I
have lived most of my life surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert and spent
time in all the great deserts of the Western U.S. I immediately learned to love the desert upon
encountering it as a child. My love only
grew as I learned to understand its diversity, its synergies, and its connections
to the biomes bordering it: the relict forests (that retreated to the cooler,
wetter slopes and tops of great, rugged mountains as the basins became dry and
hot after the last ice ages), the riparian zones created
by rivers and streams that came down from the mountains and cut through the
arid landscape, and the great grasslands with their reliable patterns of
rainfall, which gradually replaced the true desert at its norther-and-easterly limits. In the desert itself, the rain was fickle,
but essential. Each year the landscape would be shaped by the unpredictable patterns
of precipitation. Spotty rains of the monsoon
season would create floods in one place and leave others untouched.
I
saw the ways in which plants and animals adapted to living in a land of scarce
water; and how, if left undisturbed, the desert that sustained them always remained a land of
inexhaustible variety. As a
child, I marveled at the strangeness of the devil’s claw seed pods, which seemed
like objects from another planet--or perhaps they truly were the devil’s
claws. I would look out on the desert in
spring, or after the rains, and see a million flowers that had opened in an
instant, many for only one short day or night.
I was full of awe, tinged with a sense of disbelief, at the sheer size
of the vine that produced a melon known as the buffalo gourd. The vine would grow impossibly fast, adding
meters of grey-green foliage almost overnight.
And by the end of its season, nothing would be left but tangled, dead
tendrils and bright yellow little gourds with an odd smell. I remember learning about the tiny yucca
moths, the only insects that could fertilize the yucca—the desert lily—with
its great clusters of white flowers, and I remember examining dried yucca pods in
the fall and finding the remnants of seeds eaten by the moths’ larvae, who
always left some intact so that the collaboration between yucca and moth could
continue.
I
knew all of this was magical, but also fragile: that a single bulldozer was capable of leveling acres of desert for some new development, that cactus
poached from a site or region might not return in my lifetime, and that a clear-cut relict forest would be gone forever.
I also knew that a grave where the ancestors slept could not be restored
once it was desecrated, plundered for artifacts. Tire tracks didn’t disappear in an arid
landscape, and overgrazing reduced areas of biological diversity to mere sand
dunes dotted with half-buried mesquite bushes.
I learned
that nature is sacred: that the mountains are sacred, the rocks are sacred, the
desert woodrat’s ungainly nest is sacred, and that each life is precious and
necessary for the well-being all.
