Requiem for the Santa Cruz: An Environmental History of an Arizona River
Review by David Seibert
The University of Arizona Press has recently published Requiem for the Santa Cruz: An Environmental History of an Arizona River. This beautiful book, a collaboration by Robert Webb, Julio Betancourt, Roy Johnson, Raymond Turner, and Bernard Fontana, is a major contribution to the challenges and interactions of environmental science, land-use ethics, and inhabitance in a still-growing region of the fragile southwest.
For centuries the Santa Cruz River regularly flowed, ebbed, and flooded a region extending from south of Nogales to north of Tucson, where today we find concrete-lined river channels and a dry riverbed. The river supported springs and dense bosques and contributed to groundwater recharge in the entire Tucson basin. But this dynamism and reliability also led to highly extractive human settlement in the late nineteenth century that continues to compromise the river’s myriad functions, many of them required, in some form, for human survival in this place.
The work effectively coordinates historic and modern sources from biology, history, climatology, anthropology, and geology. In doing so, it paints a bleak picture of the tremendous impacts of a number of simultaneous stressors on what had been a self-healing system of arroyos, wetlands, thick gallery forests, and rich wildlife habitat. Major water systems and intensive land and water use, changes in river morphology, large flood events, and declining vegetation (suddenly unsupported by local flood regimes) all contributed to a lowered water table that no longer met surface flows when rain events did occur. At any scale, from back yard to national forest, the effects on these potentially vibrant systems are self-destructive, for, as arroyos continue to deepen with accelerated flood and erosion effects, water is more quickly shunted out of the system. The potentials for hydrological connection are lost, leaving dead or dying forests, ever lower water tables, and bare dirt ready to wash away with the next rain.
Hence the word “requiem” in the book’s title. Some of the most important and poignant components of the Santa Cruz’s function may be gone, possibly forever. However, a hundred years of history provide critical learning opportunities for contemporary and future users, and we learn that with vision, planning, and a steadfast ethic of care, we can prevent such degradation and even reinvigorate some of the most vital features of the ecosystem. In this approach, one doesn’t write off a river system, nor try to entirely restore its historic conditions. Instead, a group of individuals share their interests and concerns with one another, pick their highest potential spots carefully, and get to work creating change.
Dr. Julio Betancourt, one of the authors of Requiem for the Santa Cruz, will present a program at the EarthFest Series on April 16 at 7 p.m. at the Patagonia Public Library
Gray Mountain
A novel by John Grisham, 2014
Review by Elizabeth Zinn
John Grisham is arguably the don of the legal thriller with 27 novels now under his belt, many of them international best sellers. The Firm, The Client, The Pelican Brief, A Time To Kill, and five others have been made into films, and Grisham continues to crank out one book a year, adding to the 225 million copies of John Grisham works in print worldwide.
The latest addition to Grisham’s oeuvre, Gray Mountain, contains all the ingredients familiar to Grisham fans (among whom I count myself): a rural Southern setting, the coal mining country of Appalachia; a bright young lawyer heroine, Samantha Kofer; a handsome but flawed hero, Donovan Gray; and a cast of stock characters ranging from the overworked and underpaid free legal staffers to various down-and-out homeless victims of Big Coal’s cruel (and often illegal) practices. As Samantha struggles to navigate the intricacies of small town politics and Big Coal’s stranglehold on the area, she predictably falls in love with the beauty of the remaining unscarred mountains and the simple goodness of the people who have lived and toiled there for generations.
For a reader interested in mining, Grisham’s research has produced a wealth of factual information on modern strip mining practices – both the frightening mechanics of getting the ore out of the ground and the legal shenanigans that often allow the big corporate companies to trample the little guys in pursuit of profits. Some of the anecdotes are clearly drawn from real-life accounts and legal actions. But in the end, this is a book about the law, about different ways it is practiced, for whom and for what purposes – and how it can be co-opted and corrupted if the price is right. Here, Grisham wears his heart on the page. Big Coal and its armies of corporate legal pawns are portrayed in almost cartoon-like fashion as the bad guys, without conscience or scruples. Samantha and her co-workers are the good guys, of course, besieged and outgunned but refusing to give in. The book may be among Grisham’s most trite, but the issues are timely and real and one cannot ignore Grisham’s plea for preservation of what is left of the fragile area’s environment, as well as for preservation of the pure ethics that underpin our justice system.
Gray Mountain does not pretend to be great literary fiction and Grisham at his least successful is still a good read, and there is a lot in this novel to interest, entertain, and educate.