Mort Rosenblum: As our desert is despoiled, the past is erased

PATAGONIA — Along with the din of bulldozers on the border, echoes of Orwell resonate across Arizona. A soulless president bent on ethnic purification and heedless plunder is fast blotting out traces of a rich pre-Columbian heritage.

Remember "1984"?  "The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." Time is nearly over for us to protect the future.

Early in his second term, Donald Trump issued an executive order, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History." Now, eschewing climate science, he thwarts action to draw on ancient wisdom vital to an imperiled Southwest fast running out of water.

Republicans in the State Legislature cheer him on. Some dismiss as "aliens" indigenous tribes with roots that run 10,000 years deep. They push them off ancestral land for water-squandering mines and mineral exploration.  

Meantime, big money funds a headlong rush toward high-tech industry, housing projects and yet more agriculture on arid lands. If today's Arizonans cannot learn from our forebears' respect for scarce water, we are toast.

Two recent headlines in the Star reflect overlapping calamities -- irreparable cultural and environmental damage we are leaving to future generations. The first, "Ganado Story Being Erased," focused on the Hubbell Trading Post in Navajo country

Trump is whitewashing a multihued past. Hardy pioneers driven by "manifest destiny" tamed wild country by expelling and decimating Indians with methods he prefers that Americans forget. And he ignores the (relatively) peaceable symbiosis that followed.

Kit Carson drove thousands of Navajo on the "Long Walk" in 1864 to bitter exile near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Survivors returned two years later. Chief Ganado Mucho (Many Cattle) befriended John Lorenzo Hubbell, who bought the small trading post.

Anglo-owned trading posts supplied essentials to reservations while helping Indian weavers and artisans meld into Arizona's cultural tapestry. Hubbell's was preserved as a national historic site in 1965. Different sorts of Americans learned from one another.

Today, as the Washington Post reported in detail, the old stone creek-side complex is among the treasured remnants across America being labeled with revised history that deprives fresh generations of facts about the West's turbulent earlier days.

The second headline atop a piece by the redoubtable Tony Davis is drop-dead urgent: "Arizona Faces Massive Cut in Colorado River Water Under Most Likely U.S. Plan."

I came down to Patagonia, a rare little town where civic concern overshadows greed and profit, to put these disparate issues into a bigger picture.

Russ McSpadden, a champion of bedrock activism, read from his evocative new book of poems, "Borderlings," to a packed room at the town library. In a conversation later, he summed up multifaceted crises in a phrase: brutalist theatrics.

At the Center for Biological Diversity, he began watching Trump's wall take shape. He told Arizona Luminaria's John Washington, "I’d go and watch mountains being blown up, get dragged aside to make room for them to build a wall.”

More recently, he followed the border from New Mexico to California and found 1,800 stadium lights ready to flood nighttime wilderness with harsh light. So far, not yet.

As a kid, he lived at a U.S. base in Germany. His father gave him a fragment of the Berlin Wall. He placed it at the foot of Trump's wall, which does not keep crossers out but isolates Americans from a rich, colorful culture on the other side.

Gary Paul Nabhan sat in the back, nodding as McFadden linked Trump's folly to a wider world. His upcoming new book, "Water in the Desert," looks at similar crises across arid lands that force families to flee dried-up fields and tapped-out aquifers.

I spent an afternoon at his wondrous desert-rat lair in the hills outside of Patagonia. If you don't know about Nabhan, a Lebanese American ethnobotanist, Brother Coyote to the Tohono O'odham, look him up. There is no way I can summarize him.

One line in his book may soon be an essential guide to new generations: "I went looking for water in the desert and found that the world was teaching me how to listen.” And a chapter on Quitobaquito details what he heard on the border.

"In August 2019," he wrote, "I was heartbroken to learn that the very worst kind of intervention in any desert had been set in motion." It would cut across Tohono O'odham lands that reached from southern Arizona to the Sea of Cortez.

To tribal elders, uprooting thousands of saguaros was like felling their own kin. Cactus fruits and fibers vital to their lives were lost. The Quitobaquito oasis was the last place for drinking water for another 30 miles for runners on sacred salt pilgrimages.  

At the oasis," Nabhan wrote, "the sweet smell of fecund mud was soon to be replaced by the stench of dust, gasoline fumes and cement...that would impact the springs, wetlands and wildlife of this singular place." It has since done worse than he imagined.

Tribes and activists joined in a last-ditch suit to stop Resolution Copper, a multibillion-dollar Anglo-Australian mine near Superior. It would collapse Oak Flat below and likely destroy Apache Leap, a dramatic mountain face. Its water demands are incalculable.

The South32 Hermosa project, on the border south of Patagonia, is slated to drill down 4,000 feet for zinc and manganese, and it might expand to a vast open pit. Studies show it would deplete up to 1.2 billion gallons a year of already scarce water.

The list is long across Arizona. Whatever the positive benefits of plundering Earth to wage needless wars and to produce more than people need to live well, the upshot is clear. No human society can survive without water and the food that it grows.