Environmentally friendly...

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!