Arizona's 5th C: Conflict?

Site of the proposed Rosemont Copper Mine in the
Santa Rita Mountains, 30 miles south of Tucson, AZ.

When I was in fourth grade, I remember learning about the 3 C's of Arizona's economy: cotton, copper, and cattle (and oh, the havoc those three have wreaked). At the time, I didn't understand why so much fuss was made over this; I'm not sure anyone really made a true effort to explain economics to fourth graders, and I don't blame them, since I'm hard pressed to understand any of it today. I did know that many of my not-so-distant Arizona relatives - people that I met at family reunions, people who wore cowboy boots and smoked Marlboros on the back porch - really! - were either ranchers or miners, and when I thought of them I inevitably felt the romantic pull of a notion I had, impossible to articulate but very real, of my family as makers of the Wild West.

In recent years, I've heard that a 4th C has been added: climate. Our lovely winter weather draws retirees' Winnebagos to Arizona like lumbering moths to a flame, and fueled a frenzy of building and development that only the near-collapse of the domestic economy could slow - which it did. But that doesn't mean that the other three C's are gone; in fact, yesterday I attended a Forest Service hearing regarding the draft environmental impact statement for the development of the Rosemont Copper mine, 30 miles southeast of Tucson in the Santa Rita mountain range.

I attended the hearing to speak out against this mine, and I did so. But it wasn't without acknowledgment of the complexity of this issue, which I feel is often lost as both sides batten down the hatches and prepare for a war in which the other side not only has no claim to legitimacy, but is morally repugnant. As much as I oppose the mine itself, I have to acknowledge that those who support it are simply coming from a different perspective - they are not necessarily scientifically illiterate morons, as the anti-mine crowd seemed to perceive (ok, so there's a high level of scientific illiteracy happening, but that doesn't make those who suffer from it morons, or somehow inherently less valuable humans than the rest of us).

There are plenty of reasons to oppose this project. It would destroy a large swath of the Santa Ritas, one of the least-trammeled ranges in southern Arizona. It would have unpredictable consequences for the watershed, including reducing groundwater levels and the flow of springs that feed important riparian areas throughout the range (well, the only thing that's unpredictable is how much impact the mine will actually have; there's no question that it will be highly destructive.) In a regional economy that currently brings in millions of dollars from tourism, the mine would destroy land of significant scenic, biological, and recreational value. The list goes on and on. I heard several interesting arguments during the hearing yesterday, one from a former mining engineer, saying that the copper vein that is to be mined is weak, and that the project is doomed to failure for many technical reasons that I wish I understood.

The argument for the mine, of course, is jobs. In an economy where the real estate, construction, and development industries have all crashed, Arizona's 4th C is no longer working out so well. And so the lure of copper once again has a hold on us - mining can provide jobs, and copper is an increasingly valuable commodity due to its use in high-tech applications. I fully acknowledge that without copper, I wouldn't be typing on a computer right now. I wouldn't have been able to drive a car to the hearing yesterday. We all use the products of these extractive industries, so how can we actually reconcile opposing them in our own backyards?

Then there's the uncomfortable question of what I can only think to call a kind of class warfare around these issues. Overwhelmingly, though not without exception, those who spoke out against the mine were well-educated, well-off folks who opposed the project on environmental grounds or because it threatened their way of life, which often involved a ranchette where they had retired a few years before to run a few horses and open a bed-and-breakfast. Those who spoke in support of the mine did so because it would support their jobs - for example, a trucking company brought in a busload of their employees who would be hired to truck copper away from the mine. The privilege of opposing these projects belongs to the wealthier folks in our society, or at least those of us whose jobs don't rely on these types of industries. And who are we to try to argue that habitat is more important that jobs?

Despite these complications, I still oppose this mine, mostly because it seems to cost so much for so little (or unpredictable) potential benefit. Assuming a cost-benefit analysis could accurately value things like habitat and scenic beauty, I feel confident that the costs of the project would outweigh the benefits. The deeper conflict is how to find alternatives to the cultural and economic paradigms that require such a heavy toll in terms of natural resource extraction, and deeper still seems to be the divide between worldviews represented at the hearing yesterday. The people around me were dismissive and demeaning towards those who spoke in favor of the mine; I have no doubt that the other side of the room snickered when I talked about the threats to riparian habitat. After all, what use is a bird when there's no food on the table?

Waiting for Summer

"Me and this desert, baby, we get along... It's hot here/it's hot as hell here/swamp cooler and a cold beer/I ain't saying we got it made/but we're gettin' there..."  -Kevin Pakulis

So here we stand, right on the cusp of summer. The days are getting hot - into the 90s - but the mornings and evenings are still cool. The sun rises early and shines its slanted light through our east-facing bedroom window. I love waking up to that, and to the cooing of the doves that serves as an overture to the coming trill of cicadas and the heat that burns the lungs with every breath. I love the sense that each morning, the earth is stoically preparing for yet another beating by the slowly arcing sun. Call me crazy, but I love summer in Tucson.

The desert summer is a great simplifier of things. Everything moves just enough to maintain its function, but no more. The small pleasures of a shady spot to sit or a glass of ice water trigger a physical sense of celebration. We wear fewer clothes and even less makeup, and sweat is a generally accepted accessory.  No one cares if you are stinky and miserable, because we all are.  Tucson is full of people who leave during the summer, but those of us who stay bear our burden proudly. We are the real Tucsonans.

Right now, the saguaros and prickly pear are beginning to blossom in their annual act of defiance against the coming June. The desert holds its breath, waiting for the heat to bear down. When it hits, we will fall into the familiar rhythm of summer days: of rising to greet the sun, and of sunsets all the more spectacular for the relief they bring. The city is quiet, as college students and snowbirds alike have cleared out; the rest of us wait along with the desert.  We are all equally at the mercy of the earth, and are united in our knowledge of that and the smallness of ourselves.  We will talk of the heat as if it is a person, malicious and stubborn.  We will stand in the grocery store produce section for a few extra minutes, commiserating with strangers about how good it feels compared to the hell that is the outdoors.  But the truth is, I think we like having this thing in common.  And come July, we will allow ourselves to speak, and perchance to dream, of rain.  

Writer's Block & Vehicle Shock

Greetings, faithful readers! Just thought I'd send a note out into the cloud to say that I'm here, I'm thinking a lot about writing, and I'm writing, well, really... not much at all. It's been a combination of work and travel busyness and writer's block, which I hope to kick soon. Past experience tells me that will mostly involve continuing to give myself opportunities to sit down and write, plus kindly coaxing the muse with coffee or a glass of wine, depending on the hour.

In the meantime, a story to amuse you:

We've recently been considering selling one of our cars, given that in an average week, both cars sit idle five days out of seven, as we get around by bike. Clearly, there was no reason to be paying insurance and maintenance cost on two cars, and we were going to get around to selling one of them... eventually. But as it goes with most such chores, weeks passed with little action.

One day last week, J and I left the house for an early morning bike ride, and noticed that the car in question had a smashed window (unfortunately, not the first time this has happened - we have only on-street parking, and Tucson is notorious for property crime and car theft). The stereo, of course, was gone. It was irritating, but I couldn't even bring myself to be angry - it just seemed like a sure sign from the universe that it was time to become a one-car household.

After a little research into the value of the car in its current condition - the smashed window was not the only problem it had - we decided it wasn't worth trying to sell it and donated it to the local NPR station. They towed it away and will sell it at auction to benefit the station - a beautiful reincarnation, if you ask me.

Veggie Garden Update: Obstacle, Vegetable, Miracle

Broken sewer pipe.. not the best way to start a new project!

It's been quite some time now since I wrote my first post about our veggie garden, and it's fair to say that we've hit some pretty significant snags with the project since then. First of all, remember that broken pipe I mentioned? The one that one of us (I will not name names) smashed with a pickax? Well, that turned out to be a sewer pipe connecting our guest house to the main house. So with borrowed angle grinder in hand and a conversation with the retired plumber at Ace Hardware fresh in his mind ("You can fix it, just don't screw up and break the pipe or you'll pay thousands of dollars to replace all the outdoor plumbing on the property"), my indomitable husband approached that pipe with some trepidation. And yet... crisis averted! I wish now that I'd taken a photo of his professional repair job.

Once that was fixed, we re-buried the pipe and reconstructed our sunken beds around it. I put in a little rockwork to support the area where we had moved the most dirt around, and therefore where it was most likely to erode into the sunken beds. Then we mixed compost in with the native soil and set off on our bikes to stock up on seeds at a local nursery.

Our sunken beds, with reinforcing rockwork where we had to dig out the broken pipe.

I used rocks we already had around the yard, and created a walking surface with the flattest ones.

To start off with, we've planted carrots, cucumbers, basil, snow peas, and sweet peppers. Most of these were recommended for planting during this time of year by my desert gardening book; a few are experiments (i.e. they might die in the heat of the summer). We also used some drip irrigation tubing I had leftover from a work training to rig a gravity-fed irrigation system from our rain barrel.

Unsure of what I was doing as I planted the seeds, it occurred to me that in fact, I had never actually planted vegetables (aside from potted herbs) before. It's been my goal basically since moving to Tucson to plant a veggie garden, but school, work, and outdoorsing always seemed to get in the way until now.

I couldn't help but reflect as I buried each seed what a miracle it is that plants will, if we're lucky, spring from them. It's one of the most basic - and essential - biological functions out there, and certainly one that humans have been dependent on, well, forever. Much has been written about how disconnected we are from our food - the way it's produced, where it's produced, and the people who produce it - and it's certainly symptomatic of our larger disconnection from nature that I have now planted my first food-producing seeds at the ripe old age of thirty.

Yesterday, I got home from work tired, hungry, and a bit grouchy (for me, those things almost always go hand-in-hand), and so I was somewhat annoyed when J insisted that he had something important to show me outside. But he really did:

Snow pea

Cucumber

Carrot

Birdwatching the Urban Jungle

One of my favorite things about walking, running, and biking around Tucson is sighting birds. This afternoon as I biked home from work, I spotted a great blue heron flapping along toward Himmel Park, its wing beats long and leisurely like a bird with nothing but time for enjoying the gorgeous March day. The same flicker was singing his heart out on the same tree where I noticed him this morning, which was not long after I saw a Gila woodpecker scaling a mesquite tree on University Boulevard. This was not an atypical number of sightings (and those were just the ones that stood out) during my 8-mile round trip bike commute, especially this time of year, when, despite relatively chilly nights, spring threatens every day to burst forth in all its gaudy desert glory.

For me, the pleasure of bird sightings in the city stems from my perpetual surprise at them. Tucson is, in some ways, a barren place, and I say that as someone who loves desert vegetation and loves this city. But we have approximately 1% tree canopy cover here, compared with a national average of 25%, and even though our desert trees may naturally create less cover than more lush vegetation elsewhere... that's still pretty pathetic. Our urban forest could definitely stand to be enhanced (for more on those efforts, check out Watershed Management Group and Trees for Tucson).

So it is always a surprise when, as I make my way through the exhaust-filled, pavement-covered, largely shade-free urban landscape, having nearly forgotten that I do in fact share this environment with something besides my fellow humans and their cars, the shocking red of a cardinal or a vermilion flycatcher literally stops me in my tracks. Or a red-tailed hawk alights on a telephone pole, fluffs its feathers, and screams its wildness across a deserted parking lot. These are the small miracles that transcend the ordinary workings of my day, that transport me, that keep me from looking down and hating the grime of the city, and instead looking up and feeling, briefly, the freedom of its winged inhabitants.  The birds do not judge, they just are.

Nature is so very resilient if we give it the slightest chance. There are many people working in Tucson - and in so many other places - to bring nature back into our urban spaces. It is vital to our health as humans and to our awareness of other species that we see nature as something that we are a part of, not something we go on an eco-vacation to see, but rather something that is present in our everyday urban lives, inseparable from us and impacted by us. The countless benefits of this extend to both ourselves and the species that we help to thrive, and I like to think that the biggest one is simply that the presence of nature can remind us, daily, if only for a moment, that we too can be wild and free.

2011: The Year of Living Locally

Mountain biking under the desert moon near Colossal Cave, AZ.

Things have been a bit serious over here at the Porch Swing lately, and for good reason. Strangely, I started this blog on the morning of the Tucson shootings (before they happened), and that event has occupied my consciousness, and therefore my writing, quite a bit in the last week and a half. And while I intend to try to post some serious writing here, I also intend to have fun. So here's something on a lighter note.

Due to various school, work, and life overlaps and obligations, it looks like we won't be traveling abroad this year, which is something that I really wanted to do before my husband starts graduate school (which will hopefully be soon). We love to travel, and I tend to have an unbearable sense of urgency about it - if we don't do it NOW, we'll never do it! - whatever adventure "it" may be. But the other night, we sat down and looked at the calendar and realized that an extended trip abroad just isn't in the cards this year. So rather than dramatically lament our fate - "we'll end up having kids and then never doing anything" (ok, I might have said that) - I have dubbed 2011 our year of living locally.

Granted, we will still be leaving Tucson, and Arizona, plenty - a Colorado backpacking trip and my sister's wedding in Door County, Wisconsin, for starters, and knowing us we'll squeeze something else in there. So don't feel too sorry for us. But this attitude is about more than staying home. In fact, it's not really about staying home at all, but about exploring all the amazing things our region has to offer. Jason and I have both lived in Tucson for six years, and while we often get out and about, there are still so many canyons unexplored, so many creeks un-birded, peaks un-summited, mountain bike trails un-shredded. It's time to get out there.

I think as a culture, we tend to sacrifice short trips and weekend adventures in the name of one long, glorious, two-week vacation in paradise, and I'm not sure the one is really worth the sacrifice of the other. (I'm all for nice, long vacations - I think two weeks of vacation a year is a crime - I'm just saying that shouldn't be it.) Work fifty weeks and play for only two? Life is way too short for that. This, of course, speaks to a larger cultural issue of workaholism, but that's a rant for another post. The point is, we can have adventures, travel to places we've never been, learn something about our own culture or the natural environment or ourselves - all in a local day's play. Sometimes, we get so focused on the big plans that we forget the small ones, which can be just as rewarding and can happen every weekend: little shots of adventure, of novelty, reminders that the grand world is actually right outside our door.

Helicopters

Several years ago, I was backpacking off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon when my party came across another group. It was one of the hottest among many hot days I have spent in that canyon, and the heat radiated off the ancient, black Vishnu Schist with what seemed to be a special ferocity. Sweat dripped like water as we made our way along the beach, bodies hunched beneath our backpacks, next to the booming Colorado.

We met the other party shortly after we had left the river and started up a side canyon. They told us they had separated from the rest of their group, that one of the others was struggling and moving very slowly. This first party was heading to the river for water. We wished them luck, said we'd keep an eye out for their friends, and moved on.

We never did come across the struggling hikers that day. We made our camp up the side canyon, next to the creek, beneath the cottonwood trees. The North Rim is famously remote - far fewer people visit or hike there than the more populated South Rim. We had driven an hour on a dirt road off a basically deserted highway to get to the trailhead. And so we speculated: perhaps they'd turned around to attempt to hike out? Maybe they were camped somewhere above us? But there was nothing, really, for us to do about it.

We sat in the shade and played cards into the afternoon, the encounter largely forgotten. But toward sunset, suddenly, we heard it: the unmistakable rhythm of a helicopter, the sound reverberating off the canyon walls. We stopped what we were doing, looked at each other. This part of the Grand Canyon is one of those treasured places our constant human ruckus has not reached, and for days we had heard nothing but birdsong, rushing water, and our own voices. But now this, all too familiar: the sound of trouble. It was distant and low and distinctly human. And to us, with no way of communicating with the outside world and the acute knowledge of our own isolation, it was foreboding. To the man being rescued (we found out later he was evacuated from the canyon, severely dehydrated, but fine), that sound was no doubt a symbol of safety and rescue. But to us it had the tenor of human affairs gone deeply awry - of rescue, yes, but also of combat, of emergency, of something being ushered away.

For five days now, helicopters have gathered over my hometown. They are amassing at the site of a great rift - a lurch, it seems, in the quiet way of things. They hover above the hospital where the victims of Saturday's shooting lie recovering, where the rows of news trucks, satellites aimed at some distant orbit, broadcast Tucson's tragedy across the world, and where the shrine to the victims every day grows larger, the entire scene more surreal. They wasp above the University of Arizona, where, as I write this, people are gathering by the thousands, twisting in lines across the campus, to hear the President of the United States speak some comfort to a shocked community.

The world has cleaved open a bit, and the helicopters are here, not so much to tend, as to record, the wound. Perhaps we long for them to carry us away, to bear rescue and hope rather than sorrow. But really, though it will take time, I think what we long for is silence, for a clear, blue Arizona sky, punctuated every so often with something both mundane and magical, something to remind us that the world is, once again, as it should be. Something clear and ordinary, like birdsong.

Heal America? Let's start with our local communities.

A horrific day in Tucson yesterday. Representative Gabrielle Giffords shot and severely injured, six others dead, thirteen wounded. Right up the road, on Ina and Oracle. So tragic for Tucson, and the whole country, really. Regardless of the motive (and, really, insanity was the motive, politics merely the channel through which it was funneled) this has become politicized, has become something to blame each other for, a talking point in the endless stream of "news." I do agree that the current hateful tenor of politics contributed to this, but clearly the individual responsible was seriously unhinged, and perhaps his rage would have been directed elsewhere if not here. Who knows what pushes people over the edge, but the bottom line remains: we must bring civility back to our political debates. We must stop the fear-mongering, the stunning lack of empathy, the scapegoating, the oversimplification of complex issues into vitriolic soundbites.

How do we go about doing that? How do we keep our politicians and media accountable for the way they frame things? (I conflate the two here because it's hard to know the difference anymore. They seem to be two sides of an equally toxic coin.) Are they a mirror, simply reflecting what we, the public, demands? Violence and hate sell, so that must be what we want?

I tend to think the contemporary media plays a more active role than that. There is a concerted effort to shape people's entire worldviews - to develop a mythology that can be applied to any situation and demonize any point of view labeled as "other." I frankly can't comment intelligently on much of this, since I never watch television news, but suffice it to say that's because it ceased to be news a while ago. So the question remains: what can we do about it?

My cynical side tells me: "nothing." But the earnest urban planner in me believes that most people really want something better for our country and for their communities. But how to fight propaganda? It can't be with more of the same.

Sometimes I think this country is just too big, that part of the problem is that we all feel so disconnected from each other, our communities, the politicians in Washington, and certainly from the rest of "the American public." What is that, anyway? How can we possibly refer to a group of 350 million people spread across thousands of miles of geography as a generalized or cohesive group? There is no "American public."

And so we must localize. It's the idea I come back to again and again when thinking about national- and global-scale problems. If the world is not how we think it should be, perhaps it's because of this disconnection from our local communities. At the very least, since we cannot change the world, the only way to feel any measure of empowerment is to start to work and connect locally. So turn off the mainstream media and go dig in a community garden, volunteer at a school, introduce yourself to your neighbors. We have more in common than the talking heads want us to think. It's so much easier to hate each other if we don't know each other, but it's nearly impossible if we do. That's the level at which we average citizens can have an impact. That's what would make Gabrielle Giffords proud.

Coming Home

The only time I miss real winter weather is when I snowshoe or cross-country ski. The snow-laced trees, the frozen world, the blue, blue sky that holds a sun amplified again and again over ridges of white. My breath heavy and released in visible puffs, the stinging of my hot cheeks as I move through the sharp, freezing air. Traipsing uphill with that ridiculous, splayed-ski waddle.

We started out the new year on cross-country skis, and it made me long for something different. For an adventure, a new life in a new place where I could cross-country ski every day. Surely my life would never become routine or boring if only I had snow over which to cross-country ski.

This slump of longing (which was only a few steps short of a full-on pity party, and which I knew all along to be founded upon false premises) lasted for a few days after I got home to Tucson. And then, of course, I remembered how much I love this city, the desert, and my life here. I remembered the water harvesting projects I've planned around the house, the garden I'll grow, the creative life I'll make. Having plans and ambitions for the future inspires me, invests me in this place as my home. But being fully aware of the present, with all its quirks and blessings -the cats on my lap, the fridge full of food, a Gila woodpecker outside the window - that will sustain me wherever I go.

So cheers to the new year (arbitrary though it may be), to the desert, and to coming home; but most of all, cheers to this moment, the one that none of us will ever quite experience again.

Welcome!

I often write from our front porch swing, on what is known among friends as "the best front porch in Tucson." We have certainly spent many a summer evening watching the sky gradually ignite with a famous Tucson sunset, cold beer bottles sweating in our hands, and the land singing with relief at the end of a long, hot day.

I also spend a fair amount of time there alone. The street is vibrant with pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and the park across the way is full of activity - both legal and illegal, and always amusing. From the porch swing, I can see everything, but, hidden as I am behind the mock orange tree, few passersby ever notice me. It is the perfect place to feel both connected and hidden, as I think most writers do.

So from the porch swing to the cloud, I hope to document my adventures here - urban and wild, foreign and domestic, real and meditative - and do some decent writing, with little revision and a fair bit of humor. Thanks for reading!