Ava Frans: To see Queerly

This is a story of reimagining kinship through Wilson’s Phalaropes’ queer dance.

Belly down by the water’s edge and face-to-shrinking shoreline, crystalline salt cradles my chin. I watch intently as slender-necked shorebirds pirouette across the banks of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. In synchronistic spirals, each bird creates a vortex, bringing fairy-bodied brine shrimp to the water's surface, stirring them from their sunken rest in the lake’s briny abyss.

Wilson’s Phalaropes dance for survival. They must eat enough brine shrimp to fly the nearly six thousand miles to the coast of Laguna Mar Chiquita, a small saline sea in Argentina. Born onto the soft-sanded shores of South America, the fluffy chicks emerge in the care of their father. One by one by one. Once a female Phalarope lays her eggs, she leaves the father to incubate and raise the chicks on his own. Meanwhile, she goes off to pursue other mates. In a single breeding season, a female may have up to four male mates, leaving each with the gift of fatherhood. Wilson’s Phalaropes are gender-benders. These birds are “delightfully queer.”

I wonder if the chicks’ fathers tell them about a time when the silvery sagebrush reached deep water. I wonder if he tells them about a time when the water’s surface was large enough to catch the setting sun. If he looks out now and sees the parched earth and Great Salt Lake’s skeletal shores, I wonder if he feels a deep-bone ache wishing for a landscape that may never return. 

(Breathe)

(Slow down)

To the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In:” Oh when the birds / Go flying in / Oh when the birds go flying in / Oh I will go to be with that water / Oh when the birds go flying in…

A smile stretches across my face as an ode to the Great Salt Lake flows from my lips. Each hand, sticky with glue, fuses to my neighbors’—bonded in joy. A paper mache Phalarope perches atop my head, delicately wobbling as I warble.

Pelicans, Brine Shrimp, Greebs, and Phalaropes join in procession. A cardboard cacophony. An indigo-dyed silken wave flutters in the wind. We circle an older woman playing accordion and sway back and forth in song. When the life of a lake we love is at stake, we express our gratitude. We are more-than-individuated, more-than-human.

Eli Nixon, a self-described “settler-descended transqueer clown,” is a “cardboard constructionist and a maker of plays, puppets, parades, pageants, and low-tech public spectaculah.” They are the organizer of this public display of affection for the Great Salt Lake. Eli’s art springs forth from homage, honorary action.

Pretend. Before tending. Eli asks, “Can we pretend our way into tending?” Pretending they’re a bird helps them to slow down. To remember water. To remember the lake.

First, cardboard. Rejecting notions of disposability, Eli hunts for boxes in need of a new home, amongst forgotten dumpsters and alleys. They pause, listening to the trees from which the cardboard came, and follow their lead. A round head, a swooping neck, a beak, and two wings. Slowly, a cardboard Phalarope starts to take shape. Sculpting is reversible and informative, it comes with the grace of endless re-dos. In changing 2D to 3D, they invoke the magic of their mind. From cardboard, they learn shape-shifting and freedom. This is cardboard camaraderie. Cardboard connection.

Next, glue. Cornstarch and water boiled into a paste. Just the right consistency, not too drippy, not too viscous. When mixed, cornstarch and water form a non-Newtonian fluid, defying fundamental laws of physics. Even glue resists rigidity.

Then, paper mache. Newspaper strips layer one on top of the other, interlocking. Each joint creates a stronghold. Eli turns printed ads promoting ceaseless consumerism inwards, away from view. With a little glue, the paper strips soon become armor, solidifying the bird beneath. 

Last, Naturedrag. A different kind of drag, a third form. Not the kind of drag that aggressively reinscribes binaries, leaving Eli to wonder “a way into the joy that performers experience.” Not drag queen or king, but more-than-human drag kin. The Phalarope occupies Eli. They disrupt their sense of self. They are older than gender, before and beyond gender. Running and flapping. Running and flapping. They exceed their daily mileage by some six thousand miles. They find their pace, following the tide, the sun, and the moon. They are humbled by language-less-ness.

All hands join in. Done and undone, born anew in pieces of cardboard and strips of paper mache, Eli shares the gift of Naturedrag with us. As we open our mouths to imitate the birds, the wind, and the Great Salt Lake, a Phalarope circles above. She calls. The mystery of her voice exists on a wavelength our brains cannot understand. Lost in translation. 

Why are we so earthbound? We can build planes and giant balloons, but we fail to fly when we flap our meaty little arms. Just as we get the hang of our imagined wings, the twang of our weary bodies tells us we have better things to do. Hitches in our steps. Cricks in our necks.

“What does the impossible look like?”

An impossible dance is a fresh suit of skin through which we molt into another form of human, bird, and freedom.

The dance is impossible because we are human, not birds. It is impossible because of our wingless, featherless body plan. It is impossible because it unsettles our notion of kin.

Eli asks, “Can we use this embarrassment to shift the weight of our feet on the land? Can we go so deep into the embarrassment that it becomes something else—grief, joy, awe, solidarity? Can this bumbling act of embodied recycling open new portals to ancestral recognition? Can we use it to see these creatures and each other anew?”

In experiencing new ways to move our human bodies, we molt. We shed our humanity, destabilizing bipedal dominance. Two animals collide. We meld our human and non-human forms together as if to become one queer entanglement. 

There are secrets revealed in synchronistic spirals—dancing, feeding, undulating. If we care to look closely enough, the Wilson’s Phalarope has something to say. Perhaps not in English, perhaps not in any language we will understand—unless we join their queer dance.

Caitlyn Taylor: The Core Behind Every Bite

Come here, young one, up to Jude Schuenemeyer’s orchard restoration site on the outskirts of Montezuma Valley. Here, you will find me, a winter banana apple tree at the top of the gravel road. I have a broad umbrella shape, full of light green leaves with a few mini yellow ones sprinkled in the mix. They are raindrop-shaped with ruffled edges, and some fold like tacos. Once you find me, sit under these low barren branches where I can protect you from the cold breeze. Then, I can recite the story of us, the apple trees, this land, and its friends. 

My brethren, who used to be bountiful and diverse, were lost to time– one by one, being forgotten. I watched as our caregivers walked away, allowing their branches to shrivel, their roots to rot, and their trunks to be chopped for kindling. Leaving me anxious, awaiting my paralysis doom.

We haven’t always lived on these lands, being brought over the expansive ocean blues. This story begins with one that I heard from the soil, who's always listening and remembering every footprint. For years, we lived joyously, in picturesque tall orchards, scattered. Kids would climb up our rigid trunks to shake out the apples. Eventually, wealth grew in America, the aristocrats that you read about in your history books, like … oh, what are their names? Yes, the Washingtons and Jeffersons.  They used slave labor to graft their cider orchards with mediocre juicing trees, shifting our apple narrative. Back when George Washington was a general fighting the Six Nations of Iroquois over fertile land, he decided to starve them out— the quickest way to end a battle. So, he sent the soldiers to burn the Six Nations’ homes and food sources. When the soldiers arrived, they found the tribes' beautifully cultivated orchards, anguishing at the thought of destruction. In their eyes, it was too civilized to be created by beings they saw as lower than human. It was a massacre— black ash floating above the blazing red, yellow, and orange. There were many lost that day. These stories, although sad, need to be shared, not left with the soil.

The exploitation of others never ceased to exist, even here in the West, where the history I have seen begins. It all starts with a fellow named Jasper Hall, “the fruit wizard of Montezuma County,” or my creator. He was considered the crazy man in town— wanting to plant an orchard way up here, about 68,000 feet in elevation. On the contrary, there was some truth behind their words; it is rough to grow up here— suffocatingly dry air and the bone-chilling wind— one might say it is miserable, but it is all I have ever known. Nevertheless, we produce some of the “most outrageously high-quality fruit on earth”— I might be slightly biased.

Eventually, Jasper passed away, as we all will someday. Leaving me behind to watch the seasons change, my leaves turning the array of Autumn colors, dropping to the ground, leaving me barren and cold only to be made new with each blossom. It was a lonely century, but I was not completely alone— apple orchards multiplied across the valley— we were everywhere, supporting the local culture. But just as quickly as they arrived, they left— either withered away in the presence of codling moths or forgotten by their keeper.

Oh, coddling moths, I shiver just thinking about them. Their slimy magot-like larve bore wholes into our fruit's flesh and cacoon themselves in our trunks, bringing destruction with each phase of their lives. They ravaged so many trees, taking the orchard community with them. Eventually, you humans came up with a solution to save our kind— DDT. World War II had just ended, and it came out commercially— killing everything in its path. 

If you thought coddling moths were bad, you are sorely mistaken that was the least of our problems. Nothing compares to the fight against the industrialization of agriculture, trying to produce more and more for cheaper. We used to be plentiful, we were in everyone's backyards, no tree alike. But then, many small orchards turned into a few huge orchards. For crying out loud, I am a winter banana apple tree, when have you ever seen one of those in your local grocery store? I can almost promise that your response is never— it’s always the honey crisp, red delicious, or the granny smith for your pies.

It was undeniably a gloomy century, but before I knew it, Jude and Addie Schuenemeyer purchased the orchard way up here. With it, about 20 years ago, they started the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project, also known as MORP, to keep more of my brethern from being forgotten. 

They stumbled upon this occupation after learning about Montezuma's crumbling apple orchard culture. At first, it was like watching a toddler learn to walk, waddling around and fumbling quite frequently, but before I knew it, they were running. It just took support from the community and a few copies of Jasper Halls’ articles. 

Now, their cultivar preservation project is optimistically improving— documenting 436 varieties of apples planted in Colorado before 1930. I watched with hope, sitting at the edge of my seat as he and his team scoured through historical records like starving animals trying to salvage as much as possible. Although many were found, a good portion of their list has been noted as lost or extinct. And for my brethren who are holding onto their last thread, Jude hunts for their story and works to revive their verity so they are not forgotten to time. 

As part of keeping us around, he works to help other orchardists stay afloat. You might not know this, but we produce way more apples than what is ever seen in your local stores— are rejected for their unique Buetty or never even collected. Each apple that is rejected can be detrimental to the small orchards because that was money going in but not out.  So, Jude has come up with a solution. He has this fancy smancy juicing machine in the shed across the way. About this time of year, he will roll it out onto that level cement slab, and with a few presses of buttons, the rejected apples are funneled through one silver tube to another. It's kinda crazy to watch I have no clue how it works, I just know it makes a lot of noise, and in one moment, there are apples, and in the next, there is apple juice. The juice allows the orchardists to make back some revenue that they would have lost. 

I know that even once Jude is gone, MORP will last, and my brethren and I will be protected. That we apple trees, even the most out there like I, will have a place to be remembered. 

You have been listening to what this old apple tree had to say all day; you are probably getting cold by now. So, go on and enjoy your afternoon. But every time you see an apple no matter its size, shape, color, texture, flavor, or the number of bruises, remember me, all my lost brethren, and the complexities behind every bite.

Sofia DeFanti: Borderlands of Change

Sunlight illuminates the ribbed surface of the storage container daubed with orange, blue, and green paint. The jaguar’s drooping eyes and bared teeth seem eternally fixed to his face. Trapped in the confines of the medium, he is imprisoned behind the container’s steel bars, a confinement parallel to that of the US-Mexico border twenty miles to his south. Monarchs and bees relish in their freedom above, soaring in winged companionship. The mural is both a celebration of biodiversity and an elegy to a world that thrived before the divisions of mining and border militarization.

The painted words, “Restore, Protect, and Reconnect,” grow like fruit upon the vines that blur the distinction between the storage container and the natural world. Borderlands Earth Care Youth meticulously painted this mural in the small town of Patagonia, Arizona. For Patagonia-area youth, this opportunity in conservation is highly unique in a region of sparse employment options. 

Growing up twenty minutes from Patagonia, Jordan Sene spent her youth relishing in this incredible space, with the intention of returning to it to be a school teacher. Along with most rural students in the area, environmental science was absent in her education, and certainly as a potential career path. This all changed in 2018 when Jordan interned with Borderlands Earth Care Youth, a unique paid internship designed primarily for Hispanic, Latino, and low-income youth in the local Santa Cruz and Cochise counties. Now, she has returned as the Education Program Manager for Borderlands Restoration Network. 

Jordan reaches into the lanky arms of mesquite trees with her loppers, trimming off brittle limbs with ease and familiarity, a brief reminder of where her work started. Six years ago, she was first introduced to environmental stewardship, “My first time at Deep Dirt Farm, now BECC, was the first time learning about environmental action, land protection, permaculture, and sustainability… and that is what drove me to my area of study and career path.” Now, she instructs similar restoration efforts to those she participated in herself, as well as leading education programs on the geography and biodiversity of the area. 

Around Patagonia, the Sky Islands mountains emerge like adorned castles amongst an expanse of lowland desert, stretching drawbridges of the imagination between the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico and the American Rocky Mountains. Within the palaces of these ranges is a dazzling array of biodiversity, nurtured by a unique combination of ecosystems that sustain over 7,000 precious species. Along with these animal and plant populations, this land has provided sustenance for Indigenous Sobaipuri, Papago, and Pima peoples for thousands of years. 

In the last couple centuries, the history of this region has not been so bright. Riddled with colonialism and contestation, this land is no stranger to violence. Prior to and during the 1854 Gadsden Purchase of Southern Arizona from Mexico, Patagonia was a railroad town for lead and silver mining. Meanwhile, the border wall running through Nogales began construction, permanently dividing families as well as crucial migration corridors. The consequences of these decisions remain- in the form of divided communities, unemployed locals, and untreated toxic waste abandoned on the mountaintops.

Ten miles from Borderlands Earth Care Center, high in the Sky Islands of the Patagonia Mountains, a different storage container rests upon a patch of leveled ground, surrounded by fragments of broken rock. Its harsh gray exterior stands in stark contrast to the artfully reclaimed container at the preserve. Here, successive incisions have staggered the ground, exposing the pink flesh of raw earth. Roads meander like a labyrinth of veins passing through barren ground. 

The recently developed Hermosa Mine is renewing the site of the Taylor Mine, a silver mine from the 1880s. Now, construction has begun for the company South 32, an operation for zinc, lead, silver, and most significantly, the only electric-battery-grade magnesium in North America. 

From dawn to dusk, thirty to eighty trucks will groan up and down steep forest roads. Burdened with hazardous process chemicals, they make their pilgrimage towards the Hermosa mine site. If they make it safely into the mountains, these chemicals will be utilized to sever precious minerals from extracted rock. The toxic waste will be stacked and left behind, embodied permanently in the landscape.

The small, 800-person community that lives beneath this mountain fears a multitude of possible implications from the mine. Lingering over their heads, and under their feet, is the possible contamination of groundwater, a resource heavily relied upon for municipal water use. Further, the increased noise, construction, and traffic pose a threat of disturbance to crucial habitat for endangered wildlife.

Despite many locals' fears, the community faces a looming reality of economic dependency on these mining jobs. With the exception of Border Patrol, ranching, and limited medical and primary education jobs, few choices are available. Jordan recognizes the familiarly consequential pattern: “young people leave and they never come back.” 

A simple Google search, “Jobs in Patagonia, Arizona,” presents an overwhelming number of mine related employment options. Rows of mining construction jobs populate, followed by more permanent jobs related to South 32, the mining company itself. 

Borderlands Restoration Network envisions a world where economic success can be derived in conjunction with beneficial impacts to the environment. However, for many locals, the legacy and availability of mining jobs is impossible to ignore. Jordan sighs, “I have kids that still want to work for the mine, even graduating from my program… The influences around you really have a say in your direction of careers.” To pay the bills, sometimes moral compromises must be made. 

Mining is a controversial industry woven into the fabric of the Southwest as deeply as cactus spines embedded into flesh. The road to change is daunting, and the town’s economy will not transform immediately. However, thanks to Borderlands, there are more opportunities for sustainable employment in Patagonia than ever before: working with native plants, doing stream restoration work, and for youth, paid restoration internships. 

Here at the Earth Care Center, the land remarkably remembers how to nurture life. Nurseries teem with the vibrancy of leafy greens. Native seeds rest in dusty jars, fragile glass cradling the key to sustaining healthy ecosystems. Books teem from eclectic cupboards and weathered shelves. Outside, tired shovels and rakes hang heavily. Their rusty heads wobble underneath their own weight, loosened from lives of continuous toil. 

Jordan’s eyes light with amazement as she reflects upon the space that embodies the love and dedication her students have poured into this community. “A big part of our curriculum is a sense of place.” Her students are deeply involved in place-based learning such as stream restoration work and native species identification. Jordan sees these opportunities as vital for the student’s growth—dually building skills of resilience and developing deep relationships with the land. 

Tucking a strand of her light brown hair back into her ponytail, Jordan tilts her head up, proudly observing the expanse of shrubs and grasses that border the gentle curve of a rock-lined path. The carefully groomed trail is a product of the intentional care of community members and interns. “We're just wanting to showcase another option that there are nature-based solutions, and there are career pathways related to sustainability and taking care of the environment and stewardship.”

Borderlands Restoration Network is faced with a monumental task: to loosen the chokehold of violence and extractivism, and nurture a community that thrives instead on reciprocity. Everyday, their work invites more people to these spaces, to bask in the warm sunshine, the quiver of a cottonwood in the wind, and the chatter of birds. Jordan gazes once again upon the murals, “We run on passion.” Every stroke of color reflects the vibrancy of the lives that have touched it. 

Ayano Yoshikawa: Landscape and Stories

I come from Tokyo, Japan, a city often referred to as the place that never sleeps. Walking in the dark, you never feel alone because of the constant glimmer of neon lights from every direction. Yellow from the street lamps, red and white from cars stopping and moving, green from the convenience stores, and blue, purple, and pink from ramen restaurants to sketchy maid cafes. They all combine to create a magical harmony, each sign glowing to catch your attention. Unfortunately, the neon light hides the shimmering lights above, erasing our connection to the Milky Way.

Landscapes are changing and disappearing. For my family, we chose to live in Tokyo and let go of our night sky. Yet, some are still fighting to protect their landscapes.

A little away from a port in Lewiston, Idaho, in the American West, I sit in the backseat of a jet boat along the Snake River, gazing at a particular mountain. It stands out from the others around me, which are dressed in brown tones with green sagebrush patches sprinkled along their sides. This mountain has a steep slope, curving like the inside of a bowl, formed by tall, thin, red-brown stones lined up so tightly that they seem stacked against one another.

On the jet boat, Roger Amerman, an ethno-geologist from the Choctaw Nation, stands comfortably wearing blue shorts. His eyes beam as he looks at the mountain. Roger focuses on understanding the deep connections between Native Americans and their natural environment. “You’ll see at the top of these columns, there’s like an octagon, kind of a roundish ovate structure,” Roger says, pointing at the hillside. In Nez Perce stories, these columns were created by beaver clawing at the mountain during a fight with Coyote. The red-brown, pencil-like stones, lined up like a brand-new box of yellow pencils, can be seen as claw marks of a beaver clawing its way up. “You’ll notice that in Native cultures, except maybe Mesoamerican, all our structures were round or ovate,” he continues. “And you see that in the base of teepees or long tents—they’re either round or ovate.” Roger raises his voice. “We learned about life. We learned how to build our structures, our architecture, from the land. [The land] talked to us.”

On the other side of the planet, 5,000 miles away from Tokyo, on the Nez Perce reservation, I gaze at a night sky shimmering with silver glitter through the opening of a traditional Nez Perce teepee. Information about the Star Festival, Tanabata recollects in my mind. Tanabata commemorates the annual meeting of Orihime and Hikoboshi, two lovers separated by the Milky Way but allowed to meet once a year by a magpie bridge. Orihime and Hikoboshi are stars, Vega and Altair, on either side of the Milky Way, with the swan constellation in the middle forming their bridge. 

As I look at the shimmering sky, I recall a different kind of landscape, one filled with red and white lights that move slowly through the night. As a child, I thought these were stars, only to later realize they were airplane lights. I never saw Vega, Altair, the swan, or the Milky Way where I grew up. Now, staring at the stars from my sleeping bag, I am surrounded by a magical landscape, as if I’ve stepped into a fairy tale.

I look at Beaver Claw Mountain, noticing how the landscape preserves the memories of people. During the boat tour, Roger talks strongly, dire emotions floating through his voice. “The [Nez Perce] know a lot of these stories, and we hope that we retain them. This is… this is pillar stuff to the culture, to know this. And the Nez Perce are very lucky.” His voice hardens, carrying the sorrow of his great-grandparents and their ancestors, as well as the sadness of the Choctaw Nation.“We were displaced out of the Mississippi Valley into Oklahoma Territory. We can't put our hands on these sites anymore. We're impoverished.” The Choctaw Nation was forcibly removed from their homeland in 1830 and relocated to the Choctaw Nation Reservation in Southeastern Oklahoma created by the American Government. “I've talked to people. We have the legends, but the Nez Perce, Yakimas, Nixya'awii, Umatillas, they still are in pretty much their original homeland, and they are rich that they could tell the story.” While some tribes still live near remnants of their ancestral lands, most were not so fortunate. Many tribes were relocated far from their original homes, and some, despite federal recognition, do not even have a reservation. Roger looks at Beaver Claw Mountain, a place where the Nez Perce continue to tell stories in the same landscape their ancestors did. “Most of our tribes can’t do that anymore,” he says.

Later, I find myself looking at a real night sky, out on a remote mountain along the Washington and Oregon border. I can’t see my hands but can feel them outside my pockets. For the first time, I truly understand what pitch-dark means.I look up and see the brilliant Milky Way, its countless stars impossible to count. Among them, I spot Orihime (Vega) and Hikoboshi (Altair) on either side of the Milky Way, with the Magpie (Swan) bridging them. It’s not even Tanabata, but the stories of Orihime and Hikoboshi I heard from my parents and teachers, people who themselves had never seen the Milky Way, feel even more magical.

The culture of celebrating star festivals is fading, now mostly for families with young children. I wonder if the absence of the Milky Way is causing people to forget the stories, and eventually allowing a part of the culture to disappear.

Cameron Collister: Life Lives on: Flowing Beyond Borders

Blades dip and slice through the reflection of a sky mirror. Paddle strokes synchronously push through blue waters and a small fleet of three carefully crafted wood canvas canoes rhythmically make their way down the endless waters of Lac La Croix it is ongoing like a river. It’s 6am on a seemingly ordinary July morning in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The day of the week or date is unknown, it’s not needed. What is known is the perfection of sky’s reflection on the glassy lake. Both to the right and left are pine forest shorelines mostly made of red and white pines. Glancing at the map, campsites are marked by red dots, portages between lakes with a dainty red dashed line, and there is a black bolded line splitting down an ever so precise but random path through Lac La Croix and the same east to west chain of water. This is the border line. Lac La Croix extends its waters to international shores on one side are Canadian trees, the other American. A successful division on paper, but the map overlooks water’s fluidity. After all, it’s all just water and trees in this land of lakes and rivers. 

Running far away in a place where water scarcely flows, there is a line drawn of similar stature. The line here is real, drawn on map and land. The border is unstoppable and halt you must. A steel curtain where flint first meets steel, rusted fence rods stake into the flesh of the land and razor wire scars bleed a river of reverence. It linearly moves with a sense of infiniteness. Flat desert stretches into the horizon like endless lake water and time moves slow. A thin margin of life, the dry desert here embodies typical characteristics of physical division. Face to face with sky-scraping metal ties, you will feel small. But fluidity remains. People move. The yucca grows between bars, wind blows rock to sand blown cross counties and the desert remains the same. Differences stand bold as byproducts of humanity defining the separation of region needed only to serve the orders of power. 

Paddling along Lac La Croix on an unknown July morning you know exactly where you are with a map in your lap. Up and around an island and you can watch a teeter movement back and forth to either side of the bolded black line. Traveling the border route east to west passing back and forth of the border line is frequent, but it doesn’t really matter. Water is fluid. There is a privileged ability to ignore such dividing constructs. The observation of the border is one that is done only when demanded of such constructs.

 A shiny thing lies on shore, it is human made. An alien object to the wilderness. Upon inspection it is 6 inches tall, made of a shiny silver, and reads on one of four sides “United States of America”. These small monuments are built into the land every 15 or so miles marking the border. They stand out once you notice them. One of the few things making the border known in a place where a border serves no real purpose. It is a reminder of division in a place where life moves freely flourishing as fluid as the water. 

People flow like a river. Below a looming wall of steel, cemented in desert like a dam to a channel, there is a bustling traffic crossing back and forth, a routine. It is a passing similar yet vastly different to being seated in canoe on water weaving along a seemingly imaginary line. It is a tight run ship. Nothing goes unseen on the Mexican border.

A river of people moves carrying a will to live in peace, safety and with dignity. The border division erodes dignity away to the flow of water, compromised to the value of a person’s citizenship or the daily work of low paying jobs. A literal river has a tributary, a mouth, a sea, an ocean- for a river of refugees there are pulls of safety, safer, and safest.  Families hold together like clay and children are raised on both sides, raised to rise above walls. Youthful ignorance is bliss at the border. 

Life grows like vines rising on the wall not to be tamed to either side. The San Pedro River chases channel North crossing into the U.S. from its headwaters in Mexico. Attempts to bind are bound to fail, water refuses to obey by constricting lines. Only constricting to the narrowing of channel’s constriction and obstruction. The story of rivers in the southwest is largely a story of rivers no more. The San Pedro River is one of the last free flowing rivers in the region and with construction ongoing to continue a border wall across river it’s flow would join the masses of rivers no longer free flowing. At crossing a border is a clot in a river’s vein. However, water is alive, water is doing things. Floods and meanders pose challenges against the division of a border and life sustains fluidity. 

Mitochondrial DNA is a river that carries the ancestral mother lines in the living wherever we go. A small grey cat with yellow eyes born from the alleyways of Nogales navigates a maze of feet plodding its way through border traffic. The boots of patrol agents on duty and mother’s slip-ons with children’s sneakers homegoing are all the same to the cat. It travels between bars and through chaos, blind to the international border that lie at its paws. 

Not all creatures have the same agency as this cat. Preserving migration corridors for migratory species is critical in the sky islands border region. Jaguars, monarchs, and bats are among some of the creatures most at risk due to the division of the border wall. Life is fluid and its persistence on either side of a border serves as a reminder that borders are human constructs of division. But the Jaguar cannot fly. Blocked by the border wall they are unable to fulfill the Northen most part of their migration north. 

Given wings and you are given freedom. Wrong. The birds still see the line as they fly cross this land. The playful bat searches for a sugar rich agave flower to feed upon. In turn the agave is pollinated in a perfect relationship of give and take. Bats on either side of the steel curtain border face an imbalance of food availability due to differences in regulations surrounding the use of agave in agriculture and production of tequila, mezcal, and baccara in Mexico and the U.S. 

Only when they have no other choice do geology and life obey by physical borders. Border systems surround us; international borders are marked to the extreme even in places where a border serves little significance, stateliness cut and divide a country, even fences mark the simplest of borders. When visiting a wildlife refuge should you expect to see a barbed wire fence along the perimeter, when walking the trails wonder how the animals move through these fences. The land is the same on either side of a wall, fence, road or small metal border monument, life persists. Borders serve to humans a creation of division on either side. And to the animals and land, create unnecessary hurdles to life. 

Alice O'Brien: Hummingbird Wings in the Smoke: The Preservation of Language in Landscape

“We are reeling right now.” John’s voice dipped. 

A hummingbird flitted over the deck and fell out of sight. Tiny wings beating in furious rhythm, a toneless hum, X̌ʷnámx̌ʷnam. Someone had asked about the current state of languages for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. We were all sitting on the deck of a wooden lodge on the X̌ʷnámx̌ʷnam property- named after the sound of Hummingbird wings- that has recently been gifted by the Methow Conservancy to the Colville Tribes as an effort to reunite indigenous people with their ancestral lands. John Sirois, traditional territories advisor for the Reservation, went on to say that the last fluent speaker of the Entiat language had recently died, with other languages on the reservation in precarious positions. The decline of Native American languages is widely recognized, and anything but natural. In the late 19th century, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools, beginning a brutal, centuries-long assimilation policy that forced Native people to abandon their land, culture, religion, and language. 

Language in its many forms is a uniting characteristic of humanity; we all use it. As it unites, it also separates- languages become differing ways of interpreting the world. What cannot be underestimated is the fundamental force that language possesses in shared communities. Language is strength: languages mean control over history and identity. Language is the capacity for self defense, and language is dignity. 

Language is often associated primarily with the written word. Written language is idolized, established, and eternalized, such as with the Constitution and the Bible. In Stites Idaho, we encountered a dimension to language that transcends boundaries of Western understanding. In the chicory-dotted yard of the longhouse in Stites, Idaho, Nez Perce citizen Nakia Williamson-Cloud spoke solemnly and commandingly through the smoke. He told us about the natural law for his people, asserting that “it’s not written in any book… It's too big to fit on a page. It's written on this land and that's where the truth is.

On our day in Hell’s Canyon, guided by Nez Perce Tourism, we stood in front of a rock face taking in the rust-colored pictographs that were painted an estimated 7,000 years ago. These symbols exist at the intersection of art and language, pulling meaning through time. Roger Amerman, citizen of the Choctaw Nation and our host on the Nez Perce reservation, made sure we understood that the symbols on the rocks revealed truths about the life of the Indigenous people in the region at the time. The “language written on this land” that Nakia mentioned wasn’t literally written, like red on rock. He speaks of a type of writing that exists in the landscape in a deeply rooted way. He told us, “the language wasn't brought here. It wasn't a value that was brought here and superimposed over the land. The language comes from this land.”

Back at Hummingbird ranch, John spoke similarly about language and the land. He remembered asking Elaine, an elder in the community, about a good word for canoe. She asked if it was made on the Okanagan or Columbia river, whether it was carved out or burned out, used for fishing or transportation? All of those features would change the word, she explained. Place-based specificity is deeply ingrained in the language, as is fluidity. Words change, reflecting the passage of time and compounding violence. When mining in the 1960s changed the water in a Snake River tributary, its name changed too. The Nez Perce originally called the river “Koos-kai-kai,” translated to “clear water,” which is what Idahoans still call it today. However, the Nez Perce now refer to the river as “La claspa,” which means cloudy, muddy water. “Language changes how we relate to things,” Nakia tells us. 

For the Nez Perce, stories passed down by their elders are situated in the landscape around them. Stories about Coyote, and about the origin story of The Heart of The Monster, where Coyote scattered the parts of the defeated beast, can be traced in every direction. Roger took us to the Lungs, situated close to the Heart near Kamiah, Idaho. The winding road took us steadily upwards. At the top of the ridge, we looked down at the smoke-blurred landscape. Roger pointed to the lungs, explaining that on a usual day, we could have gotten a more cohesive picture of the story of the monster as we looked at the expanse below us. The smoke served as a sobering reminder, not just of the ways that the landscape is becoming increasingly endangered, but of the metaphorical cloud that blocked our collective ability to “read” the land the way it was intended. 

Nakia speaks about anthropologists and linguists in the 1960s who collected and preserved stories from his elders. “Unfortunately… when they’re written in English… very much the nature of them has changed.” Efforts to preserve language like these are part of a large movement in the late 20th century known as “salvage anthropology,” Euro-American efforts to preserve and document Native American culture in the face of what they viewed as a sweeping, irreversible, loss. As artifacts were collected and language preserved in writing, living Native people still lacked access to their ancestral lands. Today, Native American languages are on an undeniable precipice. However, historic methods of language preservation used by linguists and anthropologists have failed to understand the extent to which the language and the land are interconnected and mutually instituted. 

Protecting the land, the pages of the law, the history and future of Indigenous people, is of utmost importance. These stories and these laws are written into the landscape around us in ways we cannot see- and perhaps are not meant to see. How do we, as Non-Native people, move through the pages? We climb the ridge and look over the Lungs of the monster. We see smoke in the valley and our lungs work to filter our breath. We try to distinguish the ancient petroglyphs from the layers of vandalism. We move with reverence. 

Written word freezes language. Language created from and written on landscape melts and transforms with the changing world, eternalized. Indigenous people in North America have been able to look to the pages of the land for 16,000 years. The threat lies not just in the land changing, because language can change in tandem- it lies in the inability of Native people to access and tend to that land which acts as the pages and basis of law, the foundation of religion, the etymology of words, and the holder of generational wisdom. When land and its readers can coexist in space, languages come alive. 

Johanna Duncan: Where will you feel the Earth’s undoing?

In your lifetime, you could go back to the place in which you were created— that taught you what the world is like, that created you— and not recognize it. As the atmosphere warms and the seasons shift, it might not feel the same as you remember. The trees you’ve come to know might be gone, their absence felt as there is nothing to greet you in a new season. The mountains in the distance that anchored your place in the world might be charred and barren. You can sit in their shadow, only to reminisce, as their silhouette reminds you of what once was. 

Swelling with soot, the Rio Grande runs black as it churns through the valley. The ashes of an ecosystem lost inundate the channel. Sediment dams the river, building up between the levees constructed to tame the river’s meander and periodic flooding. Laid bare is the insignificance of human engineering when compared to the transformative forces of fire and flood. 

The dense stand of cottonwoods that line the river’s bank quiver in the wind, seemingly at the sight of the funeral procession that marches before it. The smell of smoke billows from the river as it cascades from the watershed’s highlands. The Jemez Mountains stand scorched and barren after a high severity wildfire immolated nearly everything in its path. Ponderosa pine snags decorate this scene of desolation in the absence of a lush, green canopy.  

“Landscape is a function of climate,” remarks Anne Tillery, a geomorphologist who has spent her career working for the US Geological Survey in the Rio Grande Valley. The black river, the scorched earth, and the boney ponderosa stands are a result of a series of land management decisions, aided by an average atmospheric warming of 2 and a half degrees over the past 40 years in the valley. 

Anne has witnessed the increased scope and severity of wildfires in the Rio Grande watershed within her own lifetime. The 2011 Las Conchas Fire was one of the largest wildfires in New Mexico’s history, burning nearly 150,000 acres of ponderosa pine forest. 

Among the scorched earth, there is nothing left to cling to. As monsoon rains made landfall on the newly burnt landscape, massive amounts of sediment washed away. Babbling brooks swelled with rainwater and flooded the narrow finger canyons. Charred ponderosa snags, skeletons of their former selves, were mobilized by the flooding. Log jams formed, scraping the canyon walls. “I mean, the landscape, it just unraveled,” Anne lamented. “Right after the fire, I was literally weeping. I was so upset. And I walked out to this overlook, and the sun went down, and I was just crying and crying. And then once the sun went down, you couldn't see that it was burned anymore, and it had the same exact profile that it always had. And all of a sudden I was like, ‘You know what? The mountain doesn't really care.’” Even if the mountain doesn’t care, the people who witnessed the fire’s destruction do. 

Walking through the uncanny valley of a landscape you once knew turned unrecognizable, your eyes may cry. A twinge in your chest as your heart strings are weighed down suggest an irreconcilable loss has occurred. As this upwelling surfaces, you are no longer apathetic. In the midst of ecological disaster, you can grasp onto reverance for the lost. Will you lose yourself in the valley of disdain and inaction? Will your eyes glaze over as another scene of desolation washes over you? Or will you reconcile with this loss, holding it within yourself to create change? 

As high severity fires burn and flames engulf forested hillsides, entire forest ecosystems will be lost. Forever maimed. You can walk through the scar of the landscape you love knowing that it’s no fault of the fire that bare twigs protrude out of the scorched earth like bones from a ribcage. Because before the scorched earth, there were decades of fire suppression. Forests grew thick and unforgiving as land management agencies put out nearly every fire that started. The forest nearly forgot the gentle embrace of a low severity wildfire gracing its understory. What will be forgotten as the landscapes we know change before our eyes? What ecological knowledge will be lost?

The destruction of forests by high severity wildfires is just one example of grief in the face of ecological loss. Within the Rio Grande watershed, this loss is prompted by poor land management decisions, climate change, and the damming of waterways. 

As the smoke dissipates, and the black ashes of an immolated ecosystem wash down river towards the plains of Mexico, the river remains unrecognizable to its former self. The Rio Grande churns down a channelized corridor constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. A series of dams and levees constrict the river’s characteristic meander. Severed from the wetlands, most of which have been drained to make way for roads and housing developments, the Rio Grande can no longer engage in a cycle of periodic flooding. 

As the floodplain forgot what it felt like for the Rio Grande’s silty waters to wash over it, the valley’s cottonwood trees began to disappear. A cottonwood will release tufts cradling their seed to be carried by the flood water as it spreads through the valley. As the flood recedes, the seed will plant itself in the damp soil that remains. Sprouted roots will chase the groundwater as it retreats into the river bed. A cottonwood emerges, its bark growing gnarled. The deep, interlocking wrinkles seem to reflect the wares of time and hold the history of where water has overtook the valley floor. Left without a means to repopulate, the cottonwoods are confined to the banks of a systematically managed river, void of its meander. 

A network of irrigation ditches stems from the Rio Grande like veins from a beating heart, leading to a small farm in the South Valley of Albuquerque.  The desert sun beats down over Chispas Farm on an unseasonably warm late October morning. Purple eggplants peek through a tangle of green vines and leaves that form rows across the farm. As the frost arrived much later than usual this year, the farmers had to adjust their harvesting schedule. Ethan, a farmer at Chispas explained, “It does hurt a little bit to pull out live plants. It is important for me to notice that persistent feeling of something being slightly off or wrong or out of sync with how things are supposed to be or how things usually are.” As climate change causes the seasons to shift, relationships to the land will as well. “That, I think, is a pretty important feeling to pay attention to. It might point me towards more climate grief or climate change action,” Ethan noted.

Where will you feel the earth’s undoing? Will your eyes weep as a landscape unravels before you? Will the sweaty sheen on your skin feel unsettling as the sun beams overhead weeks after an autumnal equinox? Will your heart ache as your hands grasp to pull out live plants, still growing green on the vine after far surpassing their growing season? When we lose landscapes, we lose a part of ourselves. Reverence is resistance to apathy in the face of ecological loss. Ruminate in your grief. Question why it hurts, why it feels off and unsettling, and why you are weeping. You may find the antidote to inaction amongst the ashes.

Irving Baldwin: On Parasitic Conservation

“Environmental movements normally are for the native species. They are for the endemic species. This thing's non-native, it causes damage to the native species, and it challenges the way we understand environmental management. But the life lesson there is sometimes done is better than perfect.” With this, Ryan closed his time with Semester in the West leaving us perplexed wondering how German Brown Trout saved Mono Lake. 

Two days prior, Ryan Garret, education director for the Mono Lake Committee, stood at the South Tufa trailhead on the shore of Mono Lake. The committee’s primary mission: to right the wrongs inflicted on the Lake by the diversion of its water to Los Angeles via the LA Aqueduct: “They diverted four of the five tributary streams that feed Mono Lake. when you cut off the main water supply, Mono Lake is going to shrink”. As the trail led down a soft slope, a pastel panorama of colors danced in the wind, tickling the rubber rabbitbrush, sagebrush, and caterpillar greasewood. “Rubber rabbitbrush, while native, is considered a pioneering species, and specifically a pioneering species of disturbed ecosystems.” Reaching beyond the tips of the brush are gnarled spires of limestone called Tufa. These emaciated carbonate fingers reach longingly up at the sky. These features draw tourists to the lake en masse. Ryan stands at the foot of a Tufa; “What's super interesting about these towers, is that they can only grow underwater… if we were standing here in 1941 we would all be well underwater.” These Tufa are captivating, the plants, beautiful- yet they are the product of the starvation of the lake whose water was sent to a cause deemed more worthy.

The shore is a light gray sparkling as obsidian flakes glint in the sunlight. Between glistening sand and lapping water is a foot-wide buffer of dense black. A boy dressed in a tracksuit runs through it and as he does, the solid black band dissolves into the air, as a sea of hundreds of thousands of alkali flies part to clear his path. The whole lake pulses with life. Below the surface species found nowhere else in the world thrive. Brine shrimp that have evolved with the lake for thousands of years would disappear if it were to shrink any more. The same goes for the endemic alkali fly, a species that fascinates many with its ability to live most of its life underwater. All of this beauty and fantastical geology reflects a noxious reality–Mono Lake is showing us these things because she is dying. 

In the early 1900’s the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s began developing the LA Aqueduct. The project was designed to meet the needs of the growing city of Los Angeles by drawing water from less populated areas in California. In 1941 Grant Lake, seven miles above Mono Lake, was re-engineered to serve as Grant Reservoir holding the increased water supply produced by the Aqueduct expansion into the Mono basin. It cut off every drop of the lake's supply. The ensuing 40 years of diversion, caused Mono Lake’s water level to recede by 45 feet, almost half of its total volume. It was projected in 1979 that without the return of water to Mono Lake, the entire ecosystem would collapse by the mid-1990s to early 2000s. As the lake levels dropped the tufa were exposed; a check engine light. Garret kneels on the earthen dam that created Grant Reservoir. The Reservoir and Mono Lake are connected by the tributary stream Rush Creek. Garret explains the four ways that water leaves Grant Reservoir: evaporation, a return ditch, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and, the spillway, the last is important, and it comes with a story. In the early 1900’s Brown trout were introduced to Mono Lake’s tributaries by hatcheries and 30 years later there was a well-established fishery.

When the El Niños of 1982 and 1983 sent water through Rush Creek 30,000 trout came with it and took up residence below the reservoir. The fishery was thriving again, and anglers rejoiced, praising LA DWP for the spill. The department accepted the praise despite having no intention of sustaining the spillage. November first, the day after the 1984 fishing season ended, LA DWP announced it would be closing the gates, once again drying up the creek and starving Mono of her much-needed water. California Fish and Game planned to salvage as many of the fish as possible for relocation but the Mammoth Flyrodders Association, a powerful special interest group, was able to influence and implement a different solution. 

Diving into fish and game code they located codes 5936 and 5937 which stated “The owner of any dam shall allow sufficient water at all times to pass over, around, or through the dam, to keep in good condition any fish that may be planted or exist below the dam.” They successfully argued that these regulations merited an injunction against the department’s water management plans, and the department was ordered to ensure that a minimum yearly spill of 14,000-acre feet be allotted to the Rush Creek system. The precedent provided by this decision was applied to the other three tributaries of Mono Lake as well. Today the department has strict limits on how much water it can divert yearly from the lake. But there is something fishy about this solution. The health of Mono Lake has been a priority for conservationists and activists, known as Monophiles, since at least the 1970s. For decades these groups have organized and fought for Mono–to preserve its endemic species and breathtaking scenery. But time and time again they were stymied by the political goliath that was the DWP. The Fish and Game code win that ensured the minimum annual spill, was a double-edged sword. Garret lamented while standing above a small dam on Lee Vining Creek “The trout here, the fish, are the primary political vessel that move the needle to save Mono Lake.” The trout aren't without their negative impact on the ecosystem, “They actually caused quite a bit of environmental damage here in the Sierra Nevada… the brown trout is eating all the tadpoles and all the eggs that Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog has produced. Same thing is happening with the Yosemite toads just further up the water system.” Garret explains how complex the dynamic produced by introducing this non-native fish species over a century ago has become. “Environmental movements normally are for the native species. They are for the endemic species. This thing's non-native, it causes damage to the native species, and it challenges the way we understand environmental management. But the life lesson there is sometimes Done is better than perfect. If we waited for this perfect ecological solution where we used the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog as our political vessel to restore these streams, it would have never happened. Mono Lake would have collapsed. Fish for some reason, more than any other animal that I can think of, move a political needle.” 

Ironically, the element that galvanized the reclamation of water necessary to restore Mono Lake and its interrelated ecosystems was interest in a species that’s not native to the system–brown trout. It’s frustrating and instructive that people organized around and were able to drive change because of their investment in restoring recreational fishing, not saving the exceptional Mono Lake ecosystem from brine shrimp and Alkali Flies to migratory birds. 

As it stands now, Mono Lake is doing alright. The flies still blanket the shoreline, the shrimp still thrive in its salty body, and birds still take refuge on its glassy surface. However, the battle to save Mono Lake still wages in the courts of law and public opinion. Ryan hopes that through education, activism, and litigation the lake can become its saving grace. Self-supported and self-actualized.

Linnea Krig: Maxville Memories

Dawn at Maxville delivers serpentine trails of milky mist that graze over the vast field of cattle-trampled grasses like ghosts caught between earth and sky. Elk call out somewhere nearby as if they are scattered voices of an eerie, wailing choir. When the sun finally rises it’s easy for the mind to try and wander into the past, to reconstruct what is now out of sight. Gwen Trice is attempting to put this vision of re-creation into action. An hour's drive away from the abandoned town resides the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center. With beige walls and light green trim it fits easily into the main street of Joseph Oregon. Unassuming, modest. But inside, two small rooms hold all the remaining stories and objects from a so-called “ghost town”. The project began with one woman, a curious daughter searching for answers and healing. 

Gwen is the daughter of Lafayette “Lucky” Trice, a Black man who lived and worked in the Oregon logging town of Maxville, established in 1923 by Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company. Bowman-Hicks closed the town after just ten years. Gwen wasn’t alive during Maxville’s operations, but remembers growing up in La Grande, Oregon, and being told regularly that she wasn’t allowed to exist in White spaces and around White friends. She relives that pain telling us, “I hated me. I didn’t want to be me, and that’s probably the saddest thing that a child can come up with.” Throughout this period of self loathing, her father’s early adulthood was shrouded in some mystery for Gwen and when she learned of Maxville from her father late in his life as a community where White families and families of color lived and worked agreeably in close proximity, she held on tightly to the surge of hope for healing it gave her.

In order to fill in pieces of the story she didn’t get to hear from her father, she turned to others. In early 2009, Gwen released an episode of Oregon Experience through Oregon Public Broadcasting entitled “The Logger’s Daughter,” consisting of her interviews and research conducted in an effort to glue together the scattered shards of Maxville memories. A fifteen-years-younger Gwen Trice dresses in the same bright colors she does today and carries herself proudly with the same persistently bright smile alongside a slight concerned crease in her brow; the face of hopefulness alongside a shallowly buried and fervent frustration. She pours herself into interviews with, mostly White, still-living residents of Maxville, listening as they wax nostalgic about stories of her father, yet also occasionally drop a casual slur or two. Even as these sharp reminders of discrimination pass by, Gwen embraces these moments and expresses her appreciation for folks sharing with her their full, uncensored accounts of life in the logging town. Still, the shadow of active exclusion laws in 1920s Oregon looms, sometimes silently, over each conversation. 

Equipped with hundreds of meaty stories and small bits of physical history, Gwen explains her intentions for this physical space and, in the process, creates something that conveys more than a Land Acknowledgement usually does. She says, “We are creating ways for people to understand the connection our space makes to the lands, to the Nez Perce tribe, the first peoples that were here before the land was stolen from them. And I like to consider it, consider us, temporary stewards of the land, because they had it for thousands of years and it was stolen. And we don’t know what could possibly happen in the future.” Gwen embraces this undefined future, never forgetting the ephemerality of her work; knowing that when the time comes, just like it did for Maxville a century ago, the land and the people will move on. But, as it often goes, memories, physical and intangible, will still linger. 

On what once was the White side of Maxville shards of hotel ceramics lie, strewn atop the yellowed grass; highly visible. Remembered easily. Oil drums rest sideways, rusted razor edges of holes revealed through a century of weather. A few building footprints stand out somewhat obviously. But a half mile away, on the Black side of Maxville, the physical remnants of families are virtually invisible blanketed by thin layers of sediments and thick foliage. Here, some meticulous scraping of packed earth is in order. Where tiny makeshift railcar houses used to reside right next to the now absent tracks, a small team of archaeologists, employed by Gwen, kneel to dig and scrape and sift. Each millimeter of damp dirt removed reveals century old belongings of Black families suspended in fine sediments built up over decades and helps put together pieces of splintered stories. 

The restoration of the Maxville Cabin is another significant step taken to carry out Gwen’s vision. Diligent work went into deconstruction of the remaining pieces of the weathered building, replacement of rotted and cracked wood, preservation of any still-useable material. Now, fine sawdust coats the floor and floats slowly in the sunbeams piercing through the original windows. Sunbeams pushing through the panes of glass just like they did one hundred years ago when Bowman-Hicks used it as their operations office, where Gwen’s father may have stepped inside, exhausted from hours of physical labor, to discuss a job with a colleague or a boss. Every once in a while, inside the cabin, Gwen pauses, tilting her head upwards with her eyes half closed in a silent moment of grief filled prayer; it loads the air with emotion and an unspoken understanding of simultaneous hurt and healing. The more Gwen reasserts the subjectiveness of trauma and the web of buried pasts, I am hopeful for how she will employ the character of the land, the unavoidable influence of its half-erased history, to soothe and move forward.

Gwen’s project in Maxville doesn’t exist to permanently develop the space into a Western fantasy land or a ghost town tourist site for casual romps and to supplement growing souvenir collections. Her vision doesn’t serve as a tool to quench a played out colonial thirst for voyeuristic fun, nor does it exist solely to subvert the exploitative history of archaeology. Instead, Gwen’s work shines an experimental light to the past in hopes of returned connection and community. In her words, “Now, I’m giving what I didn’t get, and it’s incredibly healing.”

At dinner one night, outside the cabin, Gwen declares with an almost frenetic delight her “Master Plan” for Maxville which includes a partnership with Dark Sky International, a bat identification sensor, and a 3D virtual recreation of missing buildings. Just then, somewhere in the distance, an elk lets out a haunting howl. Gwen pauses mid-sentence to close her eyes and face the sky just as she did in the cabin. And, maybe remembering that she’s allowed to take her time, she listens. 

Henry Anderson: Apple Archive: Preserving the Branches of Diversity

In the shifting shade of an orchard in the afternoon light, children dart like birds through the trees, vanishing and reappearing between withered trunks. Amber light sparkles through the gnarled branches, pooling in the soft spots along the flowering wild grasses, beaded with dew. Apples lie scattered at the base of the winding roots, bruised and bitten. A boy runs through hollow tunnels, bent and carved by deer padding through the bushes. He yells and laughs before he notices his friends have disappeared behind the walls of shrub. He crouches, before laying on his belly to hide. With the boy’s chin in the dirt, he stares at the thick blades of grass–the worms and isopods inching through the soil, exploring small forests. Mesmerized by the miniature scale of the world in front of him, he pauses, before looking up at the cover of the trees spreading earth across the sky.

That boy was me. I played in orchards as a kid, where the trees felt like cathedrals. I never thought about the apples or where they came from, because they felt permanent. Like they had always been there: as timeless as the dirt under my nails, and just as irreplaceable as the stars. It wasn’t until I spoke to an older man that I began to understand how fragile those trees really were, and what depth of history they carried with them. That history began long before I was born.

In the early days of North American orchards, apple trees flourished across homesteads, farms, and small towns. Each tree fruited unique flavors, colors, shapes, and blemishes, cultivated for their specific uses—cider, baking, fresh eating, and show. But as industrial agriculture rose in popularity, monoculture took over, and many of those trees were torn up. Ripped from the earth, to make way for standardized orchards, in neat rows. Many, forgotten and abandoned. I don’t blame them. The market demanded it. Names like Polly Sweet, Summer Ladyfinger, and White Horse disappeared, either into obscurity, or extinction.

In the hills of Montezuma County in Southwest Colorado, Jude Schuenemeyer greeted our group on a chilly day. With a patterned collar shirt and a Nature Conservancy hat, he twisted the small ring on his left hand. His soft eyes passed over us, looking up at the heirloom tree that dangled apples as green as the leaves, hanging at nose level.

“So here's something you guys have to know about apples,” he said, crouching under the tree. He pulled a short-bladed knife from his hip and reached into the branches, twisting off a twig.  “Apples are not true to type from seeds. Without human interaction, all of the cultivars that exist will go extinct.” He sliced into the branch, splitting the ends apart into a V. “There were 20,000 cultivars a hundred years ago, and we're down to about 6,000 cultivars now, which means we lost about 14,000 varieties of apples.” He paused. “We lost a lot. We lost an enormous amount of cultivar diversity in how those apples were used and what they represented to people.”

That scale is hard to grasp, until you consider what remains today. Walk through your local grocery store, and you’ll likely find only a handful of varieties–maybe ten, at most. Every apple you see has been engineered, not for individuality, but for uniformity and convenience. In many ways, this has been a success. Engineered apples are designed to thrive in large-scale agricultural systems, with higher yields. Traits like a resistance to bruising and longer shelf lives allow them to be transported long distances, to feed larger populations. For consumers, predictability in color, taste, and shape caters to busy lifestyles and allows them to be more accessible and available year-round. In a world of billions, modifying and mass-producing apples became essential, in order to keep shelves stocked.

Yet, while grocery store apples meet the demands of a fast-paced world, something irreplaceable has been left behind. Orchards with staggering variety preserved much more than just fruit. They preserved the richness of choice. Choice which connects us to our food with a much more personal connection. Diversity may well have been a luxury, but it was also resilience, culture, and creativity, nurtured by generations of farmers and apple cultivators. Each apple on a tree was a symbol of their identity, and the community that surrounds them. In the pursuit of perfection, we sacrificed that diversity, erasing a living library of flavors that once enriched our lives.

But not everything was lost. Thanks to a centuries-old technique, rare apple genetics endure.

Jude sliced off another branch from the tree above him. “To keep these things going, we graft.” He pointed at the base, buried by muddy leaves. “You see this scar across here? That's the graft line. This is the work of somebody from over a century ago.” Indeed, a faint line was visible on the bark: a trunk Frankensteined together, like patchwork. I thought about the trees I used to play around. Did they have graft marks?

With technique and precision, you could sustain a variety solely on another tree. Or, you could fuse two desirable traits into a single tree. Maybe, say, grafting a Ruby Red onto a Red June. By hand, you could combine the hardiness and adaptability of one with a uniquely sweet flavor of another, creating a new variety entirely.

He leaned forward. “I think of grafting as one of the greatest leaps of human imagination. To understand it, there was a tremendous, tremendous leap of human imagination. I put it up there with the invention of the sewing needle.” He smiled, in a deja-vu kind of way, like it’s something he’s said many times before: as if his awe still hasn’t faded. 

Jude rotated the branch in his hands and held it up for us to see. “If you have an apple that you really like, and you plant those apple seeds, you're going to get something very different from what you originally had.” In that sense, apples are quite different from other crops–they resist being shelved or frozen in a vault. Apple varieties will vanish if left to nature alone, it’s as simple as that. Each type is tied to us, dependent on human hands to keep the genetics alive. By tending to them, orchardists like Jude allow future generations to taste what we once savored, and to spit out the same seeds. As Jude said, “People and apples are very much alike.” Rather than being locked away, they need to be alive, rooted in the soil, and cared for, as though they, too, crave a hand to turn their branches and remind the world that they are still here. And so those orchards may provide that shade, one day, to those kids who ran around them and climbed across those gnarled limbs. 

Juliette Silvers: Life Divided

Over the dusty gravel of the Sonoran Desert moves a tortoise leg, scaled and wide. Then another leg. Then a third. Then a fourth. Then stop. The way is blocked. Something hard and hot. So the tortoise turns. It keeps moving forward, the corner of its shell grazing one rusty slat after another. If it never gives up, the tortoise will patiently plod along until it is too hot, too tired, too shriveled, and it will die. 

The border wall stretches miles to the east, miles to the west. It runs along highways, along rivers and canals, through parks and wildlife preserves. It runs through towns, including one called Nogales. 

It is raining in Nogales. It hardly ever rains in November, but drops are falling. They seem to pause, suspended against the gray sky, and then rush past the brown slats of the wall and clinging wheels of razored wire. The rain hits the road, slicking the concrete. A black coat is tangled in the metal overhead. Above the train tracks, someone’s shredded underwear hangs limply from the barbs. A trio of black birds dip and glide out of Mexico, into America.

Colorful, rundown storefronts are tucked into the streets beside the wall. There is a taqueria, menus taped to the front windows. The store on the corner has wedding dresses on sale for $25. There is also “Nogales Tactical,” where each laminated window holds a photograph of a man with a military-style weapon, aiming at passersby. 200 feet away, at the border crossing, a propped-up sandwich board tells south bound cars “No Guns in Mexico.”

People shop, they work, they drive home. There is a hulking divide, repelling one half of their lives from the other, but they can go through. As a line of cars inches past loitering border agents, a woman in pink fleece pants eats her afternoon snack, a man rolls down the window, spits something out, and rolls the glass back up. Their days are punctuated by the hateful, fearsome barrier, but life goes on. They are like the birds. They have paper wings. Others are not so lucky.

“In the first five months of [2024],” the Council of Foreign Relations reports, “[border] agents encountered more than nine hundred thousand migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The majority hailed from just six countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, and Colombia.” People are leaving these homes because of violence, poverty, climate change. They are coming to the U.S. because things might be better here—there are jobs, although often hard ones, and, in some ways, there is safety. Getting in, however, is far from safe. 

The wall cutting through Nogales is solid. It’s twenty feet tall. Cameras scrutinize it from every nearby rooftop—that is, on the U.S. side. There are green-clad border agents and white patrol cars. 100 years ago, the border was 6 wires, strung between fence posts. 200 years ago, Nogales did not exist. 

The wall doesn’t push migrants away. It forces them out into the desert, up into the mountains, down into rivers—to places where the wall stops and they can get through. Places that are scorching and dry, freezing cold, treacherous. The U.S. Border Patrol makes it worse. Where the wall ends, they do not. They chase migrants, trying to detain them—with dogs, cars, ATV’s, helicopters. In the dark, on jagged cliffs, towards fences, towards water. Border Patrol does this, and people get lost, get hurt, die. 

Mike Wilson is a human rights activist. For 12 years, he left water in the desert for migrants crossing the Tohono O’odham reservation, along the Mexican border. When he started, he told us, there were “a lot of undocumented migrants coming across through the reservation lands, and they were dying, and they are dying now.” 

Every year, the aid organization Humane Borders releases a map of Arizona, peppered with red dots. Each dot is a body. Someone who died on their journey across the border into the United States. There are so many of them. “It's like the map is hemorrhaging,” says Mike. 

Photo from Humane Borders

For decades, the U.S. government has stacked fear and hatred on the southern border. And now, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there are 654 miles of barrier. The wall blocks off rivers, extends through dynamited pieces of mountain, and is flanked by barren strips of “enforcement zone.” Because of a law passed in 2005, the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Antiquities Act, and Native American Graves Protection Act, among others, can all be violated by the wall. It pries life apart where it has always been fluid, together, and connected. 

For 5 years, the Sky Island Alliance has recorded wildlife along the Arizona-Mexico border. They have seen in 100,000 photos that border fences are navigable, but the steel bollard slats of the wall leave room for only smaller creatures to crawl through. Desert tortoises, black bears, pronghorn antelope, and many others are left with their habitat sliced in half. They lose space, food, and water. Cut off from neighbor populations, they lose the strength of genetic diversity, too. And as the climate warms, creatures may be unable to flee north.

Francesca Claverie, from the Borderlands Restoration Network, explains that “from human migration to animal migration … All of this for 1000s and 1000s of years, has been migration corridors. So whenever you start messing with that, things kind of go awry.” 

Back in Nogales, a little gray cat pads along the curb. It can wind between the wall’s towering rusty bars and around the legs of people in the street. Music plays across an empty parking lot, from a stereo in Mexico. Plants unfurl between the houses on the hill. Life is beautiful, resilient, and connected. It is waiting, reaching. As long as the concrete and metal stand though, it will reach in vain. 

Additional Sources:

https://www.cfr.org/article/why-six-countries-account-most-migrants-us-mexico-border 

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/5/headlines/biden_waives_26_laws_to_hasten_us_mexico_border_wall_construction

https://www.wildlandsnetwork.org/news/the-border-walls-cascading-impacts-on-wildlife 

https://www.britannica.com/place/Nogales-Arizona 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/raging-controversy-border-began-100-years-ago-180969343/ 

https://humaneborders.info/app/map.asp 

http://www.thedisappearedreport.org/ 

https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/border-wall/border-wall-system-frequently-asked-questions 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/some-ecological-damage-from-trumps-rushed-border-wall-could-be-repaired1/ 

https://earthjournalism.net/stories/how-the-us-mexico-border-wall-harms-wildlife 

https://skyislandalliance.org/our-work/science/borderwildlife/ 

https://www.audubon.org/magazine/winter-2020/the-border-wall-has-been-absolutely-devastating

Gwen Marbet: Perihelion

“Be ready for ceremony, it’s coming today.” 

The barely visible, arching elliptical of Tsushinchan’s orbit reaches down towards the undulating mesas of ancient river sediment just as indigo begins to streak the orange-cast sky. The comet is old, believed to have been born of the spherical veil of icy space debris on the boundary of the Kuiper belt. Tsushinchan, in an 80,000 year orbit, intersects our Earthly orbit nearly perpendicular, at 139 degrees of inclination. 

In those 80,000 years, the apsidal precession of the moon will occur nearly 9,000 times – its axis of elliptic orbit rotated to the east from the magnetic pull of the northern constellation of Draco and the southernly constellation of Dorado. It will form 8,888 overlapped orbits ringing Earth before Tsushinchan retreads her blazing path through our solar system. 

The persistent, self-perpetuating spiral of our galaxy is sent into a spin from the gravitational imbalance of the continuous cycling of interstellar life: nebulas, black holes, and stellar nurseries join together in a cavalcade of symphony. Our Earthly existence is situated in the midst of it all, on the Orion spur of the Milky Way galaxy. The outer reaches of it are the smear of stars and gasses appearing across our night sky. Looking up into its hazy depths is a rippled reflection of being, which stares right back at you, born from the very churning existence which sustains our fragile lifeforms. Within it, the recycling of molecules are embroiled in a ceremony of rebirth spinning at 515,000 miles per hour. 

Life finds a home in this constant movement and follows suit. Mimicking its mother as she stirs about the kitchen in the morning light: making the coffee, reading the newspaper, going about life. Outside, the ponderosa spirals on the ridgeside – the xylem tissues developing in windy conditions, taking on a helical shape, and sculpting the fibers into a spiral as the tree grows. As it ages, weathers many a storm and is licked by fire, it eventually becomes a snag – the bark falling away, slabbing off and sloughing down the now shiny bare wood. Piling like clothes cast off in the heat of the moment in a rumpled pool on the forest floor. What’s left is the exposure of the effort of all this growing, the spiral of wood tapering down to a single branch, made flexible by its grain. 

Downvalley, in the rivers, the salmon have returned to spawn in the cool waters – driven back to the point of their birth. Geographically, this looks like an orbit, completed once through, driven by Earth’s magnetic core. Navigating the ocean and rivers by way of the pencil-thin lateral line running from operculum to tail fin, salmon sense variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, finding their way back to their spawning grounds. But, the magnetic field of the Earth itself is not stagnant. Rather, like the moon, its telluric current is subject to geomagnetic reversal – electrical currents hummock and swale, driven by convection in the mantle. Salmon are able to sense these minute changes, adjusting the trajectory of their path to still return to their spawning grounds. An individual salmon’s journey may appear as a singular orbit, completed once before the fish spawns, its body is destined to decay aside the redd; eventually left as a

bleached skull of razor-like teeth, a snout-like jaw, and the hollow of the eye giving way to the cranial cavity. To overlap the migration trajectories of a certain group of salmon over time from the same spawning grounds may illustrate a trajectory pattern not unlike the apsidal precession of the moon over astronomical time. Thousands of skulls line the river beds. 

— 

We know processes like these to be a linear notion beginning with “life” and ending in “death.” There is vague understanding that at some point the cycle starts anew but still there is a desire to settle this matter in the linear. So, the placecards are decidedly set at opposite ends of a long mahogany table to avoid conflict. The two contrasting opposites designed to make us cherish one and fear the other take their seats. The feast shall commence, or will it end just as the gesture of beginning has ushered in its first breath? For we attach these ideas to a moment forced into stagnation by our pointing finger. The body attached to it squints and tilts its head, focusing, and wrought with hesitation at the naming of such an event, says in a wavering voice – “this is the end.” 

But is it? When two opposing forces, pressure and gravity, are in equilibrium, they create a circle: a continuous motion, self persistent, and never ending. So perhaps, we look at the agreement of life and death as we do the creation of circles – grown from the balance of two interconnected opposites. Think of it as cosmic duality. The contrary becomes the complimentary. They are set at the same pace, in the same harmony. 

Already, cyclical ideas are represented in religion: in the halos of Catholic holy figures, the Dao De Ching’s introduction of the daoist principles of Yin and Yang, Buddhist teachings of enso – perfectly empty yet completely full. Across religions and geographic boundaries there is a recurring harmony between the cyclical and the divine, and through ritual observance the cyclical divine ushers in ceremony. It’s meditation as an act of attention-giving to the universe. The inspiration that rises from attention given to the unseen and the ordinary, the brief and the drawn out, is what opens us to the principle of the cyclical as the divine. Pick it up and see what it tells you, for ceremony is birthed from the attention to the passing – the continuous vigil held for the details often overlooked. 

— 

Eons of river sediment hold one another in an embrace adorned with a filigreed arc accelerating tenfold from its center. Scientifically, spirals like these are understood as a curve emanating from a nucleus, advancing in a constant outwards motion and never once revisiting the same point. Ancient Pueblo rock art depicts them as a motif of migration. Both speak to the movement of being as a migration from a center, as a consistent solar return, or as an agreement between opposing forces. It is understood that these processes are continuously cyclical, but there is a point in which the spiral ends, the sphere stops expanding, and the orbit terminates. It is the moment of attention held that dangles these processes taut in our consciousness – which we in turn try to emulate, groping and feeling our way through murky depths. The ruination, the collapsing inwards, is the realization that it is a fleeting moment in time in which all hangs in the cyclical precession of being: at some point there will be an end, an abandonment of the continuation, if there is to be a day anew. 

You must know now that the spiral arms of the Milky Way are not in fact solid arms, but rather are a mesh of interstellar fabric briefly woven for a moment in time, only to be quickly unraveled through the deft flick of the wrist that is the constant flux of stellar orbits. 

At perihelion, Tsuchinshan may feel the heat and the solar wind generated by the fiery mass of the sun, or be pulled into its magnetic field and blown apart, or perhaps sucked into a hyperbolic orbit from Jupiter and expelled to the outer reaches of interstellar space — 

but most likely she will just vanish. 

Though, in this moment, indigo and purple are daubed across the sky by the spine of Comb Ridge as she dips with grace below the horizon. 

Ben Anderson: Thacker Pass: Salvation or Sacrilege?

Gary Mckinney, a Mcdermitt Pauite descendant and enrolled member of the Duck Valley Shoshone Paiute Tribes, leans forward in his chair. Chin tilted up in defiance, his dark eyes search our faces as he asks: “How come we don't matter? Why? How come our families are throwaways?...What about the cancer? What about the dirty water? What about these abandoned mines around here?... EV mandate, the green energy transition, renewable energy is all bullshit. Excuse my language, but…that's just the way I am. I'm not afraid to say what I need to say anymore. Our lives depend on it.” His words ring eerily outward, poisoning dreams of “green” futures with the reality of violence. The Thacker Pass Lithium project has been promised as a modern mining miracle, set to usher in the new era of energy. To Gary and others in his community, it's a promise filled with cracks. It’s fissures seeping toxic sludge and long silenced screams.

15 million years ago, 1000 cubic kilometers of earth took to the sky. Molten rock and ash exploded in a cataclysmic event, eviscerating everything in its path. The aftermath was a ring, 28 miles long and 22 miles wide. In its center today, lies the largest single lithium deposit in the world. But long, long before lithium ever mattered, there were people. The Mcdermit Caldera or Peehee Mu’huh, as it is known in the Numu language, has been sacred to Shoshone, Bannock, and Paiute peoples since time immemorial. Descendants of which, form twelve tribes who trace significant connections to the land.

Standing on the eastern edge of the caldera, Myron Smart addresses our group. “Good morning you all. I just wanted to say this little bit, not too much.” Myron is an elder of the Fort Mcdermitt Paiute and member of the People of Red Mountain, an intertribal activist group. He exudes a patient humility as his grandchildren listen restlessly beside him. Taking a measured breath, he begins to speak:

“Way, way back in time….You know, our people were connected to the land and to this,” he gestures towards the caldera, “the wind, the spirits and the creators.” “They lived off of the land. They did their harvesting at a certain time, and then they had the winters…They had gatherings… they sang songs to make it rain…they had certain songs for all the four seasons…everything was really good.”

There was water, and there was life. Mule deer, pronghorn antelope, sage grouse, and golden eagles called the sagebrush home. It wasn’t perfect but people had what they needed. All of that began to change when western settlers arrived. 

From where we sit on the caldera’s rim, the slope drops suddenly down into a broad basin, cheatgrass giving way to stands of old growth sage that stretch on for miles. To Myron it’s important that we know that the land below us isn't just sacred, it’s also a grave. On September 12, 1865 the 1rst Nevada Cavalry massacred 31 men, women, children, and elders there. Myron’s grandmother was one of the only survivors. “She was…12 years old at that time…she said you could hear women, children crying…screaming, people just running everywhere.”

But one massacre wasn’t enough. Next came the boarding schools, and eventually the reservation. “When the government came… they were gathering people up…like a bunch of sheep or a bunch of cattle…pushing everybody onto the fort…Afterwards…they took little kids… like my grandkids, they took them away…off out into a boarding school...They didn't want us to speak our own language at the boarding school. They didn't want us to use our songs at the boarding school. They didn't want to hear us make our prayers…They cut everybody's hair. The soldiers…raped little kids, little girls, little boys. It didn't matter to them. We didn't have anybody there to protect us…To this day, the same government is doing the same thing to us.” Myron’s last statement sits heavy in the air and its evidence lies right beneath our feet; a water pipe running west, from the Quinn River Valley straight to the beginnings of Lithium Nevada’s 2.9 billion dollar Thacker Pass mining project. 

A day earlier and about 20 miles east, Randal Burns, chief geologist for Lithium Nevada, fires up a core saw. The screeching hiss of its rotating blade explodes into the air before he quickly turns it off. “I've said it time and time again, if it can't be grown. It has to be mined, I don't think enough people appreciate that.” We’re gathered in a small concrete floored building filled with hundreds of drilled core samples from the caldera. The dust of ancient sediments flavoring the stale air. Randal has just spent the day teaching us about the geology, history, and operations of the Thacker Pass Mine. He detailed community outreach programs, environmental impact studies, and the lengthy permitting process of the mine. According to him, the mine won’t have a meaningful impact on the land, there was no massacre at Thacker Pass, and the Mcdermitt Paiute Tribe is on board, at least on paper. Randal knows mining impacts intimately and in his mind, Thacker Pass is the best it can be done. “I hope you guys walk away from here with a more positive view on mining, at least modern mining, there's no amount of apologies that can be given for some of the past environmental sins, for sure, but in the US anyway since the late 80s, when mining reform occurred, you shouldn't have any bad mines.” Randal’s sincere assurance is contagious, and hearing it from him, it all sounds pretty convincing. But even if this project is different from the mines of the past, are there truly no risks?

Steven Emerman, owner of Malach Consulting and member of the U.S. Society on Dams’ Tailings Dam Committee, is an independent hydrologist who has spent decades studying the impacts of mining projects around the world. To him, Lithium Americas’ tailings storage plan is an exercise in “reckless creativity”. In a report commissioned by the Great Basin Resource Watch, he argues that the tailings storage relies upon an untested technology, justified with data based on single input, best case scenarios, without precautions for if things go wrong. The result is that a supposedly zero discharge facility could leak “tens to thousands of gallons per minute and would continue for decades after closure with no provisions for management of the seepage”. 

To Myron and other members of his community, the consequences of water contamination hit close to home, in fact, they nearly destroyed it. Ceasing operation in 1970, the Cordero Mercury mine left a devastating legacy for the town of Mcdermitt and tribal people in the region. Mining waste was placed on roads, in playgrounds, and around dozens of homes. Cancer and poisoned water followed. It wasn’t until 2013 that the EPA removed the waste, and to this day the water remains contaminated. In their negotiations with Lithium Americas, the tribe argued that their water supply should be fixed. The corporation refused, despite the fact that it would only cost them 0.02% of one year’s profits. 

As much as one might hope that Lithium Americas is negotiating in good faith, their track record and the power dynamic at play cast an ominous tone. One of its subsidiaries, Minera Exar, has been named in a report by the Business and Human Rights Resource Center citing 4 separate allegations of human rights violations surrounding its operations in Argentina. Additionally, a report published by Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales found that Minera Exar failed to provide free and informed consent to indigenous communities impacted by their mining activities. Further, a Washington Post expose documented a consistent pattern of leaving communities impoverished while raking in massive profits. 

Bottom line, there are many concerns being levied and few answers about how things will go. Will the groundwater be contaminated? Will toxic dust blow up to the reservation? Will the already overallocated watershed be able to sustain increased withdrawal? Environmental catastrophe aside, do people in the community want this or even actually understand what’s happening? What about the 11 other tribes with cultural ties to Thacker Pass, why weren’t they consulted? There isn’t a consensus. What is clear is that Lithium Americas is willing to gamble with the lives of tribal peoples, disturbing sacred ground to extract billions in exchange for breadcrumbs. An electrified future has a price, and right now indigenous people are, once again, footing the bill. 

“They use us like a doormat. You know, if they don't want to listen to you, they'll close the door on you. They'll walk in and then they're going to wipe their feet like this on you.” Myron says, scraping his boots back and forth across the obsidian speckled gravel, “walk off, and then think it's okay. We're people too. We're all human.” 

Additional Resources:

https://gbrw.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Exhibit-4-Thacker_Pass_Report_Emerman_Revised2.pdf

https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/howardcenter/lithium/stories/indigenous.html

Lithium extraction in Argentina: a case study on the social and environmental impacts

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/tossed-aside-in-the-lithium-rush/

Final Environmental Impact Statement: https://eplanning.blm.gov/public_projects/1503166/200352542/20030633/250036832/Thacker%20Pass_FEIS_Chapters1-6_508.pdf

Owen Schott: Terrorists and Angels, Water Caches in the American Southwest

“I forgot to bring my death maps,” said Mike. An off-hand comment, as if a map marking is dead humans is a normal thing to leave on the kitchen counter. Mike Wilson is a human rights activist and is Tohono O’odham, living on tribal land. He emulates a warm father-like energy--dad humor mixed with a dose of realism. He is the type of guy to give you the shirt off his back, regardless of the blue pen stain on his breast pocket. His land, a home from time immemorial, has been disrupted, and splintered by the U.S.-Mexico border wall. 

The Humane Borders death map confronts and quantifies the incomprehensible amount of deaths along the border. Each red dot on this map denotes a body, a life, a story. Mike witnessed migrants passing through the Baboquivari Valley, dying on tribal land by the hundreds. He estimates over half of all migrant deaths in the Tuscon area, occur on tribal land. For twelve years, he provided life-preserving aid, by putting out water for migrants. He maintained a water cache, a strategically placed water supply. His actions caught the attention of his tribal council and the Border Patrol. Mike faced fierce opposition and intimidation from both groups, reasoning that his water would encourage more migrants to come. Mike is a true hero. His life and actions should be celebrated, but instead are despised.

A few hundred miles west of Mike's water caches, a different journey begins. The Pacific Crest Trail is a long-distance hike from Mexico to Canada, starting at the US-Mexico border. The scorching sun settles on a wall of steel slats, heat waves slipping through the gaps. Hikers stick an arm or leg through the wall’s towering bollards, then head north. Thru-hiking is an adventure of endurance and privilege. For undocumented migrants, the journey north is one of necessity and survival. 

It’s in The United States government's best interest to dehumanize migrants. Aiming to decrease unauthorized crossings, in 1994 the US Border Patrol implemented the Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD) policy. Making the journey more hazardous, they Militarized border towns and pushed migrants to endure more dangerous routes, like the Sonoran desert. The U.S. government knew the consequences; they knew it would increase migrant deaths. Temperatures reaching 120 degrees, beat down on the rugged landscape, and on those attempting to cross it. Since implementing the policy, the government has reported over 10,000 deaths. Many remains are never recovered, The true total is much higher. 

Traversing the valleys in the Tohono O’odham’s sacred Baboquivari Mountains, Mike points his Dodge pickup towards Highway 86 to refill his water caches. His tank labeled “Agua” sloshes on the dirt road, dancing with the potholes. He steps out of his truck, it’s dust-caked and battered from a decade's worth of weekly trips. 

He unloads clear water jugs and positions them to form a cross, a sign of hope for migrants. Mike is a lifeline in the desert, like a river replenishing hope, where it runs dry. In the blistering afternoon heat of the Southern California Desert, I walk north on the Pacific Crest Trail. Barrel Cacti, Cholla, and Creosote fill the slopes. Faced with a bout of food poisoning, I needed water: the nearest reliable source, a day’s hike in either direction. My stomach was a washing machine, running with the lid open. Tumbling towards the Highway 78 underpass, I was satiated in its shade. Shade is not the only offering here. Under the support beam of the underpass, is a water cache. Gallons of water for hikers, neatly arranged, often replenished. Relief, renewal, and rejuvenation ooze from the liquid life. This water is not here by luck. A group of eclectic volunteers, resupply this cache. Known in the hiking community as trail angels, they are celebrated as such. 

Photo from Human Rights Watch

Mike and others providing humanitarian aid are considered enemies of the state. “My tribe was going to label me a domestic terrorist as if my water was a weapon of mass destruction.” Since when do terrorists work to preserve human life? Despite his resilient efforts, he isn’t labeled an “angel”. 

Aid groups have been fined and prosecuted for engaging in humanitarian work. Volunteers for the activist group No Mas Muertes were putting out water in the Buenos Aries National Wildlife Refuge when they were charged with “dumping of waste”. Other volunteers  have faced fines for “abandonment of property” This is retaliation against humanitarian aid, exposing the government’s priorities. Human life and compassion come second to ruthless border enforcement on federal lands, while trail angels on the PCT—also on federal lands—face no such consequences. 

Mike drove every Sunday, for 624 weekends, with a truck full of water to his water caches. This time, he arrived to find the gallons placed meticulously the week prior, had been cut. One hundred desert life preservers, destroyed as if they were bombs. Mike said, “Here is a history of border patrol agents in the field destroying water barrels… I had those slashed by the hundreds.” A universal experience for aid groups. A human rights violation by the United States. 

When trail angels assist strangers attempting a difficult, but chosen journey, they receive love. When aid groups assist strangers migrating for their lives, they are criminalized. Hiking and forced migration do not have the same consequences, the action of putting water out is the same, but the reaction is different. Border aid groups are treated unjustly for providing basic survival needs. Where policy and society want to create divisions, our humanity seeks commonalities. Mike Wilson is a border angel.

Antonia Prinster: Silent Ceremonies

This is a story about hatcheries and the celebration of salmon.

There’s a hammer on a table outside, a metal hook hanging inside, tables where the collecting occurs, and a window that leads to nothing. A female Chinook salmon is given a number. She’s bludgeoned to death with the hammer, hung on the hook, slashed open; eggs spew out of her abdomen and gush into a plastic bucket. Guts pulled out, kidneys inspected for disease. Her eggs are put into a numbered baggie. Saturated with drugs, she’s thrown out the window to be taken to a landfill, buried beneath mountains of trash. After cutting, squeezing, and hammering, the eggs are fertilized. Formalin is used to disinfect the popping boba-like spheres. The fertilized eggs are trucked up a paved hill to the incubation facility, hundreds of shelves lay at the ready, home for the millions of future salmon. The scene is reminiscent of a kitchen: messy, wasted ingredients and a hodge-podge mix of utensils lie around. The scent of something delicious hangs in the air. 

This reality binds our feet to the concrete below and our eyes to the concrete across the river. Chief Joseph Dam stands tall and squat, plugging the entirety of the Columbia River, supplemented in eagerness by the Chief Joseph Hatchery, the object of our groups’ collective curiosity. The late summer sun reflects off the slow moving reservoir. Pelicans sit silent and ready at the chute-mouth that spits hatchery-reared smolt into the Columbia. Once released, they make a journey to the ocean; many, most, do not survive. Hatchery-reared salmon die far more in number than the dwindling wild salmon populations. They swim to shadows, preyed upon by watching birds and seals. 

Salmon have survived and evolved for millions of years, creating incredible biodiversity. Raised in confinement and spoon-fed, hatchery-reared salmon are seen by some as genetically inferior. Released hatchery salmon are an unwelcome introduction of poorer genes into the wild gene pool, muddling the waters, out-competing wild salmon for food. 

On top of this, salmon survive within a system that is extremely expensive. The federal government has pumped more than $2.2 billion into salmon hatcheries over the last 20 years. Despite this, hatcheries along the Columbia and tributaries are failing to fulfill their promise. The federal government signed treaties with the tribes over a century ago, promising to preserve their access to salmon; their way of life. They are failing. Less and less salmon, wild or hatchery, are caught each year.

Chief Joseph Fish Hatchery is 545 miles from the mouth of the Columbia River; it sits above the last water to hold spawning salmon before nothingness. Owned and operated by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, the hatchery began production in 2013. The hatchery releases young salmon into the Columbia in order to replenish the waters below the concrete blockade of Chief Joseph dam. 

Large groups of corralled salmon bump up against one another in concrete ditches beneath nets hanging slack. Holes riddle the nets, allowing birds to squeeze in and scoop up small salmon. The hatchery manager explains to us how they need to replace the nets soon, or else they’ll lose more fish. Someone in the group asks why salmon hatcheries are worth it, the manager replies with a hint of resignation, “I’m going to try to be simplistic here. It’s worth it because salmon tastes good.” Salmon does taste good. To orcas, osprey, otters and bears. They are a keystone species for many animals. Including humans. For the Columbia Plateau tribes, salmon are life. 

Colville and Nez Perce tribal members describe that before dams, the Columbia was a free-flowing river cradling millions of salmon returning to the place of their birth by unknown forces, salmon backs glistening in the heavy sunlight. One could venture across this river, over rapids and falls and rocks, solely on the shoulders of those plentiful and strong salmon. The First Salmon ceremony of the Columbia Plateau tribes honors the pivotal role that salmon and water play in the health and culture of their people. The winding rivers cutting through hills of yellow grass and basalt sustained the tribes with salmon for millenia. A factory of wealth; spears and nets hang in hands from above wooden platforms, thrusted into the frothy water below. 

Non-native people have devastated salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest for over a century. Rivers and creeks dredged, logged, overfished, dammed. Today, hatcheries are becoming unable to produce meaningful numbers of salmon because so few return up the Columbia from the ocean. Blocked by dams, salmon trudge up fish passageways, unguided and confused. Waterfalls of white froth cascade over and through, a highway of wheat prevails.

We watch as the wind pushes white caps across a great expanse of reflected sky. A river turned lake, barges chug across, sink through locks and trudge slowly across the tumultuous, un-moving water. Wheat moves across this expanse. Salmon hit their heads against structures that tower above, aimlessly wandering throughout pools of warming water. The hatchery system was built to slow down the ever-continuous decline of salmon since the beginning of the 20th century. Hatcheries give salmon to a world without. A temporary lifeline, a stop gap, pumping borrowed blood weakly into the veins of the river, back into the heart of the tribes, until the real problem is recognized, addressed, and fixed. Empty rivers and plates, solemn, silent, ceremonies of extinction and death ensue.

In the rays of the rising sun, an unnaturally still and wide river holds a wealth of hatchery-reared salmon. Full of ocean nutrients and depleted at the end of their journey, these salmon are ready to die. A boat rests on this same river. A Chinook salmon wanders the vastness of the reservoir. Perhaps a hatchery salmon, perhaps not. Despite this, she’s caught, thanked, and hauled up to the surface of the boat. Killed along with many others and put into a cooler, saved for a purpose. Her body is cut into pieces, long and thin, planted onto dogwood skewers, sizzled on a barbecue rack, flames tickling her flesh. Hands flip a rack full of salmon, deer and elk smolder nearby above fires moving with grace. In this kitchen, upon white paper plates and tule mats rest pink salmon, surrounded by moving colors and voices, bells and songs, solemn then festive. Her body nourishes and strengthens the hearts, minds, and bodies of the creatures who give thanks to her, water flowing over it all. 

Cambria Barlett: Fire Debt

“Many of these people make these management decisions that are short-sighted. They're thinking about 5-10 years. We're talking about in perpetuity, generations after us.” Nakia Williamson's voice cut through the thick air, each word spoken with slow, steady intention. He faced east, the direction of his tribe’s buildings, the Nez Perce direction of insight and wisdom. He stood in the center of a circle of students sitting in sun-bleached camp chairs. We looked at him intently, not breaking our attention for a moment despite the smoke that filled our lungs, forming a heavy oppressive veil swallowing the landscape in all directions. The polluted air hung around us, perfectly illustrating the short-sighted land management decisions he referred to. The next day we left the reservation, relieved to escape the smoke.

We sat in a small clearing, a few miles down a trail in the San Juan National Forest. In our hands, we hold round slabs of tree trunks. Each cut of wood is cold and smooth, polished by the many fingers of students who learned from them before us. The tree’s life is documented in each concentric circle. Looking back at a collection of tree rings from a forest, one can discover that they tell decades-long stories about the forest's health. Small scars run through the wood, memorializing times when wildfire flames and smoke had licked up the tree trunks. The scars reveal a rhythm of small, frequent wildfires. These fires are necessary to the health of the ecosystem, shaping the landscape, clearing undergrowth, and making room for new life. The quiet consistency of fire documented in the rings continues up until a moment when everything stops. Halted by relentless fire suppression strategies established by the United States Forest Service. In the early 1900s, the Forest Service created their friendly mascot: Smoky Bear. His fuzzy face and yellow fedora, impress a narrative of fear to the general public surrounding fire. Those efforts to suppress fire are demonstrated clearly in the tree rings, that is until the forest eventually demanded an intense reckoning. Fueled by years of neglect, fires began growing in scale and intensity, burning hot as a reminder that we must repay our debt.

Across the West more intense fires spread through forests and communities, leaving them to suffer the consequences of suppression. From a small dirt road outside of Winthrop, Washington we look out at a canyon, the aftermath of the Cub Creek 2 fire that had burned over 70,000 acres in 2021, lies below us. Only a few green trees survived amongst the trunks of standing dead that blanketed the land in every direction. Dr. Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist from the University of Washington, stands with us. She had greeted us with a friendly smile, a happy floppy-eared dog running circles around her feet. But now she is solemn as she describes the burn site with deep familiarity and knowledge. As we talked to Susan about her research the wind howled through the valley. We could hear the crashing of trees, breaking clean in half and falling to the ground below. The snapping became so frequent and loud that we all fell into a motionless silence. In that moment it felt as though the urgency of addressing the issue of unnaturally catastrophic burns echoed, quite literally, through the landscape. Susan looked out at the forest with genuine concern. “I worry also about the future of some forests…When you have this much tree mortality, you have to worry a little bit about where the seeds are coming from.” She explains that the Ponderosa pine forest is in danger because fires, as big as this one, sweep through entire watersheds burning their seeds and undergrowth. Even huge ancient trees which used to be able to survive smaller fires, are now falling to the ground, losing their opportunity to replenish the forest and leaving soils to erosion. High severity fires are pushing ecosystem to the brink of ecological collapse.

It’s not just the forest at risk. Susan asked our group how many of us had been impacted by wildfires. We looked around at each other to find that more than half of us were raising our hands. Susan paused for a moment, she was saddened by our answer but not even the slightest bit surprised. Her voice wobbled with emotion as she talked about a particularly grim fire that swept through her community in 2014. “So many people lost homes,” she said “We lost power for eight days, as well as any communication, like the cell tower. And so we literally got to the point where we were all going to the post office and looking at whose house burned down like there were just lists.” In the wake of such tragedies, there is a growing awareness of the necessity to manage our forests more effectively, to repay the debt we owe.

The solution to catastrophic wildfires is tantalizingly obvious. We must bring back more frequent, less detrimental fires. Susan’s research reflected this necessity; she found that reintroducing fire through prescribed burns worked like “a magic wand.” She exclaimed that it was “actually the most satisfying study I've ever done because the results were just so clear.” Her study was about this area but similar conclusions are being drawn across the West. The reintroduction of fire is connected to a long history of burning. It's about becoming part of the ecosystem again instead of working against it. Susan emphasizes this countless times, “there's been a big busting of the myth that fire ecology is not just about Western science, it's also about indigenous knowledge.” Understanding indigenous knowledge is a crucial part of introducing prescribed burns. However, this knowledge has been forced away by colonizers for so long that many ancient land stewardship practices are lost. Nakia echos the challenge, “So this is the type of knowledge [oral histories] that we still carry forth, and we still try to hold on for the benefit of our children, and to also try to communicate it to people that are making decisions without the same history that we have, and some knowledge of how this land works and how it has changed over time.” Now starts the long journey of rediscovering our relationship with land. Susan said, “I think that there's actually quite a bit that we can do, and it's also very disrespectful to indigenous people to say that we're not part of these ecosystems and we don't have a responsibility to act.”

There is of course resistance to the reintroducing fire, especially in communities that have experienced a great deal of fire trauma. We are attempting to apply old methods in a new context, but luckily people have found methods that work effectively and safely. We are up against a 100-year narrative of fear that has been ingrained into us by Smokey Bear. We are slowly learning how to undo this mistaken belief and come back to an understanding where fire is seen positively again. Susan thinks that people will start to understand the solution through education. She distinctly recalls a moment when she was teaching a group of young kids, some of whom had lost their homes to fire. When asked if the fire was good or bad, they all wrote similar answers in their notebooks: “Nature needs fire and sometimes it's bad for humans.” The shift in understanding is well underway.

The issue is clear, it is written in the rings of trees, the forests of standing dead trunks, and the emotion on the faces of affected communities. The solution is clear too, the forest has asked us to repay the debt that we have created through fire suppression. And, most importantly we know how to do it, indigenous knowledge and research have given us the answers. We must once again be in a relationship with nature where we can take care of the forests just as they take care of us.

Kiana Potter: It's Not Possession

With his left hand cupped around his ear, he leans forward in his eroding camp chair that has held so many bodies over so many years. He repeats our names under his breath with a subtle nod of his head, holding the words in his mouth, willing them into memory. Wrinkles drawn like the drainage bed of a dried desert river fan from soul-soaked pockets of deep blue reverence. Strands of long white hair curl over the cliff of his chin. His small stature, held together by the cloth of sun-stained skin, contrasts an enormous spirit in humble grandeur.  

In the belly of Butler Wash, just outside of Bluff, Utah, Joe Pachack led us to experience the remnants of Ancestral Puebloan homesites. Originally from Colorado, Joe was drafted as a high schooler in 1968. During his time as a helicopter guard, he flew over Bluff, Utah. Feeling a pull he recalls as “metaphysical”, he reveres that first sight as “an oasis in the desert”. It took him 20 years, but when he finally made it back he never left. Now Joe has spent decades in Bluff as an artist recording rock art and artifacts. 40 miles directly south of Butler Wash, Joe was the first person to rediscover rock art of a mammoth or bison, suspected to have been drawn by the Clovis people who inhabited the Bluff area as early as 14,000 years ago. 

Arid ground plumes below the impact of many steps as we chase heels on a tight single-track trail. Misunderstood as lifeless, the desert floor springs into a virdescent jungle, demonstrating what is possible where just a few fleeting drops of water flow. Primrose greets my lower legs with a gentle tickle while the yellow flourish of Rabbit Brush speckles the landscape. Red star explosions of Scarlet Gilia found communities between Ash Berry. I introduce Horehound Mint to my tastebuds for the first time, bitter over a quick goodbye. Pale sticky spikes of cocklebur cling to the legs of wandering pants as Joe playfully identifies them as porcupine eggs. Gently taking a plant in his hand, he invites us to the smell of a Wormwood branch. I hold it to my nose, inhaling until I can no longer separate the scent from the air. I consider the label of sweet citrus and sage qualities, struggling to find the words to understand a new smell, like trying to imagine a color I have never seen before. As he talks, a wave of inspiration bathes me in urgency. In the presence of such a library, the holes in my knowledge are a humbling infinity between the things I know. 

The succession of human civilizations in the area shaped the landscape. While speculation plays a large role in the interpretation of the area’s history, Ancestral Puebloan Basketmakers were the first to establish permanent homesites in Butler Wash around 650 A.D.. Throughout history, the homesite in Butler Wash has been occupied by an evolution of Puebloan Tribes. Puebloan Basketmakers I, II, and III walked in the footsteps of their predecessors, sharing the same Kivas and carving stones. By 1300 A.D. they are assumed to have migrated out of the area. 

On the hillside, crumbling walls sewn together by adobe clay stand below the roof of a water-carved alcove. Goosebumps diffuse down my arms as I stare into a time capsule. We gather around a disintegrating rectangular Kiva, speculated to have been built by the first Basketmakers to settle the alcove for ceremonies or burials. The Kiva’s original architecture was almost indistinguishable from the carnage. Its sandstone building blocks eroding back to dust, rubble strewn across the floor in hurried chaos. Joe explains that pot hunters, archeologists, and other heedless guests had stolen artifacts, tearing the homesite apart. “What we’re seeing here is a truly amazing site that has been ripped to holy hell. It has been disregarded.” He states matter-of-factly. The remains are fenced off by bent rebar stakes and a sagging thin chain, a barrier of morality rather than physicality. “I bent a lot of these,” Joe said gesturing. “Donated my rebar bender and welder to the BLM to do things like this. And it's helped.” In another homesite, we see modern words branded over irrecoverable petroglyphs. “MIKE WAS HERE” along with a hundred other names and initials announcing their personal negligence, covering up the only form of written history for the first people in the area. “If we don't have reverence for it, it doesn’t mean anything to us.” Joe’s words heavy in the hot air as he draws our eyes to the overlooked details. Smoke stains older than time and memorial shadow the alcove’s walls. Faint fingerprints preserved in clay grout fossilize forgotten people, their energy still here. But amongst that beauty, looters saw the money that comes from stealing a hand-coiled pot and a collector found their newest piece of home decor, something to show off at dinner parties.  

 As I write this my head spins. I want to tell you how meaningful it was to be around Joe, how unsettling it is to see the extractive destruction of homesites. But my mind teeters on eggshells as I unpack the complex dichotomy of Joe as a non-native person, who has dedicated his life to holding reverence for these places, and the simultaneous ruination of them by others. Feigning for a conclusion, I am humbled by my missteppings. When trying to do justice to this topic, don’t paint Joe as a savior. Address the flawed and violent history of archeology. Don’t romanticize the Puebloan people and do not generalize Native folks across different landscapes and time periods. Explain how non-native people should coexist with the homesites of Butler Wash but remember, you don’t have the answers. Maybe walking through the homesites, despite doing it in the most respectful way we knew how, was wrong. Maybe we should be doing it because what will happen to the history if we do not? Where is the reciprocity? What does that look like? Profit and preservation do not go hand in hand. If they did, maybe textbooks would tell uncensored stories of violent colonialism. Kids could be taught to care when they were taught to read. Maybe as adults we wouldn’t be swimming in the world of righteous academia, struggling to keep our heads above water, wondering why we didn’t stop and listen for the answers to these questions a long time ago. My brain is muddled, my tongue swollen with the taste of a lifetime infused with the narratives of settler colonialism. 

The reality of the situation specific to Butler Wash, is that the descendants of the Ancestral Puebloan Basketmakers have moved out of the Bluff area. There weren’t many people who could credibly guide Joe on his endeavor in Butler Wash, so Joe approaches things with a humble curiosity. Amongst an epidemic of white-saviorism, skepticism is a healthy reaction. I am not in a position to make claims of the correctness of his actions, but well-intentioned people are looking for examples. In a world where the paralysis of perfection is the death of progress, Joe is moving. I heard his voice quake under the weight of his words, the crack in the back of his throat that makes the hairs on your neck stand up because you know he is trying not to cry. “If I teach you an ethic, it is that another person’s culture can be as sacred as yours, and it’s not possession. It’s a concept. It’s an idea. It grew over time and has evolved into something magnificent.” His words echo. 

Joe steps around the cryptobiotic soil, admires the ants, and tastes the wind. He doesn’t seem afraid of doing it wrong, but of not doing it at all. When faced with the decision to think critically of the role of non-native stewardship, we must resist the complacency of non-action. “It’s the opposite of living in ignorance, believe me, energy follows thought. So think it, and you can invent it, and you can help a community gather around it.” With credit to Willie Nelson, this is Joe’s mantra. There will always be things lost in the separation of an outsider, but the knowledge that Joe has dedicated his life to is worth something. In a time, desperate for change, can Joe be an example of reverence?

Jackson Schroeder: The Importance of Environmental Education

On a sunny October day, the Semester in the West (SITW) crew drove 10 minutes down from our camp in the Jeffery Pine Forest to the South Tufa Area at Mono Lake. 21 Westies hopped out of three Jeep Wagoneers and stood in the gravel parking lot. The saline lake glittered under the snow-capped Sierra Nevada. Ryan Garrett, the Education Director at the Mono Lake Committee (MLC), met us with a beaming smile. He was in his late twenties and sported a black jacket that read “Mono Lake Committee” on the chest, a green beat-up Patagonia daypack, and a weathered pair of Blundstones. He began his tour by stating, “The story of Mono Lake can be characterized as striking a balance between… the needs for fresh, clean drinking water and the ecological and cultural value that is found here.”

In 1941, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), trying to provide water to its growing population, extended its aqueduct into the Mono Basin, diverting water from four creeks. At the time, salt lakes were seen as disposable wastelands, too salty to host fish and corrosive to boat engines. LADWP faced little resistance to diversions. The MLC website recounts, “Over the next 40 years, Mono Lake dropped 45 vertical feet, lost half its volume, and doubled in salinity– threatening the survival of the nesting California Gull population, air quality with toxic dust storms, and this unique and critical ecosystem.”

In 1976, Stanford Teaching Assistant David Gaines led the first ecological study of Mono Lake. The study found that continued diversions would raise salinity levels, wiping out brine shrimp and alkali fly populations, thus eliminating the food source for millions of birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway every year. These birds positively impact the Pacific Flyway area by performing nutrient and seed transfer, serving as habitat indicators, and feeding predators like larger birds, small mammals, and reptiles. Without Mono Lake, migratory bird populations would decrease, contributing to the decline of ecosystems that people rely on. Hoping to save Mono Lake, MLC and other environmental groups sued the LADWP under the Public Trust Doctrine in 1979. Nonprofits are often on the front lines of legal battles, and their success often hinges on public opinion. 

We stood on the sandy shore and looked out at the lake over black clouds of alkali flies. “If you leave with one thing, it's this: the healthy management level of Mono Lake is 6,392 feet above sea level,” said Ryan. “In 1994, the State Water Board issued Decision 1631. It said by the year 2014 that the lake was supposed to reach the healthy management level.” Ryan produced a telescoping pole and put one end at the water’s edge, stating, “It is currently 2024, and for the lake to be at the healthy management level, it needs to be at the top of that pole.” The pole was eight feet, seven inches tall. “Ryan’s probably the most engaging speaker of the program so far,” I thought. But he wasn’t always this passionate about Mono Lake. 

Ryan was born in 1995 in Modesto, California, which he described in an email to me as “a farming hub surrounded by endless agricultural fields and suburbs.” He wrote, “I felt lost, but I thought that if I could get a scholarship to play college football, I might secure a ticket to somewhere new.” Ryan was a strong offensive guard and became a captain in his senior year. That fall, a friend told him about an environmental club that organized trips to Mono Lake. Ryan wasn’t environmentally inclined at the time and had no idea what or where Mono Lake was. “My friend spoke so highly of his experience, and I trusted his opinion,” he wrote. However, visiting Mono Lake with the club would cause Ryan to miss his senior homecoming game. His coaches said if he went to Mono Lake, he would lose his captaincy. 

After much anguish, Ryan decided to chase his dream and visit Mono Lake. He wrote, “I arrived at Mono Lake angry and bitter, focused only on the football status I had lost. But everything changed after sleeping under the stars, learning about the lake’s natural and political history, and experiencing the transformative power of environmental education. I realized I didn’t want a life centered around being a jock. Instead, I wanted to dedicate myself to this place…When football scholarships came through, I turned them down, a decision that those close to me struggled to accept.” 

Nevertheless, Ryan followed his passion. He applied for the Mono Lake Committee summer internship four times over the next seven years. He studied philosophy and environmental ethics at Whitman College and started pursuing teaching in grad school at the University of Alberta. Finally, in December 2020, MLC offered Ryan the summer internship, which he gladly accepted. At the end of the internship, MLC offered him a full-time position as a Project Specialist. Over the next two years, he combined his academic knowledge and vocational training by leading naturalist tours. In 2023, MLC offered Ryan his current position as Education Director. “I couldn’t be happier,” Ryan wrote. “My younger self would be proud to see the person older Ryan has become.” 

Environmental educators like Ryan play a critical role in the Mono Lake environmental movement. In another email, Ryan told me that MLC founder David Gaines “raised awareness about the lake through a variety of educational programs up and down the state. He would deliver educational slideshows to schools, Audubon chapters, and environmental organizations to spread the word about Mono Lake. Most people had no idea about how important the lake was to avian life nor knew where their source of water was…Additionally, David would lead environmental education programs at Mono Lake: backpacking trips, bird tours, and canoe tours, to name a few. Any chance he got to educate someone about Mono Lake, he took it.” MLC’s hard work paid off as they won multiple lawsuits against LADWP to protect tributary streamflows. In 1984, David compiled some of his research in the Mono Basin and co-wrote a chapter in the book California Riparian Systems, which helped bring scientific attention to Mono Lake. David passed away in a car crash in 1988, but MLC continued his legacy of education. They’ve run education programs for schools and the public since their inception. Additionally, MLC’s Outdoor Education Center has connected Los Angeles youth to Mono Lake since 1994. 

Today, the MLC website reads, “Mono Lake’s future depends on public recognition, understanding, and support.” According to Ryan, MLC’s education programs “bridge the knowledge gap between the public and Mono Lake. Most folks who come up here are just touring the state or doing a day stop en route to Yosemite. If they join any one of our tours, they …often feel compelled to do something on behalf of the lake (write a letter, become a MLC member, contribute a donation, etc.).”

MLC’s education efforts have transformed the public opinion of Mono Lake from a wasteland into an ecosystem worth protecting. As we wrapped up our South Tufa tour, Ryan shared the future of Mono Lake water policy. He described a clause in Decision 1631 that says, “If the lake does not reach the healthy management level by the year 2014, then all the parties need to come back together to renegotiate… a new stream diversion criteria to ensure that Mono Lake reaches the healthy management level.” Ryan recounted how in 2024, the California State Water Board elevated Mono Lake to its priority list of concerns, leading to a new hearing expected in Spring 2025. “There's never been a more exciting time to learn about this issue, because the next fight to save Mono Lake is about to begin,” he stated. 

While the fight to save Mono Lake has been somewhat successful, the fight to save Pacific Flyway birds relies on saving saline lakes up and down the Flyway. “Mono Lake is, legally speaking, the most protected saline lake anywhere in the world. Yet we are 10 years overdue and Mono Lake is still not saved,” Ryan stated. Nonetheless, Mono Lake is a model for other saline lakes, like Nevada’s Walker Lake, Utah’s Great Salt Lake, and Argentina’s Laguna Mar Chiquita. “We are in constant communication with groups working [at other saline lakes], sharing ideas and resources,” Ryan wrote. 

On our second and final day with Ryan, our caravan rolled up to Lee Vining Creek, at the very top of the LA Aqueduct. We ate our Tupperware lunches on a flat patch of ground between the gravel road and a small pond, looking out towards Tioga Pass. Ryan passed out job descriptions for MLC summer internships, proudly stating, “Yosemite is your backyard. Mono Lake’s your front yard. You can't ask for a better place to be.” My peers and I chatted about how we could see ourselves working for the Mono Lake Committee.

Carlie Johnson: A Rock and a Hard Place

Lasers slice through the twilight, illuminating the white spillways of Grand Coulee Dam. Through a loudspeaker, a woman’s smooth voice swallows the visitor’s center lawn. She speaks about hydroelectric power, and a cartoon beaver made of yellow lasers marches across the silky sheen of water. A surfing salmon glides across the dam, waving his fins as the woman explains the recreational real estate the reservoir provides. Acres of green and red apple trees fill the screen, and the virtues of agriculture ring through the loudspeaker. The Grand Coulee Dam Laser Light Show has it all. 

Neon blues and yellows dance on the screen, becoming first a river, then fire, then exploding into multicolored rays that bleed onto the dim lawn and splash over the trees. And behind the lasers, behind the water streaming down the spillways, behind the concrete, the turbines, and the concrete again, Lake Roosevelt slumbers in the bed of the Columbia. 

To many, the story of Lake Roosevelt inspires. Through American strength and American labor, we stopped the mighty Columbia in its tracks with, in 1942, the largest dam ever built. Grand Coulee Dam quickly became known as the 8th wonder of the world. Besides the dam’s power supply, which can provide electricity to 2 million homes per year, the dam also created Lake Roosevelt, a reservoir that holds back the Columbia and deals it out to half of Washington state’s farms. It’s big. It's impressive. And it’s dam(n) powerful. 

The glittering surface of Lake Roosevelt stretches 151 river miles back from Grand Coulee’s massive wall of concrete. At the 130th mile, though, there is another stone— much smaller, but no less monumental.

D.R. Michel, executive director of the Upper Columbia United Tribes, gazes out at the flat expanse of the lake. He smiles and rests his hand on a small amphibolite boulder, different from the craggy chunks of basalt that line this section of river. The rock is marked with hundreds of grooves, gashes, and lines… where tools have been sharpened. Despite its size– no larger than a picnic table— the stone has a magnetic weight: They call it the Sharpening Stone, and the tribes of the Columbia have used it during salmon runs for more than 9,000 years. 

One can imagine the stories embedded in this rock: here, a young boy clumsily sharpened a knife for his first salmon run. There, an old woman wore a deep groove with the surety and practice of age. As D.R. 's weathered fingers caress the gouges, he sighs. 

Since time immemorial, the tribes came to this place when the salmon did, fishing in the powerful whitewater of Kettle Falls. “Back in the day…  ten miles downriver you could start to hear the roar,” D.R. explains, pointing out the falls. There isn’t much to see, since the falls now lay under 90 feet of water. If they hadn’t moved it farther up the bank in 1940, the tribes would have also lost the Sharpening Stone to the rising waters of Lake Roosevelt.

 Moving the stone from its historical resting place caused a cry of grief from the tribes of the Upper Columbia. For many, watching Kettle Falls flood was like watching a loved one drown. As the falls were inundated, the tribes lost not only the rush of the falls themselves, but also thousands of acres of root and berry grounds, access to cultural artifacts, and an entire Colville Reservation town called Inchelium. The greatest loss of all, though, was the loss of the salmon that used to pass Kettle Falls by the millions. Because of its height, Grand Coulee Dam does not have a fish ladder to allow migratory Chinook salmon to return to their spawning grounds. So, in 1940, just before the completion of Grand Coulee Dam, the Colville tribes organized the Ceremony of Tears to bid farewell to the falls, and to begin a wait for the salmon’s return that has lasted nearly five generations.

Hours before the Grand Coulee Laser Light show and days before we spoke to D.R. Michel, we took a tour of Grand Coulee Dam. Two Bureau of Reclamation tour-guides with shirts tucked into their belts drove our group across the top of the dam, which is nearly a mile long. Reciting memorized speeches and facts, the guides took us to the powerhouses, to the crane, and finally, to the edge, where we looked over the spillways at the Columbia. Mighty, a word so often used to describe this river, was not the word that came to mind as we peered at the scummy froth of water 350 feet below us. Beneath the foam, a gray shape moved— a fall Chinook salmon, swimming first to one side of the dam, then the other. Our eyes followed the fish back and forth, watching a doomed tennis match. 

During construction of the dam in 1937, there was a temporary fish ladder to allow Chinook salmon and Steelhead across the growing foundation, but the foundation is where the luck of the fish ended. Now, the incredible height of the dam means that a traditional fish ladder would have to stretch ¾ of a mile long. “There are some newer technologies that show promise, but like most things, they’re just not big enough for the Grand Coulee Dam,” our tour guide said, with a touch of smugness— understandable if you’re employed by the eighth wonder of the world. 

Like so many environmental issues, bringing salmon back to Kettle Falls seems impossible. To keep swimming upstream against money, bureaucracy, and time feels exhausting. But like the salmon, people keep trying. 

Traditional fish passage (i.e. a fish ladder) isn’t a possible solution at the current time. However, there are ways salmon can return to Kettle Falls. There are many developing technologies in fish passage, especially technologies focusing on high-head dams like Grand Coulee. One of these is a helix fish ladder, essentially a spiral staircase for fish. This type of ladder has been used in Cle Elum Dam, and its success there gives hope for a similar passage at Grand Coulee. The trapping-and-trucking method, used by the Colville Tribes, has also shown promise for bringing salmonids upriver of Grand Coulee. D.R. Michel and the Colville Tribes have already released 200 salmon this year alone in a cultural release program that continues to draw interest and support from the community. 

Some might say salmon are caught between a rock and a hard place. In reality, the hard place stops them so definitely that they haven’t made it to the rock in almost a century. At the Sharpening stone, whose history has been carved into it by loving hands for millenia, the salmon were appreciated and honored. At Grand Coulee dam, whose history is played upon its surface in the neon reds and greens of 20th century progress, they swim back and forth ceaselessly, hopelessly. 

The loss of the Kettle Falls fishery and the salmon that populated it was a great tragedy. Greater even than that is the tragedy of the narrative. In the eyes of the government and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit it each year, Grand Coulee Dam is a testament to this country. It’s a monument to be proud of, a triumph to celebrate. This narrative, though, does not account for the pain the dam has caused. Lake Roosevelt can’t just be looked at as a place for recreation, or as a convenient source for irrigation water. If we break out of the colonial narrative, we can see that Lake Roosevelt is an oppressive and destructive presence that has been occupying indigenous land for almost a century. 

Still standing by the Sharpening Stone, D.R. Michel looks back on the ghost of Kettle Falls. “We’ve still got some opportunities to correct some of these historic wrongs, but we’re running out of time,” he says. “It’s time for us to start to do some things here.”

Annika Schwartz: Looking for Lamprey

Preceding the rings of Saturn, there is an organism who calls the ocean and river a home. A slimy squiggling body, two feet in length with a face of circular teeth. To the Nimiipuu in the Southeastern Columbia River plateau: hé·su. Asúm in upper Columbia Sahaptin, Ksuyas in the lower. Indigenous people refer to them in English as eels. Today, I will speak to them as Pacific lamprey. 

My face is almost drowned in cold water, my diaphragm is shocked and it takes a minute for it to relax and breathe through the snorkel. I’m fully submerged in the Methow River that flows through the valley. My eyes scan the bottom of the almost fifteen foot deep pool and catch on white fish, trout, chinook. Many fish spiral around each other, but I'm pursuing a creature buried deeper in the eddy. 

Kristen Kirkby, the ecologist with me on the river, has told me about an individual slightly less attractive than the pink flesh of a tributary bound chinook. She tells of lamprey living in the freshwater tributaries of the Methow like an old prophecy. To Columbia Basin ecology, lamprey are essential. Throughout their reproductive journey back to their birth waters, they bring ocean nutrients into the basin, feed wildlife, and improve water quality. In larvae stages they feed on organic matter in the sediment, cleaning the substrate for salmon roe to thrive. Kristen said I could comb the sands for lamprey larvae that filter feed in at the head of the pool. 

The swirling waters push me to the edge of a smaller input stream, with fine sediment along the shallow bottom. The waves gently rock me as rays of sun filter through the scalloped surface and land on the pale yellow sand. I thread my fingers into the bed and grab a handful, letting the current drift grains away until there are just a few. My eyes strain to see a minuscule movement in between my fingers. I'm looking for Pacific Lamprey larvae. 

Six dams lay between the small pool I am floating in and the ocean. Six disruptions of flow with lakes backing them, six almost stagnant pools of warming water and six hundred foot tall waterfalls. A series of diversions have never disrupted the Columbia River system like in this, even when the Columbia carved away the Horse Heaven Hills. 

Lamprey live in the ocean as parasites. Their circular diphyodont sucker mouths latch onto the backs of larger fish and marine mammals, feeding off of their flesh. Pacific Lamprey do not often kill their host, and, as an anadromous species, they complete their life cycle by swimming back upriver to spawn. Right here, among the hundreds of miles of habitat in the Methow river.

Again and again, I search the river bed. Scoop and filter. The larvae are tiny, the sun is bright and I must not be looking hard enough. I squint my eyes till they start to ache, my toes have gone numb in the fall snowmelt river. 

Lamprey as a species have survived multiple mass extinction events. Their round, toothed suckers, and long slippery bodies are ecologically older than trees. Lamprey have survived, evolved, persisted for nearly 450 million years, and yet 90-degree angles of concrete, an oversight on the part of dam engineers in the Columbia Basin, makes it almost impossible for them to complete their journey home and reproduce. A bottleneck for both lamprey and salmon species on their way to a vast expanse of spawning grounds in Idaho and Oregon. 

Since the beginning of the transformation of the Columbia river basin to farming and hydropower, salmon have been an ecological focus. Hatcheries implemented to mitigate ocean fishery harvests are the sole savior of the post-dam basin. Habitat reconstruction of streams for salmon. These efforts have been beneficial to lamprey as well. Salmon started the wave of ecological river habitat restoration, and lamprey latched onto their backs to survive in their watershed. 

Pacific Lamprey larvae are one of the scarcest members of the Methow River ecosystem. Once abundant in the valley, they are now considered critically imperiled. If this system existed in its natural state, the small wiggly babies would be abundant. Again and again I search the river bed. No luck. 

On the banks of the Chewuch river, a tributary of the Methow, I spoke with Cyndy Miller on the property of a land back project- called x̌ʷnámx̌ʷnam. Cyndy is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Her ancestors cared for this land 150 years ago, fishing in the Chewuch and collecting tule reeds in the meadows. 

I ask about her experience with lamprey in the valley. She beams with excitement as she shows me pictures of a Pacific Lamprey release she took part in last week. Buckets of eels raised in tribal hatcheries are released by the reservation. 

“My brothers would catch lamprey when I was younger, but this is my first time seeing them.” 

Cyndy is in her late 60s. The tribes have been disconnected from their homelands for so long that this is Cyndy’s first interaction with the ancient gray eels. Lamprey have historically been a part of First Food feasts, making them an important cultural resource. Indigenous tribes across the Columbia Basin are working to bring lamprey back to their original home. Reintroduction is slow, but all progress counts. When referencing the reconnection Cyndy experiences with her culture, she says;

“It just feels good.” 

As for me, I dream of the time this river system is restored and I can find little squirming eels burrowed in the sand. Until then, I will keep looking.