Creosote, a scrubby desert bush that scientists refer to as Larrea tridenta, has figured prominently in my own teaching and research on what we can learn from overlooked, or non-charismatic species. Most people traveling in their cars between Phoenix, Arizona and Los Angeles, California pay little attention to the miles of creosote on either side of the US Interstate. But for the indigenous Tohono and Akimel O’odham people who have lived in the Sonoran Desert for 10,000 years or more, this plant is much more than an overlooked species. It is central to their histories, cosmology, medicinal treatments, and everyday life. Creosote is, literally, considered a drug store. A tea made from the plant is used for colds, chest infections, intestinal discomfort, nausea, swollen limbs, and to ease the pain of childbirth (Nabhan 14-15). The tiny, resinous leaves smell like rain when they are crushed in your fingers. The O’odham line the graves of their dead with its branches so they can take the smell of the desert with them when they pass.

Well known O’odham poet and MacArther fellow Ofelia Zepeda, nods to these uses in her poem, “Bury Me with the Band.”

My mother used to say, “Bury me with a band,”
and I’d say, “I don’t think the grave will be big enough.”
Instead, we buried her with creosote bushes,
and a few worldly belongings.
The creosote is for brushing her footprints away as she leaves.
It is for keeping the earth away from her sacred remains.
It is for leaving the smell of the desert with her,
to remind her of home one last time.

Ofelia Zepeda

In their creation story, O’odham people remember that when their creator being, Earth Maker, first began expanding throughout the planet, he took soil and flattened it in his hands. From that soil, the first green thing, creosote, grew. This story is literally a shorthand for a wealth of botanical knowledge. It is not an exaggeration to say that creosote is among the first green things to grow. It is one of the oldest continuously living biological organisms on Earth. Some dead branches have been radio-carbon dated back 17, 000 years, and scientists tell us that living, clonally-growing stands of creosote can be over 10,000 years old. The roots of mature creosote grow in clonal circles, making what may seem like many plants, one large individual. The oldest known individual creosote, affectionately named “King Clone” grows near Death Valley in the California stretch of the Mohave Desert. In The Oldest Living Things in the World, fine arts photographer Rachel Sussman’s images of King Clone capture both the robustness and fragility of a plant with a life span that dwarfs the longevity of the place it is growing, the United States (18-22). Creosote can live up to two years with no water and regularly survives days when temperatures are over 115 degrees Fahrenheit; the plant has also survived extreme human activities, including the nuclear bombings conducted in the Nevada desert (Sussman, Oldest 18-22). In a highly-viewed TED Talk, Sussman frames her photographs of creosote and other long-lived plants as an invitation to step outside of “quotidian existence and consider a different time scale”, persistent evolution, and environments that are rapidly changing as greenhouse gasses warm the planet (Sussman, TED).

Creosote is central to O’odham cosmological understandings of how the world came to be. O’odham elders, interviewed by Gary Paul Nabhan, for Gathering the Desert say that, once, there was nothing on the land, and the world was dark. Then, Earth Maker took soil and creosote, among the first flowering plants to evolve on Earth, grew. From the plant’s tiny, resinous leaves and branches, the first animal, a tiny insect, the creosote lac scale emerged. This insect exudes a resinous substance known as lac and uses this substance to protect its own body. In the O’odham creation story, the lac scale takes this resin and creates the towering mountains placed centrally in O’odham lands (Nabhan 11). The story is remarkable for its depiction of the entangled relationships between insects, plants, humans, and their surrounding ecosystems. Botanically, the immobile, creosote sucking lac scale secretes long chain hydrocarbons derived from excess sugars in the creosote sap it consumes. The female produces large quantities of a reddish-colored lac a “material [that] is available for collection and use throughout the year” (Sutton). The O’odham gather the resin to create as a sealant for their famous, intricately woven baskets and a glue for broken ceramics. It is also notable that active scale insect colonies are involved in a multispecies relationship that involves being attended by ants which gather honey dew and defend the scales against attack. Another plant, Ambrosia dumosa, or burro-weed or white bursage, is a common constituent of the creosote-bush scrub community and research has just begun on whether or not the creosote and burro weed communicate mychorrizally.

Finally, while millions of people zip back and forth on highways with little or no attention to creosote, a closer look at the plant calls upon us to rethink human relationship to deep time and persistent and successful plant evolution. Creosote emerged at the end of the ice age, lived through megafauna extinctions, and has weathered the meteoric rise of human population. We are used to thinking about deep time through the geologic, but what about the organic? What can we learn from long lived plants that have evolved and adapted in extreme conditions? The Life Overlooked project and related undergraduate course was inspired by Anna Tsing’s provocative multimedia projects. It asks students to become “citizen humanists” who build a portfolio of humanistic materials and scientific data around an overlooked, common, or backyard species. The humanistic materials might include poetry, photography, film or other multimedia contributions that create more awareness of human connections to the species under examination within the long-lived global ecosystem we call Earth. These stories aim to provoke deeper thinking about how we can build flourishing, healthy futures for the next 10,000 years.