Abstract: This study examines the process of formally considering a California Endangered Species Act (CESA) listing of the western Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia) as a threatened species under the stated threat of climate change. The Morongo Basin in California serves as a case study intended to showcase an evolving chapter in human-environment relations, the fragile nature of maintaining community cohesion while initiating state level oversight for a local species amid regional shifts, and the interplay between the longtime critical and emerging role of participatory application in political ecology (PE) that serves to foster collaborative strategies for species and landscape-level conservation. Given the precarity involved with species listings, the results of this research are intended to improve upon employed practices for the well-being of threatened and endangered species, ecological systems, and all stakeholders to the greatest extent possible. This is accomplished through the dissemination of stakeholder perspectives along with theoretical contributions of applied, or participatory, New West PE. The research methodology involves discourse network analysis (DNA) and Visone actor-concept network visualization programs. It also involves key informant interviews with stakeholder groups of diverse affiliations. This study finds that conceptualizations of nature vary in depth along the line of stakeholder affiliation while tending to center the western Joshua tree in the frame of personal views and values of the natural world. Furthermore, this state of species centrality plays into observed shifts in high desert communities that are emblematic of regional trends. These trends are manifested in the Morongo Basin by emergent actors that are unique in their composition. In addition, the unique nature of environmental conflict itself highlighted the multifaceted role of the western Joshua tree in the Morongo Basin, misalignment between local level decision makers and the CESA process, the indirect impacts of community changes on species conservation, and the precedential nature of climate change as a rationale for a CESA listing. Isolated stakeholder contributions to the conservation debate reveal a lack of collaboration across divergent interests. Proposals for improved management of the western Joshua tree highlight a need for greater education, inclusivity, and sustainability in species management, restoration, and planning. Propositions to improve the CESA process revealed a need for clarifying steps and their implications, penalties, mitigation goals, and the future of species and their respective ecological systems in an era of anthropologically induced climate change. The results of this study overall demonstrate the unique opportunity available to combine the principles of applied PE in the New West with endangered species conservation strategies to facilitate collaborative management of the western Joshua tree and its Mojave Desert habitat.