HOT TIMES IN DESERT CLIMES

BY ROB BETTASO



In the mid 1970s, I enrolled in the Wildlife Biology program at the University of Montana (UM). Back in those days, the Wildlife Bio program was small, but it had several relatively well-known professors -- including John Craighead (highly regarded for his pioneering work with raptors), Chuck Jonkle (a grizzly bear specialist), Philip Wright (a mammologist), and Richard Hutto (an ornithologist).

In my first semester, I was required to take a class fittingly titled: “An Introduction to Wildlife Biology” and two of the required texts were Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac” (1949) as well as his “Round River” (1953). I was very impressed by both books and have re-read them a few times since then. To this day, Leopold’s writings are acknowledged classics and are familiar to students studying not only wildlife biology but also forestry, ecology, natural resource management, and outdoor education. While Leopold’s books are built upon a foundation of science, several are written for a general audience and are often assigned reading for classes ranging from literature to history to politics.

There is an oft-quoted passage from “A Sand County Almanac” that goes as follows: 

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

Leopold’s sentiments recently came to mind when I was visiting friends in St. George, Utah. I have been to the St. George area a few times over the decades and from the 1970s through the 1990s the growth of the town and surrounding environs had been quite noticeable but it paled in comparison to the growth I saw between my August 2023 trip and the one previous to that, in the spring of 2015. Today, one doesn’t need to have a background in ecology to see that the St. George area looks more than wounded; indeed, to me, the area looks like it has taken a shotgun blast right to the face.

St. George is in Washington County and the primary river system of the region is the Virgin River; which runs from the highlands north of Zion National Park to its confluence with the Colorado River near Las Vegas, Nevada. In the early 1990s, I had been one of the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s representatives to the Virgin River Fishes Recovery Team (despite my getting a B.S. degree in Wildlife Bio, I wound up spending most of my career working in the field of Fisheries Biology). Said team had been formed to reverse the declining population trends of six species of native fishes found in the Virgin River drainage. During my years of participation on the Team, the native fishes of the Virgin River drainage faced threats from water withdrawals from the system; the introduction and spread of nonnative species into the system (which predate and/or compete with the native species); and from destruction and degradation of aquatic habitats. During those years in the early 1990s, I had many occasions to visit and conduct fisheries works in the Virgin River and occasionally we would stay in St. George.

On my recent week-long visit to the St. George area, my friends and I explored some of the remaining wild places within an hour’s drive of the rapidly growing city. The most famous of the locales we toured was Zion National Park; an incredible geologic world that I had only visited once before, back in the 1970s, and which was memorable to me mainly for being the first place I ever saw a Peregrine Falcon. Before we even entered the park I was shocked by how much development had occurred right up to the park boundary – homes, stores, restaurants, and, lots of tourist traps. The high temps in early August had been in the 105F range, and many of the schools within the southwestern U.S. had already started their fall semester. Nonetheless, the park was jam-packed with people during the two weekdays that we visited.

So crowded is Zion today that essentially you can’t drive to most of its trailheads and instead, have to use the Park Service shuttle-bus system. Despite the spectacular beauty of the landscape, the press of humanity is so overwhelming that for the entirety of our visit, I felt like I was walking through Disneyland. Oddly enough, many visitors not only seemed to be giddy with the scenery, but also appeared to be thrilled by experiencing the Park with so many of their fellow humans. Perhaps worth noting, most of the people I could overhear talking along the trails were speaking European and Asian languages and this made me wonder if they had merely grown accustomed to sharing their homeland’s “wild” places with the teaming masses. The Americas are, after all, still a relatively new land and, as such, are somewhat less densely inhabited than much of the “Old World.”

By contrast, at the State Parks, National Forests, and other semi-natural habitats in the St. George area, most of the visitors seem to be locals; who use the trails for fitness activities including speed-walking, trail running, and mountain biking. The number of people using these semi-protected areas is nowhere near as numerous as in Zion, but, there is still a steady stream of people unless you leave the trails and head into the backcountry – something we were reluctant to do given the heat, the harshness of the terrain, and our not having any recent first-hand knowledge of the area.

During one of our hikes into a memorably gorgeous but, yet again, heavily visited area I pondered the state of our wild lands as they exist in the U.S. today. To some extent, gone are the widespread and obvious threats of strip mines, industrial pollution, clear-cutting, and overgrazing; yet now, we have a massive and affluent leisure class that seems to constantly occupy our natural areas in large numbers. Many of these people (all of us, really, at least to some extent) amazingly still drop litter along the trails; blaze new trails and take short-cuts that cause erosion; scream, shout, and otherwise make our presence very well known; drive energy-sucking vehicles to get to the trail-heads; and are equipped and clad in the latest of expensive and resource-intensive materials. Keep in mind, that we are the ones who “love the wild places” and consider ourselves ethical in our use of these diminishing habitats.

Meanwhile, we have exported our harsher land-use practices to the impoverished parts of the planet and we heavily use/abuse their resources while producing an endless array of bobbles and gee-gaws for us to import and stock onto the shelves of our mega-stores. I confess to being somewhat cynical, but it seems like while we loudly decry our “climate crisis,” we essentially do little to significantly change our typical routines. Nor do we see many places on Earth where, on the whole, humans are slowing down population growth, resource consumption, or waste production.

Once again, I’m reminded of a seminal text that I first came across when in my first year at the UM; namely, Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire.” The book had a huge impact on me (as it did countless others of my generation) and I wound up reading many of Abbey’s other works as well. As I witnessed the sprawl of St. George during my recent visit, another literary quote came to mind, and this one was partially used as an epigram by Ed Abbey in his book “The Monkey Wrench Gang” and is an excerpt from a poem by Richard Shelton entitled “Requiem for Sonora.” The stanza goes as follows:

I am older and uglier

and full of the knowledge

that I do not belong to beauty

and beauty does not belong to me

I have learned to accept

whatever men choose to give me

or whatever they choose to withhold

but oh my desert

yours is the only death I cannot bear

On one of our last days in the St. George area, we took a hike on a little-used trail on the public lands. The path we followed took us along the rim of a deep and dramatic canyon and after hiking a couple of miles we came to a point where we had to follow rock cairns since the route traversed a span of trackless sandstone. The way was difficult, as the terrain was steep and treacherous. At one point, the only option was to either turn around or to descend into the canyon and, once down on the bottom, to cross a creek before ascending up the distant side so as to make a loop back to the trailhead. At first, we found it exhilarating the way our Vibram soles gripped the gritty sandstone as we made the steep climb down into the canyon. Later, we found that we had to scoot down portions of the route on our butts, so steep were the angles and so great was the risk of falling. At one point, one member of our crew came close to taking what may have been a fatal fall and so we opted to return back the way we had come and gave up on finishing the loop.

The minor sting of defeat was more than made up for by the knowledge that at least none of us would be injured or killed, thanks to our prudent choice. Throughout the hike, the landforms and the plants had been spell-binding and by the time we returned to our vehicle, we felt like we had been given a unique and precious gift. To top it off, we had not encountered a single other person on our outing!

The whole experience in St. George has left me once again wondering: How much more use will our wild lands tolerate and will we love some areas to death? And, when we do find places that are left natural, how many of us will be able to enjoy and appreciate them, and for how many years of our lives? Over time, Nature becomes less available to all of us due to “development.” It also becomes less available because each of us finds that our limitations increase with advancing age. How much longer will I personally be able to physically meet the challenge of a “wilderness without handrails,” and what will be left for me that I can safely visit?

I suppose it is only fitting that I conclude this article with one last quote. Robert Fulford, a Canadian journalist, said “I have seen the future and it doesn’t work.” At both the personal and the collective levels, this increasingly seems to stand as an obvious truth.