I wrote this note to my colleagues at UAF from a small village in Mexico. I thought anyone who still checks out this site might like to read it as well… Greetings and salutations from Tucson! I hope that my letter finds you in good health and not too frozen. I myself have adjusted to the milder weather and now can understand what motivates the snowbirds to travel so far each year. Arizona has been a kind and friendly destination so far, and my hosts here at the Sonoran Institute are as hospitable as one could hope.

I think that I could not have chosen a more enlightening, yet grounding internship experience.  

I write to you from the applied fringe, the dirty hands and dusty jeans of our profession. Here sustainability happens one half-acre of restoration site at a time. Here you can see the fine line between science and activism drawn on the floor, and you can watch as people choose their steps with care. The first and most important thing here is the Colorado River that once was, but is no more. They see a future where water once again meets the Sea of Cortez, and they move toward that goal slowly, acre-foot by acre-foot.

Resilience is very much an alien landscape here; no copies of Panarchy are to be found, but Savory’s Holistic Resource Management anchors each bookshelf, including several copies in Spanish! Note that if you haven’t read this you must, it represents an alternative universe that emerged right around the same time as Holling et al. were developing the ideas that would become resilience theory. It serves them well. Other common titles include Morin’s text Community Ecology, Dagget’s Gardeners of Eden, and just about everything ever written by Gary Nabhan. That is not to say that the resilience concept is not considered useful here, but it is not approached as either an organizing or a unifying principle. Indeed there can be only one organizing principle to their work: water—who needs it, who claims it, and who controls it.

If there has ever been a poster-child for the limiting factors of ecosystems, it is water, and it is Sonora: 

[Show as slideshow]

Think back to that first time you experienced a Fairbanks winter, and how the experience forever redefined the word ‘cold’ in your mind. This place does the same thing for the word ‘dry.’ Yet just as in Alaska, where people find the most intriguing ways to accomplish things despite the unique climate, you might be surprised how much is possible in the middle of a desert.

I have ventured twice into Mexico, once to tour the many restoration sites in Sonora and Baja California, another time to spend a week in a small Ejido working on my Spanish and learning of resource issues from the people themselves. Look to this month’s Ester Republic for a short article from that experience, on agriculture and immigration policy (available here at theFireweed.com at the beginning of December). I will continue to report on experiences, here and in my monthly Republic column.

I have chosen the particular issue that I will tackle for the remainder of my internship. It involves a small little wetlands sitting in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, called La Cienega de Santa Clara. In fact this is the largest wetlands in Sonora, and I might mention that many consider it to be man-made. Thirty years ago, the area was desert. In 1977, a canal was built bringing agricultural waste-water. It was built because the high-salinity wastewater was then emptying into the Colorado, making the water useless for agriculture in Mexico. A new treaty was written, ensuring MX’s share of usable water and water quality standards for the Colorado, which meant they had to do something else with the wastewater. Hence the canal. They didn’t finish the canal, however, which was supposed to empty into the Sea of Cortez. When they got to where the Cienega is now, they saw nothing but empty desert, so they just stopped it there and let the water flow. The desert floor apparently still held a bank of seeds from the days of the Colorado River Delta before the Hoover Dam, so, poof! A wetlands rose from the dead.

Now, in such a water-limited region, no water is free. Currently, the water going into the Cienega is not guaranteed by treaty, however. A new water desalination plant has been built in Yuma to recalim some of this waste-water for use in the States. The plant is set to be turned on at 50% capacity soon, with no thought given to the Cienega. Like I said, the water isn’t guaranteed by any treaty, and the officials planning the test run aren’t talking at all to the Mexican government. Some conservation groups have started writing letters, because an endangered bird has started using the Cienega for habitat, but as far as I can tell this hasn’t been very effective, given that the US ESA doesn’t cover habitat on foreign soil.

Add to this the opinion of some that the Cienega isn’t really a ‘natural’ place at all, but just an accident of happenstance that doesn’t really deserve second thought.

There’s a big story here, of ultimate importance to the sustainability sciences, one of what is natural – how we construct the timeline for what we value, and how much we value it related to our other needs. Is the Cienega something that we value less or more than an ability to water suburban lawns? For that matter is it something we value less or more than the existing riparian corridor of the Colorado itself? What indelible marks upon the earth’s surface are we making based on these unspoken values and trade-offs.

And another story interesting story is embedded in the issue of water rights, how people have imposed an artificial starting point on the water-cycle, the headwaters, and from there have inferred ownership and priority. I think this speaks to a real flaw in the ecosystem services approach, an unintended consequence, that a consumer-based perspective approach to ecosystems can result in delineated arbitrarily by how people use, and therefore perceive, that resource. For as far as I can tell, “it was ours first” is essentially the underlying argument of water policy here.

What I will do with this story I am not yet entirely certain. It may indeed be enough just to tell it, to fully explore the issues as they are now from the various points of view at play. I will, of course, maintain an open dialog with you folks as I go down this path, because I think hidden in this little vision-quest of mine will be something valuable for all of us.

Best to you all,

Phil Loring

Writing from Ejido Luis Encinas Johnson, Sonora, MX, via Tucson, AZ, US 

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Anthropology, Photo Blogs, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.