares with the MDLT Seed Bank – home to thousands and thousands of native plant seeds. So you may hear the refrigerators in the background throughout the interview. Kelly and I are going to talk about the latest on protecting native desert species like the Joshua tree and the desert tortoise. We’ll learn why green energy developments like solar farms might be more complicated than you think, and we're going to settle the score once and for all: Why? Why does the annual native plant sale feel like Black Friday?

Odelia Rubin

So to start, I'd love to know, how you found yourself out here in the desert?

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah! Great.

Odelia Rubin

Kelly began her career in the desert as a young field biologist studying desert tortoises.

Kelly Herbinson

I'd certainly never seen a wild desert tortoise, so I was really excited about that, and I drove to Barstow and I remember the day really vividly. It was this crazy, one of those windy sandstorm days where you can't really see in front of you. And I remember pulling into town and I was staying at one of those little motels on Route 66 and I remember just pulling into the motel parking lot and crying – I was like…what? Where did I end up? It was so different from where I'd been in Montana and Northern California, I didn't know anyone, I didn't know anything about the desert. This was October of 2002 and I showed up to work the next day, and this particular job was they needed biologists to make sure that no desert tortoises were being hurt during the construction of a gas pipeline that was being installed. So that was my entrance.

Odelia Rubin

And at that point what was the status of the desert tortoise?

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah. It was 2002, so the tortoise was federally listed in 1990 as threatened. We knew it was threatened, and that's why they needed people like me out there because of the protections for the tortoise – anytime anyone's doing any kind of ground disturbance in their habitat, they need people to make sure that the tortoises aren't being harmed by it.

Odelia Rubin

And so did you, this first time, did you see desert tortoises? Were they there, were you seeing them? And what was it like?

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah. Gosh, I was on that job for a long time, many, many months. And I got there in October, right? When tortoises go into hibernation. So there were no tortoises. It was a really difficult job working 14 hours a day with these construction crews with nothing to look at. I remember spending my time trying to learn all the native plants and just walking around and learning about the desert. But in the springtime, I saw my first desert tortoise. And I also remember that moment so well because I was walking alone, doing some surveys…that must have been early March, and I remember looking up and seeing a desert tortoise walking out of its burrow. And I had a moment with the tortoise where the tortoise saw me, and I saw it, and it was really profound, which maybe sounds silly, but it was a really life-changing experience for me and I just was like, whoa! I knew what I was looking for, but just really seeing one in the wild – and I'm sure people feel this way often when they see them – they're really breathtaking creatures, and it's like these dinosaurs that still live here. They're unlike anything else out here, and it was very exciting. And I think in that, through that whole process, I really fell in love with the desert and these wild animals that live here and everything about it.

Odelia Rubin

That's such a crazy process of going and looking for a tortoise for months until you see one!

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah, yeah, I think there’s something to it – like having been there for five months, walking every day, all day, looking for them and having it happen – maybe that was part of it, just seeing one on the first day I may have been less excited about it.

Odelia Rubin

So how did you come from there to work at MDLT?

Kelly Herbinson

Well, there was a long road. So that was 22 years ago, I guess 19 years before I started working at MDLT. From that time I saw the tortoise in Barstow, that job was sort of starting to wrap up and I got asked to participate in another job which was called line distance sampling for desert tortoises. And that is the way that the federal government sort of census how many desert tortoises are left. As a protected species they have to know what's happening with their populations. Is it going up? Is it going down? And line distance sampling is a technique for surveying for wild animals to sort of see how many are left. I got asked to participate in that job, and I would say that it was that spring that my life really changed. I sort of ended up, you know, selling everything I owned, buying a pickup truck, getting rid of my apartment, I moved into my 4-wheel drive Nissan pickup truck and sort of went out with this ragtag group of 25 tortoise biologists. It was like finding my family for the first time. It was a really powerful experience. You know how they always say you have your biological family, and then if we're lucky, we find a family to be with later in our life, and I just really felt like this crazy ragtag group of biologists living in their trucks were definitely my people. And I got to see a lot of tortoises that spring!

Odelia Rubin

After that, Kelly's life took a detour. She went to grad school to study her passion – ants!

Kelly Herbinson

Of course I studied desert ants.

Odelia Rubin

She then got an MFA in creative writing, but eventually she found herself called back to the desert.

Kelly Herbinson

There was this massive solar project happening in Ivanpah, and they needed biologists badly because it was such a big project. There are a lot of tortoises there. I knew that region well from doing line distance sampling. It’s a really special, incredible place and there was this big push for renewable energy that had started. So I ended up finishing up my MFA and just getting dropped into kind of Ground Zero of this desert tortoise translocation for a renewable energy project in Ivanpah, which is this really special valley up off of I-15 right at the California-Nevada border. And it's one of the most healthy and verdant areas in the desert and healthiest populations of tortoises and I was brought in to be one of the biologists and ended up working my way up to being one of the lead biologists managing the tortoises on that site.

Odelia Rubin

Side note, if you've driven between Vegas and California in the past decade, you've probably seen Ivanpah off the highway. It's the world's largest concentrated solar facility. It's marked by towers that reflect the sun's light and heat, and beams that look like something out of science fiction.

Kelly Herbinson

And while I was there, this is really the first project like that that I'd been a part of that was destroying a lot of habitat. Having to watch that and having to sort of shepherd the tortoises through that process, and identifying them, and moving them off site, and radio tracking them – it was really hard! It was really emotional, and it's making me tear up just thinking about it. You know, this place and this thing that you love, seeing it be impacted.

Odelia Rubin

What did it look like as you’re moving the tortoises? What is that? What does that mean exactly?

Kelly Herbinson

Well, it's a many, many years long process and because it was tortoise habitat, the way that the agencies manage that is they say, ‘OK well, the developers can develop the habitat, but you have to save all of the individual tortoises on site.’ – which is great, but not great at the same time, right? That meant there were probably 80 biologists on that project walking straight lines back and forth, combing every square inch of land to find every tortoise, put radio transmitters on them so we can find them, and then simultaneously, we had to locate an area off-site that we were going to put these tortoises. But we had to find all the tortoises in that area because you can't just put tortoises in with other tortoises and hope it all works out. We had to radio track tortoises in – we called it the recipient area – for at least a full year before we could move them. So we had all of these populations of tortoises radio tracked, and the idea is to learn all about them from taking health examinations to make sure they don't have a disease that's really infectious and also to sort of figure out who the alpha males are, where the males are, where the females are, because you don't want to put an alpha male in with another alpha male. They'll kill each other.

It was years of research on these individuals and then finally when the weather is right – and we had to make sure there weren't drought conditions and that kind of thing – we literally take the tortoises, put them in plastic bins, and walk them or drive them to their new spot. So we identified individual locations to put each individual and dug them new burrows. And then we set them in their new spot and gave them water and then walked away! And we radio tracked them for years to make sure that they settled in, eventually. Some of them settled in right away, and some of them tried to walk back to the side, so there was a lot of waiting for things to settle. But eventually they did. I worked on that site for many years actually.

In that process, one of my coworkers – who I really appreciate – we'd all been so glum about watching that land get destroyed that she was like, ‘Let's find an organization to donate to!’ and she did a bunch of research and found MDLT! So a bunch of us pulled together a bunch of money and donated a big chunk to MDLT, and that's how I heard about them. That was in 2013, and I had gotten married and my husband and I had a house in Pioneertown where we lived when I wasn't in the field. I met some of the board members after we donated and they asked me to become a board member for MDLT. I started on the board in 2013 and served in that capacity until I became Executive Director in 2021.

Odelia Rubin

Yeah, it's such a long road! It’s interesting and, as a working biologist, are a lot of the jobs that are available – is that kind of what it looks like?

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, you can tell that before I went to grad school, the landscape of being a tortoise biologist was pretty different from what it is now, because that kind of development just wasn't happening. And it was really research focused. And then now, there's still a little bit of research that happens, but now there's so many renewable energy projects. When I started in 2002 there were probably 30 or 40 dedicated desert tortoise field biologists. There are hundreds now because of all that work, and almost all of it is doing things like monitoring a construction crew when they're putting in a pipeline or monitoring a bulldozer taking out desert to put in solar panels.

Odelia Rubin

So why…how do I say this. Why do you feel that it's important to protect the desert? I feel that some people, when they see the idea of solar going in in the desert, they say there's nothing there, so why not?

Kelly Herbinson

That's a great question, and my favorite question. Yeah, the desert really suffers from a sort of reputation or image issue where just the word ‘desert’ actually means something that is counter-intuitive to what it actually is. A lot of times we even see the desert and we see there's a lot of sand and rocks and very sparse vegetation. And if you're just driving through, that's what you see, and you assume there's not much here. I've met so many people passing through, tourists passing through when I worked on that job – I subsequently worked on four other solar projects after that one. I spent about seven years just doing desert tortoise translocations on solar projects. And you know I'd meet tourists that were like, ‘We really just need to panel the entire desert – it should be covered in solar panels, like that's going to fix our climate change issue.’ And you know, I firmly believe that climate change is the biggest issue and threat to humans, and to the desert, and a swift divestment from fossil fuels is exactly what we need to be doing, and a deep investment in renewable energy is exactly what we need to be doing. But we've overlooked the fact that the desert is actually one of the more biodiverse regions on the planet! We have a lot of species that live here and live nowhere else on the planet. We have over 2,400 species of flowering plants, and many of them are endemic to the desert and live nowhere else. There's, you know, hundreds of species of bees that live here, and the species biodiversity in the desert is similar to what you might find in the Northern California forest. But I think that's very shocking to a lot of people to learn that.

And so that's really what the Mojave Desert Land Trust and other groups are working towards, is really being a voice and an advocator for protecting that land and those species that are also playing a role in climate resiliency. The desert actually plays a big role in carbon sequestration. It sequesters carbon differently than a pine forest. Right now, when we're looking at a landscape’s ability to store carbon, most of what we look at is the density of trees or the abundance of trees. We don't have very many trees here in the desert, but we do have these multiple layers of species that are sequestering carbon from like dense vegetation to living soil crust of lichens and mosses and cyanobacteria that blanket the entire desert that are doing some of that work. And then we have these root systems underneath the vegetation litter filled with mycorrhizal fungi that are playing a role in carbon sequestration. And then we have soils that actually do a lot of work holding carbon in the form of calcium carbonate and caliche. And none of that is taken into account when areas are evaluated for their ability to hold carbon.

Odelia Rubin

Yeah, I think I think it's a good explanation for why. I would love to see more green energy, but it's challenging and I think it's often…like a conflicting interest, I think, for a lot of people who are really passionate about helping fix the climate change problem in whatever way we can. And for people who care about the environment, it can be, I think it's a tough and interesting problem.

Kelly Herbinson

It is! And you know, it's really something that I grapple with on a daily basis. Like I said, we need renewable energy, as much as possible, as quickly as possible, but we have to be thoughtful about creating another problem by helping one but then creating another one. And that biodiversity loss is a massive issue, and land conversion…there's plenty of other places to put solar panels that wouldn't reduce that biodiversity or harm that habitat. We're just at a point where we can't afford to lose more nature. We just can't lose any more.

Odelia Rubin

I have so many questions I could ask about the ecosystem, but I would love to get a little bit more into MDLT and MDLT's mission. And I know MDLT does a ton of different things, so I think we could start by talking about some of the different things you do; one of them is about protecting certain species, maybe we can chat about that first.

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah! Our official mission is protecting the California deserts for their natural and cultural resource value. Another way I put it sometimes is that we're really working to ensure that the California desert region maintains an interconnected and functioning ecosystem so that all of the biodiversity and all the people that live here can live here for as long as possible. And there's lots of ways to do that, and a lot of our policy, both in California and federally, is designed to protect individual species. And so often we have to, because of the way our policy is written, address specific species issues in order to address these landscape-scale issues. And there are two species – well, there's a lot – but two that we have programs really directed towards targeting those species; that's the Joshua tree and the desert tortoise. They’re two of our endemic species, meaning they live here and nowhere else, and they're both fragile and are susceptible to the threats that we're facing right now and are both imperiled species in different ways.

The western Joshua tree has been identified as being particularly susceptible to the threats of climate change. Right now Joshua trees are pretty ubiquitous in the desert. You see them everywhere, and they look great. But if you look at modeling the predicted climate scenarios going to the future, and modeling what Joshua trees need to survive, they actually live in pretty narrow niches. What we call a niche is like a set of factors that they need to survive. Those are largely going away with these new predicted climate scenarios. Or at the very least, they're dramatically shifting to the point where in Joshua Tree National Park, it's predicted that if we don't change our carbon emissions that the suitable habitat for Joshua trees will be reduced to about 2% of what it is right now.

Odelia Rubin

And what is changing in the environment that makes it so tough for them?

Kelly Herbinson

Climate. And that is largely composed of temperature – so temperatures probably getting warmer, hotter – and then variable precipitation; intense periods of drought marked by intense periods of rainfall, if we're lucky! Basically a shift to a warmer and sometimes drier and sometimes wetter climate in general. And that really starts to reduce the areas that they're able to survive. So now we're really trying to figure out where are these areas that we call climate refugia? These regions where that species might survive in the future, so that we can really double down our efforts on, first and foremost, protecting those areas to make sure that those are saved from development and habitat loss and that kind of thing. The state of California passed a western Joshua Tree Conservation Act without protecting the species under the Endangered Species Act. Which is unprecedented, and that's largely because the species would be listed on the basis of climate change and modeled predictions of a future climate. And even though we feel pretty certain we know what that's going to look like, it's still a ‘this is probably what we'll see in the future’ versus ‘what's happening right now’.

Odelia Rubin

Got it. So that answers something that I've always wondered, and I think you addressed earlier, which is like you drive through the desert right now and you see them everywhere and they look great and healthy in so many areas…and what it means is that they are actually threatened, which is a prediction. Am I understanding right? That's why it's hard to get them protected.

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah, well, there's more to it. The other piece of the puzzle is that there's politics, and it's related to renewable energy development. The state has prioritized intensive renewable energy development in order to meet these climate goals. There's this really interesting push and pull happening, right there you know? Protecting the Joshua tree and saying there can be no development there or if you do develop it, there will be very high costs, will limit the places renewable energy can be developed. I think the state is really between a rock and a hard place, as they say, where you can't have it all –they're trying to thread that needle and figure out a way to put in protections for the Joshua tree, but not severely inhibiting the development of renewable energy. This act that was passed essentially puts a price tag on every Joshua tree that's destroyed, and creates a pot of funding with that money that will then, theoretically – it hasn't happened yet – be used to protect Joshua tree habitat. It's sort of like how mitigation works for endangered species, which is that; like for the desert tortoise, if a developer let's say develops an acre of land, they have to mitigate by protecting 3 acres of land somewhere else.

Odelia Rubin

Hmm. Or like people know about buying like a carbon credit or something like that. I feel like a lot of people get that too…it’s like an offset.

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah. Yes. That's an offset, it’s a whole other subject. And it's…there's a lot of philosophy there.

Odelia Rubin

It's hard when there's such, they're endemic to such a little small area too. I can imagine that makes it tricky.

Kelly Herbinson

Yes, yes. And there's not that much left to conserve – there is and there isn't. It's complicated. But MDLT is really taking a leading role in working to protect Joshua trees and really thinking about all of this and working with our legislators and our policymakers and informing them. We're the ones with the boots on the ground here, like, what are we seeing, what actually needs to happen to protect it? So we are doing a couple of things. One is that we were able to work with legislators to get a chunk of money written into the state's budget to fund Joshua tree conservation work outside of that funding pot that's being made through the act. We were able to just get a $1.5 million grant to do two things; one is to stand up a western Joshua tree conservation coalition. This coalition includes federal agencies, state agencies, NGO's, Tribal liaisons, and researchers, so that we can work together as a team – which is not something that always happens in conservation! And the state is writing, as we speak, a conservation plan for the species. The person writing that plan is part of our coalition, so we're all just trying to inform one another and how that could potentially go. And that's just a little bit of that money. The lion’s share of that grant money is going to be used to fund a research initiative to establish baseline long term monitoring sites for Joshua trees.

When it came to the listing of the species, it's hard because all we have is future scenarios of what will probably happen. But we really don't have that much data on what is actually happening with them right now. And we don't have a system under which to record the loss that's happening, or how are humans impacting it. So this research initiative, I'm really excited about – I think it's really important – is just going to, this year, go out and set up probably a thousand study plots across the range of the Joshua tree. We call it a demographic study plot where we'll measure all of the trees, and get an idea of how many Joshua trees are there? What size are they? Are they reproducing or not? To get that baseline data so that from now moving forward, we can know and document any growth or loss that occurs in the future.

Odelia Rubin

That's so cool! And I'd love to get into the desert tortoise and what you guys are doing now as well.

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah! Just recently, a bunch of federal agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Defense, the BLM [Bureau of Land Management] got together and decided to create something called – this is a very federal agency thing – the RASP program – there's a lot of acronyms – and it stands for the Recovery and Sustainment Partnership. Basically the idea is for all of these agencies that are interested parties – they want the tortoise to do better and be delisted – are putting funding together to really make some bold conservation actions for that species. I was really thrilled to see that, because the latest data about what's happening with tortoises, is that just in the last 20 years – which hits home for me because that's the exact 20 years that I was working with them – the density and abundance of desert tortoises has decreased by 37%. That's a substantial loss just in that small amount of time. And if we continue on that trajectory, you can see where we're headed, and there are lots of threats. It's a really tangled web for desert tortoises. There's a lot of habitat loss like we've talked about, the climate change issue is also real for tortoises. We also have things like invasive species, plant species that are overtaking their food sources. We have ravens that are depredating tortoises and eating a lot of hatchling tortoises. We have things like habitat destruction from illegal off-highway vehicle use and that kind of thing. All those things are feeding into this issue for the tortoise. So this RASP program is being developed to really focus an effort on protecting habitat for the tortoises, and MDLT was lucky enough to, now two years in a row, we've received some substantial grants to participate in that program. We're working in what we call the Superior-Cronese area, which is just northeast of Barstow, to really be working with the BLM [Bureau of Land Management] to put up signs, put up fences, and start to restore some of that area that has had illegal off-highway vehicle use – maybe not in any intentional way, but folks might not know where the legal routes are, or where they can be going – to make sure it's clear where you know this is a legal route you can drive down, and this whole area is a place we really need to keep people out of because there's a sensitive species here. We're working to put in some defenses for them there. And then we're also, through that program, acquiring land to protect in the area and hoping to build out more effectively protected areas for the tortoise there. And that program is just starting, but we're really excited to deeply invest and see if we can make some gains in their numbers in that area.

Odelia Rubin

That's so cool. And that'll be interesting to see. Is part of the program too that you study the effects of what you're doing, and you're tracking that over years, kind of like you used to do?

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah! We're working on that right now. We're not the only ones doing it. There's a couple other nonprofits that are working doing similar things in other areas. And we're working with the Fish and Wildlife Service to come up with a way to measure what are the baseline tortoise numbers. This is the kind of thing that it might take – it’s a long term thing. We're not going to see next year [that] all of a sudden there's always tortoises. They are long-lived creatures. It could take decades. But we're working to come up with a way to monitor that and see how it's working or not.

Odelia Rubin

It's exciting, exciting to hear. And I know we talked to this earlier and that these are just two of the species, and there's so many. Are there any other plants or animals that you wish that people knew about and were excited to protect?

Kelly Herbinson

So many! This is one of the things I think about a lot. Our policy is written for individual species, and because of that it tends to focus on big, clear, charismatic species that you can find easily, and we're monitoring, and people care about. But there are literally thousands. Thousands! If not tens of thousands of species that live in the desert that are mostly small, mostly insects, or fungi, or little plants, or that fun group of lichens and mosses and that kind of thing. I mean, there are tens of thousands of species we've never, we haven't even described probably most of them. And they are playing outsized roles in how our ecosystem functions. Having come from a world of studying ants and I'm – I don't want to say I'm biased towards them, but I know that ants play a really outsized role in the ecosystem, and we don't talk about that! And certainly no one is monitoring how the ants are doing. And I wish we could. Trust me, I talk about them all the time. For example, ant biodiversity is an indicator of overall biodiversity health, and that's a tool that people use in other areas is looking at ant biodiversity. As a land trust, we know that there are these tens of thousands of other species that utilize this place and that they're all intrinsically entitled to a right to survive, and humans rely on all of those species surviving and playing into this functioning ecosystem that's doing things like fixing nitrogen, and converting carbon, and creating oxygen, and that kind of thing. And I do. I do wish that we could illuminate their stories sometimes.

Odelia Rubin

Yeah, I think it's always the challenge of how to make it interesting. How do you get people to care?

I want to ask you more about it, but I also want to get to talk about the native plants and the seed bank! But maybe at the end we'll get, we'll get more into it.

For me, I first came into contact with MDLT through the plant sale. Which, if you are a local, you probably know that once a year there is a sale of native plants and you can plant them in your garden and landscape with them. And I was very excited, and then I found out everyone else in the community felt very excited. And when we showed up to get our plants we found people were coming in from Arizona to buy plants, and all over! And I'm curious it's just like a such a cool part of MDLT’s mission that you guys do, but it's always left me wondering why are these plants not more available or why are they only available here?

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah, it's a good question. Native plants are a labor of love to grow, and I like to say that we are an artisanal plant grower. We are literally hand collecting seed in the local area and nurturing that seed and growing those plants from seed that's sourced from here. That is a very lengthy and expensive process. Most of the plants, you know, you go to a nursery and you see that those are cultivated in a commercial, large scale, way where they're not hand collecting wild seed to grow those plants, they're farming. We’re a small nonprofit who grows plants for restoration and I think at some point had the idea that we could grow some for the public and sell them, but because our operation is so small and artisanal, it's very expensive. And we probably don't really even recoup the cost through the plant sale. We do it sort of as a community benefit. And for all of those people who have been to the plant sale, they can tell that we're not a commercial outfit because every year we're trying to figure out how to make it run more smoothly because you know, the people selling the plants on that day are you know, me, and botanists, so we're not retail space, which becomes abundantly clear if you show up! So one day out of the year, we're a retail space and we have to all get in that mindset. We've had so many conversations of like, ‘wow, there's such a need for this’. The reason it doesn't exist is because it's not a great business model. You would have to charge so much money, and people aren't willing to pay it. I mean, some people certainly have native plant nurseries and those do exist around, but it's very boom and bust. We sell whatever seeds are sprouting that year are the plants that you'll see in the next year's plant sale – it really depends on what we get, and it depends on the weather. So every year we sow seeds and certain plants don't make it. If we had a really hot summer or a really cold winter we'll lose huge, huge pieces of our crop for that year. It's very boom and bust. You'll probably – again, if you come to the plant sale – you’ll be like, ‘why do you have 6,000 penstemons and two of those?’. It's not because we set out to grow 6,000 penstemons and two jujubes. That's what lived through the process! It turns out that seed took really well, like we thought only 50% would survive and 100% did. And this one only 1% survived. So it's an imperfect process, and I've definitely thought ‘should we scale up and have it open more often?’ because I feel like planting native plants in your landscape at home is one of the best things people can do. And giving people a moment of pause before they plant a commercial ornamental species is something that feels really important. So realizing that all of our local – when we're talking about enhancing the biodiversity of the desert and in places like the Morongo Basin, if you live here – growing plants that are creating food and home for our pollinators is really important! That's such a great role you can play versus planting an ornamental that might actually introduce a pest species. That's a big problem for us because then that gets out into the landscape. In fact, that's a big problem for us. We've had that happen with a lot of invasive species, that's how that works. So it's a great part of our mission, and we're constantly trying to figure out the best way to serve it.

Odelia Rubin

Yeah! For me it was. It's such a gateway into the rest of what you guys do, but also of how special the desert is, to just be able to take some home with you and nurture it, and watch it grow, and go through its life cycle for the year – it's so special. And then also learning that if you go to places like Home Depot and you buy a mesquite tree, it's not going to be the native mesquite. Which I think actually people might not know that you're going to get a different variety of mesquite that's not native to this area. And I know some palo verde that they sell can be invasive, and it's a whole thing! You could just pick one up and not realize, you think you're getting a palo verde, which is the same as you'd see, but it's all different.

Kelly Herbinson

And that's something we really pride ourselves on is having local, genetically appropriate locally-sourced plants, so that when you're getting plants from us, you know that they're from here.

Odelia Rubin

I think that that gets us into the seed bank, as we're looking at in front of us. Can you describe to me what the seed bank is, what it's used for?

Kelly Herbinson

Yeah! So here at MDLT, we have this really great plant conservation program that started with this nursery growing native plants and collecting seed to grow our plants. At some point, we realized the importance of collecting seed to bank it for future restoration, in part because we've had situations like big swaths of our land burn in wildfires, and because the desert isn't fire adapted, that often means that a lot of the plants won’t come back. Joshua trees are a great example, they're not fire adapted. If they burn down, if they burned hot enough, they won't come back. So we realized at some point we need to be banking seed from our land so that we can restore it if something happens. We started doing that years ago on a small scale and as we have been coming to understand the importance of that, and then you start thinking about not just ‘oh, maybe next year we'll have a fire’, but also thinking about long term future scenarios and the real situation of biodiversity loss. I mean in the last, I believe 50 years, for example, there's been a 40% reduction in the number of bird species. It's significant and really scary, and that's the kind of thing you don't notice that, but that's real. And even though we often say ‘the desert region is still one of the more intact ecosystems in the lower 48’, that habitat loss we're experiencing, the land conversion, the invasive species, all those threats are causing this silent crisis, which is this reduction in biodiversity. But the idea with our seed bank is that we can collect it now and bank them as an insurance policy for the future. So if that were to happen, if we start to have these scenarios in the next one, two, three decades where we're seeing a loss in species, we can make sure that we have seed banked for restoration purposes. And I need to come up with a term for this, but I like to say like I'm an optimist, and I also feel like we're in a position to make a change, and the reality is that if we as humans can do the hard work of curtailing our carbon emissions, we can make it through and the planet will continue to warm for the next 50ish years, but then it'll drop off! If we can make those changes now, 50 years from now, we'll start to feel that.

And that's what I'm really working towards. And the hope is like, let's bank these seeds, let's get these species in the right, as supported and healthy as possible so that they can weather what that's going to be like for the next 50 years. So that after that, when the fruits of the work we've done pay off we’ll be prepared for that.

Odelia Rubin

I love this! Optimistic, optimistic but realistic! Preparing for it to be better.

Kelly Herbinson

And fighting for it! I mean it means we have to fight for it, and we have to work, and we have to act. And that's what we're doing.

Odelia Rubin

That's all for now. If you enjoyed this interview or you learn something today, make sure to let the team at MDLT know. Maybe we'll make more audio content for you in the future. I’m Odelia Rubin. Music today by Blue Dot Sessions www.sessions.blue.

If you'd like to support MDLT, go to MDLT.org/donate. On their website you can learn all about the subjects we discussed, and find out how you can get involved. Thank you so much for listening.

[Outro]

Odelia Rubin

Why are ants so exciting? I want to know a couple little things about them that you love!

Kelly Herbinson

Yes! OK. Where shall I start?

Almost all ants, bees, and wasps; it's a family of insects called Hymenoptera. They're almost all female societies, so all the worker ants and bees you see out in the world are all female. Native ants like the big red harvester ants that you probably see in the desert. They have one queen and tens of thousands of workers, and once a year that queen lays a royal brood – a group of what I'll call like virgin queens or queens-to-be. She lays eggs that are raised in a certain way and given certain foods that those ants are reproductive and they have wings.

And then she also lays a group of eggs that will become male ants. Those male ants look totally different. They're usually really small bodied with big heads and giant eyeballs, and they have wings as well. And what happens is that royal set of ants that are all winged, for like two weeks out of the year, all of the ant colonies for that species – and no one really knows what triggers this in the Mojave – but they'll all take flight at the same time once a year. And all of the males will fly first and they form these big swarms. And then the females take flight and they fly into the big swarms of male ants. And the females will mate with five, six, seven, eight males. But the males die as soon as they've mated with the female. So they're actually only alive for a couple of days. Those male ants, they don't even really have mouths to eat with. They're simply there to mate and exchange their genetic material. Those soon-to-be queen ants who've now mated with several males, they will take flight, drop to the ground, chew off their wings, and start digging their own colony and as soon as they get underground, they start laying eggs to become workers. And that's all they do the rest of their life, which can be like 30 years!