While cruising websites for inspiration for my next story, I happened upon some startling news! According to Mark A. Dimmit, Natural History Director at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and other desert bloom-savvy informers with Desert USA, the desert this year will look more like a bleak Mars-scape rather than a brilliantly decorated and inspiring showcase of desert wildflowers. Most of this is due to drought.
Dimmit offers forecasts for desert blooms (or the lack of) on the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum website. His outlooks date back to 1999, offering a pictorial and brief written historical log of the local desert's wildflower behavior. Here's what Dimmit's webpage shows - a rather depressing prognosis for 2007. Dimmit is quick to "break it to ya," and so wildflower enthusiasts who are emotionally unstable should take precaution...
Unfortunately, last year had the same forecast but deserts of the southwest proved to be bright and colorful in 2005 after being blessed with a wet winter. Dimmit's 2005 log features briefs and physical evidence of wildflower blooms in southern Arizona and California, and Sonora. Pictures speak louder than words and tell tales of desert delphinium and desert mariposa, which Dimmit called "two of the brightest wildflowers," in the Tucson Mountains. Dimmit's log also reported Picacho Peak sprouting poppies, although not as many blossomed as in previous years.
Dimmit encourages other wildflower watchers to contribute to his database photos and accounts of the desert landscape in bloom. He also lists other websites, like the above-mentioned Desert USA, which lists similar predictions for a much wider area of the southwest US and northern Mexico. Sigh...keep for your pedal-pickin fingers crossed for a more colorful future.
(note to readers: all pictures on this site are from Mark Dimmit's collection as displayed on his webpage through the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum)
This doesn't have anything to do with my topic, but I found it on my quest for clips this morning. Everybody can relax because rap stars really will save the world some day (In case your prayers have yet to be answered by Jay-Z, maybe send a letter to Tucson's own Swindoe?)
Doesn't everybody have a cause these days? What would you rally for - stop "the war", abortion rights, free speech, humanitarian issues...The environment is also on this list - save the whales, restore our rainforest, lower greenhouse emissions. Take your pick, make up a catchy rhyme or rhythm, get a group of people to say it with you and then wave it around town. I have to say, I've always had "causes" but nothing that I have rallied or really spoke up for - other than chastising anyone who litters, so I guess I "give a hoot."
Sunday afternoon, I was flipping through the channels on TV in a sleepy state of boredom when I passed by an image of a man in a khaki and olive green colored hat standing in what looked like the edges of a landfill. Actually, he was an Arizona Game and Fish representative standing in the desert along the Arizona Mexico border being interviewed by CNN. CNN said (and so have I) that illegal immigrants literally shed their belongings while the trek the deserts - clothing, empty water bottles and gallon-sized containers, backpacks, pill packages, diapers, human waste and just plain litter. One Game and Fish guy said the trash was "knee deep" in some areas. The turbulent marriage of immigration and the Arizona desert will no longer be known by the trail of the dead but the trail of their trash.
I feel that an interview like this would have always caught my attention for at least 60 seconds or so. If you read my first blog, I tried to make it apparent that I was much of my childhood revolved around being a friend of the forest...and desert for the matter. But lately, any media clips, soundbites, pictures or chat that I hear about trashing the border has become something of an obsession, mostly thanks to making the topic a semester-long topic of research for class. I've become desperate for material.
I think this desperation is making the issue of trashed borders grow into my current cause. I've always thought that causes instigate opinions and emotion. I tried to listen to my tiny, usually indifferent inner activist to see if I could muster some guster about the issue. It turns out she's alive and well, and we just reunited (the last time we met was when Brother Jed visited campus my sophomore year. My roommate called UAPD on him and then went to the Dean. Since then, my inner activist and I - and my roommate - don't even concern ourselves with giving him attention). I heard and felt a little roar in my belly when watching the CNN interview. I really do give a hoot.
This morning, I feverishly searched YouTube and and Google video for that CNN interview but no luck. In fact, The only videos I did find were of raw sewage flowing from outside Tijuana into the ocean. Gross...and kinda related, but mostly just disgusting. CNN.com didn't even mention a story on the topic of trails of trash along the border. My inner picketer was disappointed and now making a new sign for a new cause - more media attention to the trash on the border.
But atlas, from the abyss of the online media universe, one clip revealed itself. Brought to you by MinutemanHQ.com via YouTube, my inner activist presents to you: "Environmental Destruction Along The Border." (pull the curtains please...!)
Unfortunately, I don't have the facts. I have no idea where it was shot and the video lacks substantial commentary, but it makes my cause real. *Ren has stepped off her soap box*
When recently planning an afternoon hike on one of Coronado National Forest's trails that neighbor the border, I was expecting to see some action! You know, wildlife...I researched the trail page on Coronado National Forest's website and compared trail facts - distance, elevation, how heavily used the trail is, how hard or easy the hike would be, and how to get there. Based on a slightly confusing archaic DOS-like trail map on the website, I tried to gauge how close certain trails were to the border. I wanted to make my "hiking the border" experience as authentic as possible.
I have heard in the news and through talk that the border is becoming increasingly unsafe even just within the last year. For example, wildfire season has already started in Southern Arizona with two brush fires near the border town of Tubac. A handful of firefighters and a few engine crews responded to the two blazes, but it wasn't the 140 acres of burning brush that jeopardized their safety - it was the threat of illegal (and possibly armed) smuggler activity that is becoming more frequent in areas along the border that aren't as populated or patrolled as other hot spots of illegal entry. In February, Tucson Weekly published a feature in which the author trekked a highly traveled trail of illegal activity and documented all the rage and outcry by its rural inhabitants and the closure of a section of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and lived to tell about it. Keeping these minor details in mind, I decided to pick a trail outside of Sonoita in the Santa Rita Mountains, a safe 30 miles or so from the border.
To reaffirm how safe of a decision I had made, I called the Nogales Ranger Station to inquire about and trail of choice and casually question the rumor of an unsafe border. The woman I spoke to on the phone confirmed that the area I was planning to be in was regarded as a safe zone for hikers and campers and well traveled as a result. Going any further south, though, I was warned against. "It's just not a good idea," the woman suggested with a concerned motherly tone.
So, on a sunny-yet-chilly Friday morning my two friends and I set out going east on I-10, taking a turn south toward Nogales on I-19, then snaking southeast about a mile south of the Green Valley Country Club toward Madera Canyon. Our final destination: Bog Springs Campground. Our trail of choice: Bog Springs/Kent Springs trail.
For those interested in north-of-the-border scenery or seeking an out-of-city experience, Bog Springs is key. Climbing higher in elevation and in and out of a few sycamore-shaded spring locations, the desert sun and heat were never an issue on our hike. I was most drawn to the northward views of all the smaller communities between Madera Canyon and Tucson and the evasive ASARCO open pit copper mine near Sahuarita. The higher cliffs towering over the trail was even still sprinkled with snow despite 80 degree temps in Tucson and Nogales. In the end, my first "hiking the border" endeavour was a much needed escape from campus and the city, but rather quiet and uneventful. My trailblazing buddies and I covered 5.4 miles of trail in about three hours seeing only a few other hikers near the trailhead and maybe a bug or two here or there. Supposedly, the Bog Springs area is world-famous for bird watching although I didn't even hear a single feathered friend until a tiny black bird squeaked at us and flew off and we approached the trailhead coming back to the car. And, of course, we didn't witness any sort of illegal activity...Despite the lack of action, I still recommend this trail to anyone hoping to "get away" for an afternoon and walk among the sycamores.
Last fall, President Bush signed the Secure Fences Act that will provide close to $2 million to build a 700 miles of fence along the US-Mexico border. Environmental and humanitarian activists and other agencies and groups in opposition of the act seem to think the term "fence" is a dire understatement (some compare the notion to the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall in both physical and political light). Beyond political and humanitarian debate, one very serious consequence of a fence or wall along the border has been severely overlooked by both Congress and the media: Think of the animals! The truth of the matter is that any sort of blockade on the border will restrict the movement of anything doesn't fly - but even low flying insects and birds (such as the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl) will be threatened by a wall. Added to the list of endangered species living on the border are the Mexican Grey Wolf, the Peninsular Bighorn Sheep. These are just two out of 30 endangered species living in the Sonoran Desert, 15 of those (including the Bighorn Sheep and the Grey Wolf - and the javelina, ocelot, and Sonoran pronghorn) have habitats intersected by the border. A wall will inhibit animals maneuver their natural habitat as the have for generations. Trails normally trekked for water, food and shelter will be disrupted with a likely fate for that animal. Species existing above the red line will also be affected and many fear that a wall will be all that is takes to make the endangered list double in the next decade. For further reading that explores the issues of endangered species on the border, look no further than Plenty Magazine and BioOne Online Journal.
I grew up in a very environmentally conscience household in Flagstaff headed by two Forest Service Employees, and complete with solar panels, a vegetable gardens, recycling bins and even...ugh, cloth diapers. To complete the stereotype, my family has owned three Volkswagen buses and my dad even grows his own hops to create his own homebrew.
In retrospect, I cherish the values that my upbringing instilled in me despite thinking my family a trio of tools during middle school. Eventually, I matured graduating from high school and left the high country to dwell in the deserts of Southern Arizona. My first reaction upon moving into the Stadium dorms at the U of A was that of disappointment. I immediately called my mom and whined that I lived in the middle of a concrete jungle of parking lots and the atrocity that is that stadium that lacked anything green and natural. Alas, I am my parent's daughter.
Following in my parent's footsteps, I started working at the Forest Service myself during my junior year as an office aide. While it seems like a given, to me, that the National Forest Service is a government agency that everyone should be aware of, most people's response to my new job was, "you're working for a florist?" I quickly developed a standard response to such reactions to enlighten my peers. "The Forest Service is a government agency that oversees a lot of the undeveloped and still untouched land in the US..." Sometimes, from those less exposed to 'the great outdoors' I would get a funny look followed by, "But there aren't any forests down here."
Because of the design of my childhood, I've come to appreciate those enchanted locations that lack the sound of traffic, car horns, cross-walk-coo-coos, construction, low flying planes, and people unaware of the volume of their voice while jabbering on their cell phones. Fortunately, there are places as close as just outside city limits where "noise pollution" is minimal and the only kind of traffic around are those of birds, animals and insects. Much of this land is intersected by the U.S.-Mexican border.
(Google satellite image of border towns Nogales and Douglas - notice the lack of development between the two towns. Some of this land is Forest Service land and some of it is probably privately owned. Regardless...that's a whole lot of desert of either side of the border.)
This blog is intended to give thought and research on how concepts like border control interfere with the natural balance of the land. Stay tuned!
