The wildlings go into frozen ground the second week of November. Your hands ache in the cold as you work methodically across the slope, spacing transplants at calculated intervals—close enough for eventual seed exchange, far enough that competition won't kill them before they establish. Each one costs $1.07 if it survives, and at this elevation, with these soils, survival rates hit 85 percent by year three.
Hit. The data from similar sites is clear.
The morning light catches frost on basalt outcrops as you move upslope through the Ruby Mountains drainage. This is 2039, and sagebrush ecosystems have been transitioning at 1.3 million acres annually for two decades. You chose this particular 2,400 acres because the numbers work—elevation above 6,500 feet, north-facing aspect, soil moisture adequate through June most years. The kind of site where intensive restoration actually takes.
You're betting everything on "actually."
The work began weeks ago: removing cheatgrass before seed set, creating bare ground patches where sagebrush can establish without competing for early-season moisture. The cheatgrass keeps coming back—it always does—but up here, native perennial grasses still dominate. The fire return interval hasn't collapsed into the three-to-five-year cycle that's turned lower elevations into annual grassland monocultures. Walk downslope three thousand feet and you'll find nothing but cheatgrass and charred ground. Walk here and you'll find bluebunch wheatgrass, Idaho fescue, the architecture of an intact system.
"We're building refugia," you tell the graduate student documenting methods. Places where sagebrush persists while restoration technology scales up. The need already exceeds available resources by orders of magnitude, but that's not an argument for doing nothing. It's an argument for choosing carefully.
The technical work is substantial but achievable. Wildlings transplanted from nearby populations show 95 percent reproduction rates by year three, recruiting new plants through seed at 2.4 seedlings per survivor. Your team monitors soil moisture weekly, adjusts grazing timing to reduce fuel loads without damaging establishing plants, tracks every transplant through GPS coordinates and annual surveys. The data accumulates: survival curves, recruitment rates, cost per established plant.
You grew up in sagebrush country, learned to read landscapes through the distribution of plant communities across elevation gradients. The smell of sagebrush after rain is your childhood. The way light moves across silver-green leaves at dawn is the first beauty you remember naming. Not abstractions. The texture of a world.
You understand that Wyoming big sagebrush on warm, dry sites has crossed thresholds into annual grassland across millions of acres, that restoration there requires intensive intervention that mostly fails. But you also know that not every acre has transformed, that elevation and moisture create gradients of possibility. Some landscapes can still be held.
By afternoon, the crew has planted 800 wildlings across three acres. Your back hurts. Your fingers are numb. The wildlings look fragile in the frozen ground—small gray-green bundles of stems and roots, each one tagged and mapped. At this rate, completing the drainage takes two seasons. You walk the planted slope as light angles across the Ruby Mountains, examining spacing, checking that each transplant sits at the right depth. The work feels simultaneously urgent and patient—urgent because transformation accelerates every year, patient because sagebrush recovery operates on decadal timescales.
The 350 wild animal species whose fates are tied to sagebrush depend on places like this. Sage-grouse nesting success drops to near-zero in cheatgrass monocultures because chicks are exposed to predators and can't find the annual flowering plants they need to eat. Pygmy rabbits lose habitat to annual grassland and have nowhere else to go. The ecological stakes justify the intensive effort, the careful attention to site selection, the willingness to work at scales that seem impossibly small against the magnitude of transformation.
Intensive intervention in carefully selected sites maintains sagebrush as a component of future ecosystems, even as the biome contracts to a fraction of its historical extent.
You're creating adapted sagebrush communities that persist under warmer, drier conditions, that provide habitat and ecosystem functions even as surrounding landscapes transform. The wildlings you're planting today reproduce in 2042, recruit new plants by 2045, form the nucleus of a persistent population by 2050. This won't return the landscape to historical conditions—climate has shifted too far. But it might hold something.
The resistance strategy requires accepting that most landscapes will transform while working to hold what can be held. It requires believing that intensive intervention in carefully selected refugia maintains sagebrush as a component of future ecosystems, even if the biome contracts to a fraction of its historical extent. It requires faith that the technical knowledge being developed—which sites support restoration, which methods work where, how to build resilience into establishing populations—matters for the landscapes that remain.
As November light fades, you mark the final planting coordinates. Tomorrow you start the next three acres. Next month, another drainage. The transformation continues at 1.3 million acres per year, but here, on this north-facing slope in the Ruby Mountains, 800 wildlings are taking root in frozen ground.
Refugia matter. Maintaining sagebrush in places where it can persist creates seed sources for future restoration, preserves genetic diversity, provides habitat for species that have nowhere else to go. The technical knowledge accumulated through intensive intervention proves valuable when resources eventually catch up to need, or when climate stabilizes enough that restoration becomes viable at larger scales.
Fighting for what remains is worth the cost, even when the odds are uncertain. Some landscapes deserve the attempt. Some ecosystems are worth the intensive labor of resistance. 2,400 acres of refugia, multiplied across dozens of similar sites throughout the Great Basin, might be enough to keep sagebrush as a living component of future landscapes rather than a historical memory.
In three years you'll know the survival rates. In ten years you'll know if they're recruiting. In twenty years you'll know if you've built something that persists. The work operates on geological time, and the answers come slowly.
For now, there's tomorrow's planting, and the drainage after that, and the careful documentation of what works and what doesn't. The resistance continues, one wildling at a time, on slopes where the numbers work and the landscape still holds the possibility of sagebrush against stone.