Mort Rosenblum: A parched worldview, framed by (very) old branches

and analysis of the writer:

WILD OLIVES, France — I’d be an unabashed tree-hugger if that were a little more practical. My arm span doesn’t begin to enfold old Emiliano the Olive Tree. And Solomon the Saguaro back in Tucson is far too prickly for any affectionate abrazo.

But both brief me on the state of the world. Once, the seasons were as distinct as Vivaldi’s four stirring violin concertos. These days, neither knows what to think. Rains are sometimes too much, but more often far too little — and usually at the wrong time.

When warm winters leave no snowmelt, underground rivulets run dry by summer. Pests proliferate. News reports focus on weather events rather than climatic patterns, which cause them. Famines and crop failures in far-flung places seldom make the cut.

So, I turned off the TV, sat outside under knurly branches and happily lost myself in “The Desert Smells Like Rain,” Gary Paul Nabhan’s little masterwork written in the early ‘80s on the Tohono O’odham reservation.

Nabhan, a polyglot, polymath whose deep roots run from Syria to Sonora, has so many aspects that even he probably can’t keep track of them all. Ethnobotany and arid lands loom large among them. At the Tucson Festival of Books, he had me at water.

First, some background.

Homo sapiens can survive without most anything except water and the food it grows. But a new species, Porcus horrendum, includes the American president and his fast-buck billionaires. They splash through scarce water as if there were no tomorrow.

The early signs of dwindling water supply, and the impact on ways of life, date back decades. Two examples make the point.

— Early in the 1980s, I hung out with the San — Bushmen — in the Kalahari Desert. In harsh times, they quenched thirst by collecting predawn dewdrops in the few leaves they could find. They dug deep for edible roots, which stored water like barrel cactuses.

When Botswanan herders began pushing cattle into the Kalahari, San settlements clustered around their boreholes, which tapped fossil aquifers that took millennia to recharge. Herds devastated surrounding land. Sedentary San began losing old skills.

— In 2002, as George W. Bush was about to blow open Pandora’s Box in Iraq, I joined Bedouins around a fire at Wadi Ram in Jordan. An elder came around with a crock of water for washing hands before we all dug into a platter of roasted goat and semolina.

He meant to drizzle only a trickle onto my fingers, but I extended my right hand to dip it into his precious supply of clean water. He leaped back as if I were a puff adder. I still blush at recalling my idiotic faux pas.

Today, whole families in much of the world live for a week on the amount of water Donald Trump squanders each time he flushes one of his gold-plated toilets.

He is hardly responsible for past follies before he took office. Still, profligate water use in a thirsty world demands concerted action by rich nations. Trump chooses the opposite.

Gandhi once put it simply: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” But Trump’s vaunted “deregulation” amounts to rolling back federal and even state conservation measures that were making a significant impact.

In his self-obsessed jihad to remake the United States in his own transactional image, everything has a price, and brute power prevails. That is destroying a wider world of vastly different beliefs and cultures in a wondrous world that belongs to our progeny.

A close focus on southern Arizona reveals the big picture.

In a preface to the 40th anniversary of his book, Nabhan noted summer rains in 2021 were four to five more than the previous year. He recalled what an 8-year-old boy on the rez told him in the 1970s: “The desert smells like rain again.”

It was more than creosote, those beloved greasewoods. Monsoons brought back long-dormant aromatic edible and medicinal plants. But as water tables drop again, bulldozers along the border and at copper mines are creating permanent devastation.

Outsized homes and commercial sprawl eat away desert. The damage is incalculable. When I was a kid, a $500 fine for killing a Gila monster seemed extreme. But a few are still around. Their venom was key to developing Ozempic to treat diabetes and obesity.

In the end, it comes down to water.

Thomas Merton’s family fled France in World War I for America. He became a Trappist monk committed to social justice. His foresight is the frontispiece to Nabhan’s book:

“Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival. The time will come when they will sell you even their rain.”

Today, Emiliano worries when drought curls his leaves, and no one has water to spare. But he is maybe 400 years old, a tough old dude. Solomon, a mere centenarian, was begging for a garden hose last summer along with the natural growth around him.

Nabhan describes the traditional harvest of saguaro fruit, women’s work with long poles, often romanticized but hard as hell. He heard a young city kid ask a grandmother why he couldn’t just throw rocks at the top. As he told it:

“’NO!’ Marquita replied with a strain of horror in her voice. The saguaros — they are Indians too. You don’t EVER throw ANYTHING at them. If you hit them in the head with rocks you could kill them ... You don’t do anything to hurt them. They are Indians.”

This is not because saguaros have arms, like people. Less than half of our suffering planet reveres a monotheist diety in human form. Some now await white smoke from building in Rome. Others chug nasty cactus-fruit wine to ask the spirits for a downpour.

Take this microcosm wherever you want, in any direction. For reasons that have been clear before Emiliano was a seedling, about when Leonardo da Vinci figured out much of Earth’s physiognomy the wise among us humans knew that resources are finite.

The ocean acidifies, warms and rises. Forests burn or fall to chainsaws. Topsoil blows away. Corps that thrived on arid lands are replaced by truckloads of food aid — or nothing. At some point, the balance is likely to tip for everyone.

Science develops new “inputs”: fertilizers, pesticides, hardy seed strains. But the Tohono O’odham, like villagers I’ve covered in Sahelian Africa and so many others, can manage without them.

Ancient peoples who have lived off their land can damned near grow crops on concrete. There is one simple trick to it: Just add water.