Requiem for the Santa Cruz
Requiem for the Santa Cruz

Author: Robert H. Webb

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2014-06-12

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0816530726

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"Over the millennia, the drainageway we now call the Santa Cruz River has seen many ebbs, flows, and floods. Throughout its long history, the river has meandered. It has flowed on the surface. It has carved deep fissures, and it has widened and narrowed.As readers of Requiem for the Santa Cruz learn, these are events that also have taken place in historic times. Authored by an esteemed group of scientists, Requiem for the Santa Cruz thoroughly documents this river, which flows through Tucson, Arizona, as a prime example of arroyo cutting, a process where heavy rains cut down through rock to create deep channeling. Each chapter provides a unique opportunity to chronicle the arroyo legacy, evaluate its causes, and consider its aftermath. Using more than a century of observations and collections, the authors reconstruct the physical, biological, and cultural circumstances of the river's entrenchment, widening, and subsequent partial filling. Today, communities everywhere face this conundrum: do we manageephemeral rivers through urban areas for flood control, or do we attempt to restore them to some previous state of naturalness? Requiem for the Santa Cruz carefully explores the channel-change legacy, the efficacy of attempts to stabilize it, and the nascent attempts at river restoration to give a long-term perspective on management of rivers in arid lands. Tied together by authors who have committed their life's work to the study of arid-land rivers, this book offers a touching and scientifically grounded requiem for the Santa Cruz and every southwestern river"--

Requiem for the Santa Cruz
Requiem for the Santa Cruz

Author: Robert H. Webb

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2021-11-30

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0816547505

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In prehistoric times, the Santa Cruz River in what is now southern Arizona saw many ebbs, flows, and floods. It flowed on the surface, meandered across the floodplain, and occasionally carved deep channels or arroyos into valley fill. Groundwater was never far from the surface, in places outcropping to feed marshlands or ciénegas. In these wet places, arroyos would heal quickly as the river channel revegetated, the thriving vegetation trapped sediment, and the channel refilled. As readers of Requiem for the Santa Cruz learn, these aridland geomorphic processes also took place in the valley as Tucson grew from mud-walled village to modern metropolis, with one exception: historical water development and channel changes proceeded hand in glove, each taking turns reacting to the other, eventually lowering the water table and killing a unique habitat that can no longer recover or be restored. Authored by an esteemed group of scientists, Requiem for the Santa Cruz thoroughly documents this river—the premier example of historic arroyo cutting during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when large floodflows cut down through unconsolidated valley fill to form deep channels in the major valleys of the American Southwest. Each chapter provides a unique opportunity to chronicle the arroyo legacy, evaluate its causes, and consider its aftermath. Using more than a collective century of observations and collections, the authors reconstruct the circumstances of the river’s entrenchment and the groundwater mining that ultimately killed the marshlands, a veritable mesquite forest, and a birdwatcher's paradise. Today, communities everywhere face this conundrum: do we manage ephemeral rivers through urban areas for flood control, or do we attempt to restore them to some previous state of perennial naturalness? Requiem for the Santa Cruz carefully explores the legacies of channel change, groundwater depletion, flood control, and nascent attempts at river restoration to give a long-term perspective on management of rivers in arid lands. Tied together by authors who have committed their life’s work to the study of aridland rivers, this book offers a touching and scientifically grounded requiem for the Santa Cruz and every southwestern river.

Tucson
Tucson

Author: John Warnock

Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.

Published: 2019-10-11

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 162787707X

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This account of the drama in time that is Tucson begins not with the founding of the Presidio San Agustín on August 20, 1775, but with the emergence of Sentinel Peak in geologic deep time. It ends -- "To be continued"-- in 2014. It spans the periods of precontact with Europeans, Spanish colonization, Mexican nationhood, the territorial West, early and Depression era statehood, and the development of metropolitan Tucson after World War II. It offers not one definitive historical account but a collection of stories in which threads appear that may disappear beneath the surface for a while and reappear later, like some desert streams. It leaves spaces for, and invites the stories of, its readers. About the Author John Warnock was born in Tucson and graduated from Tucson High when it was one of the largest high schools in the nation. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, Oxford University in England, and the New York University School of Law. After teaching at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, he returned to Tucson in 1990 to join the English Department at the University of Arizona. He is now Professor Emeritus at UA and resides in Tucson.

The Immeasurable World
The Immeasurable World

Author: William Atkins

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2018-07-24

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0385539894

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Winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year (UK) "William Atkins is an erudite writer with a wonderful wit and gaze and this is a new and exciting beast of a travel book."—Joy Williams In the classic literary tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Geoff Dyer, a rich and exquisitely written account of travels in eight deserts on five continents that evokes the timeless allure of these remote and forbidding places. One-third of the earth's surface is classified as desert. Restless, unhappy in love, and intrigued by the Desert Fathers who forged Christian monasticism in the Egyptian desert, William Atkins decided to travel in eight of the world's driest, hottest places: the Empty Quarter of Oman, the Gobi Desert and Taklamakan deserts of northwest China, the Great Victoria Desert of Australia, the man-made desert of the Aral Sea in Kazkahstan, the Black Rock and Sonoran Deserts of the American Southwest, and Egypt's Eastern Desert. Each of his travel narratives effortlessly weaves aspects of natural history, historical background, and present-day reportage into a compelling tapestry that reveals the human appeal of these often inhuman landscapes.

Requiem for Revolution
Requiem for Revolution

Author: Ruth Leacock

Publisher: Kent State University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780873384025

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An examination of the Brazilian revolution of 1964 which was not the revolutionary effort that Kennedy had sought. Yet it bore an American, anti-communist imprint. When the president was overthrown, Washington embraced the new regime and gave generous support throughout the 1960s.

Water Bankruptcy in the Land of Plenty
Water Bankruptcy in the Land of Plenty

Author: Franck Poupeau

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2017-12-21

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 1315349760

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As the American Southwest faces its deepest drought in history, this book explores the provocative notion of “water bankruptcy” with a view towards emphasizing the diversity and complexity of water issues in this region. It bridges between the narratives of growth and the strategies or policies adopted to pursue competing agendas and circumvent the inevitable. A window of opportunity provided by this current long-term drought may be used to induce change by dealing with threats that derive from imbalances between growth patterns and available resources, the primary cause of scarcity. A first of its kind, this book was developed through close collaboration of a broad range of natural scientists, social scientists, and resource managers from Europe and United States. It constitutes a collective elaboration of a transdisciplinary approach to unveiling the inner workings of how water was fought for, allocated and used in the American Southwest, with a focus on Arizona. Specifically, it offers an innovative scientific perspective that produces a critical diagnostic evaluation of water management, with a particular view to identifying risks for the Tucson region that is facing continuous urban sprawl and economic growth.

Mesquite
Mesquite

Author: Gary Paul Nabhan

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1603588302

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Winner of a 2019 Southwest Book Award (BRLA) An homage to the useful and idiosyncratic mesquite tree In his latest book, Mesquite, Gary Paul Nabhan employs humor and contemplative reflection to convince readers that they have never really glimpsed the essence of what he calls "arboreality." As a Franciscan brother and ethnobotanist who has often mixed mirth with earth, laughter with landscape, food with frolic, Nabhan now takes on a large, many-branched question: What does it means to be a tree, or, accordingly, to be in a deep and intimate relationship with one? To answer this question, Nabhan does not disappear into a forest but exposes himself to some of the most austere hyper-arid terrain on the planet--the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts along the US/Mexico border--where even the most ancient perennial plants are not tall and thin, but stunted and squat. There, in desert regions that cover more than a third of our continent, mesquite trees have become the staff of life, not just for indigenous cultures, but for myriad creatures, many of which respond to these "nurse plants" in wildly intelligent and symbiotic ways. In this landscape, where Nabhan claims that nearly every surviving being either sticks, stinks, stings, or sings, he finds more lives thriving than you could ever shake a stick at. As he weaves his arid yarns, we suddenly realize that our normal view of the world has been turned on its head: where we once saw scarcity, there is abundance; where we once perceived severity, there is whimsy. Desert cultures that we once assumed lived in "food deserts" are secretly savoring a most delicious world. Drawing on his half-century of immersion in desert ethnobotany, ecology, linguistics, agroforestry, and eco-gastronomy, Nabhan opens up for us a hidden world that we had never glimpsed before. Along the way, he explores the sensuous reality surrounding this most useful and generous tree. Mesquite is a book that will delight mystics and foresters, naturalists and foodies. It combines cutting-edge science with a generous sprinkling of humor and folk wisdom, even including traditional recipes for cooking with mesquite.

Riparian Research and Management: Past, Present, Future: Volume 1
Riparian Research and Management: Past, Present, Future: Volume 1

Author: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2019-04-06

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0359573770

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Fifty years ago, riparian habitats were not recognized for their extensive and critical contributions to wildlife and the ecosystem function of watersheds. This changed as riparian values were identified and documented, and the science of riparian ecology developed steadily. Papers in this volume range from the more mesic northwestern United States to the arid Southwest and Mexico. More than two dozen authors-most with decades of experience-review the origins of riparian science in the western United States, document what is currently known about riparian ecosystems, and project future needs. Topics are widespread and include: interactions with fire, climate change, and declining water; impacts from exotic species; unintended consequences of biological control; the role of small mammals; watershed response to beavers; watershed and riparian changes; changes below large dams; water birds of the Colorado River Delta; and terrestrial vertebrates of mesquite bosques.

Disabled Ecologies
Disabled Ecologies

Author: Sunaura Taylor

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-05-21

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0520393074

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A powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance. Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Sunaura Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires.