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Barret Baumgart

Barret Baumgart

DUMPSTER FIRES

A Blog & Occasional Podcast

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“Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” —Philip K. Dick

Everyone recognizes, knows, and loves the weird image of the Joshua Tree. The tree is featured in commercials, in films, music videos. It’s everywhere on Instagram and TikTok. Everyone is obsessed with it.

For years now the National Park has been the fastest growing in the United States. The real estate market in the Mojave Desert around the National Park has also been the fastest growing in California for several years. The tree is insanely trendy, a spiritual icon almost, the backbone of a new land boom in the Mojave Desert.

How is there anything new to add to this insanely popular, visually ubiquitous symbol of the West?

What nobody seems to realize—what everyone has somehow missed—is that the Joshua Tree was once universally despised by the white European travelers who first stumbled upon it. Virtually everyone wanted to see it wiped off the face of the planet. Victorian writers, travelers, and naturalist devoted an astonishing amount of ink, in the most purple florid prose, to depicting it as an actual monster deserving of extinction. Numerous entrepreneurial schemes were developed to eradicate the tree. The most serious was an attempt to turn it into paper throughout a series of mills at the edge of Los Angeles County—this just as the city was becoming the most advertised in the history of the world (1880s) and in need of... TONS OF PAPER.

Today, while all the cool kids from LA drive out to Joshua Tree and snap photos and post to Instagram, the same people—100 years ago, 150 years ago—where literally describing it as a demonic entity that needed to die.

YUCK erupted from this discovery. It was sparked by the crazy contradictions and tensions I found juxtaposing the Joshua Tree's current popularity boom with this strange buried history. Plenty of people are familiar with the statement of John C. Fremont who called the tree “the most repulsive object in the vegetable kingdom.” But nobody knows, and no author or researcher has ever excavated or even imagined the insane level of irrational animosity once directed at this humble, fragile yucca tree.

But this is only the beginning of the book.

What YUCK eventually builds to is a brief history of the West. It is a story about the birth of Los Angeles and Southern California—the largest interconnected built environment on earth—and now… as a result of its relentless growth… the death of the Joshua Tree.

Climate, the “semi-tropical” climate of Southern California, kicked off SoCal’s original land boom and mass migrations which have never really ceased. And the lifestyle that climate evolved—and that Los Angeles endlessly advertised not only on paper, but through film and television, the discovery of oil, and the embrace of the automobile—that lifestyle has ironically changed the climate.

After more than a century of effort to eradicate the tree, we’re finally almost there. The lifestyle pioneered in SoCal, that unsustainable lifestyle of endless affluent consumption that paved the way for global climate change, it looks it will itself finally kill off that gorgeous grotesque tree forever guarding the gates of the Southern California paradise.

A visual PowerPoint further summarizing the book and why it is marketable can be viewed here.
A color flyer featuring the front & back cover with blurbs can be found here.
Pointing to the back cover I like to say the book is already getting some blurbs from some big writers. I then also like to say that my first book published by the top university press, University of Iowa Press, did as well… In fact Richard Preston, the famous science writer guy who wrote that big ebola book that became the movie Outbreak, called it “An apocalypse of the weird… China Lake is a brilliant, often hilarious, and thoroughly original work of nonfiction… The book is unfailingly entertaining, keenly intelligent, and, in fact, is an almost shamefully good read.” I then like to say quickly too that China Lake made several best of the year lists (Kirkus, Brooklyn Rail).
A several page Press Kit with full blurbs and yet two further book jacket-like descriptions of the book is here.
I cropped and printed out a 24x36” poster (below) of the front cover of YUCK from the super high res pdf here.