D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2009
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Silver City ethnobotanist Richard Felger traces the connections between desert peoples and plants — and why we may one day be eating mesquite instead of barbecuing with it.
By Richard Mahler
Growing up near the Southern California coast, Richard Felger may have been the only self-described marine biologist in his first-grade class. "I really didn't get into botany until I was about eight years old," explains the Silver City-based scientist in a craggy voice, with a twinkle in his eyes and a Cheshire-cat smile. "When I was around 12 or 13, I took a sort of pilgrimage to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument," a Sonoran Desert park that borders Mexico in southwest Arizona. "Once I went there, it was like the world clicked into the right place. I knew what I was going to do."
Felger is one of those lucky individuals whose childhood passion incubates a career that proves long on stimulation and overflows with delight.
"It was wonderful," the 60-something ethnobotanist marvels, decades after the fact, "to see my first desert rattlesnake, to watch my first Gila monster ambling across the sand."
What others — including a trip advisor at the local auto club — dismissed as a dull wasteland, the adolescent explored as a virtual playground. He still does.
"When I was a kid it took me a long time to figure out that other people don't locate themselves by the trees and plants around them," says Felger, casually attired in a purple T-shirt and worn blue jeans. He is seated in a spacious, art-filled living room that overlooks oak savanna and pion-juniper woodland, trending south toward the yucca-studded edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. "When they walk or drive down the street, most people don't know the names of the plants they see — and probably don't care [to know them]."
An ethnobotanist sees things differently. He or she recognizes that humans are immersed in (and interconnected with) a natural world upon which they have a profound impact, for a better or worse. Such an expert knows we ignore such linkage at our peril.
"Today there's a huge perception," says Felger, a world-renowned and widely published specialist in the native flora of arid environments, "that we're not really part of the natural scheme. The idea that we go out and find nature, that it's not our habitat, is a concept that goes against my own philosophy."
And what underlies Felger's philosophy, exactly?
"There is no place on Earth, just about, that has not been visited by humans," he stresses. "We have an influence on every part of our planet, as the world does on us."
Cultivated plants are prime examples of this reciprocal relationship. They sustain us as food, forming the very foundation of our civilizations. "This," points out Felger, "is what human culture is built upon: wheat, rice, corn, beans and a few other grasses and legumes." Look around, he suggests, and we are surrounded by evidence that modern and ancient peoples long have depended upon plant life in order to form secure, ongoing communities.
Since their arrival in the American Southwest some 14,000 years ago, according to Felger, members of our Homo sapiens species have been modifying the landscape in myriad ways. But whereas early residents relied on mesquite, cacti, agave, yucca and other native plants as food sources, modern men and women have their foodstuffs flown or trucked in — or grown on local farms that require irrigation and fertilizer. Except from some leading-edge organic farmers and gardeners, desert vegetation is all but ignored except as decorative landscaping.
But is it sufficient to sustain us?
Well, maybe not the millions who now have made New Mexico and Arizona their homes, but certainly a limited number of humans. (The term "carrying capacity" comes to mind.) Take the Seri (Comcac) Indians, for example. Members of this small indigenous group have persisted for at least five centuries in one of the harshest environments on Earth: the desert islands of the Gulf of California and the mainland coast of the Mexican state of Sonora. Felger has studied Seri knowledge for many years and described them in his 1991 book, co-authored with Mary Beck Moser, People of the Desert and Sea. These Native Americans were historically hunter-gatherers who maintained an intimate relationship with ocean and land.
"Many of the older people actually lived off the desert and the sea during the first half of their lives," says Felger, recalling his early collaborative research with the Seris, whom he's been working with for decades. "They did not go to the store. There was no store and in any event they had no means of securing money to buy things. These are people who really did live off an extreme desert. Water was their single limiting factor to population size."
Felger is now working with the grandchildren of some of the oldest Seris with whom he first interacted. The latter had knowledge of their environment that was so vast, he says, "that even in 25 years I was able to learn only the bare minimum. Much information has passed away with those older people, but many of the younger Seris have terrific interest in the ecological, botanical and biological knowledge of their region."
Store-bought food now supplements the diet of the Seris, who once depended upon sea turtles, fish, birds, such mammals as deer, and native plants for their survival. In a hot, dry land that averages only about five inches of rain per year, water continues to be scarce and precious — wherein lies an important lesson for modern humans living in arid climates.
"People can do without oil," Felger declares. "They can either learn to do without it or to develop alternatives. But there ain't no alternative to water." In the future, he predicts, "the most vicious wars will be fought over [the control of] water. I'm sure that if New Mexico, Arizona and California were separate countries, they'd already be at war over water. I'm not sure that's such a bad idea, but I'm pretty sure who would win: the places with the most people and power."
Felger says "horrendous things" are going on elsewhere on our planet in relation to scarce water resources, citing the Mideast and South America. In several countries, "multinational corporations have already attempted to move in and grab water rights."
Lest we feel insulated from such turmoil, Felger reminds that global interconnection is more far-reaching than many of us think. The deliberate human modification of environments in Asia, for instance, over recent millennia has turned forests into grasslands into deserts. Now these and other desert ecosystems are further threatened by disturbance of the thin, microbe-rich crusts that hold their fragile soils together. Such cryptobiotic crusts are where considerable photosynthesis takes place and life-supporting nitrogen gets fixed. "The skin of the Earth has been broken and destroyed," Felger laments.
These changes, coupled with the phenomenon of global warning, have rendered some once-productive farmlands worthless and others wholly dependent on irrigation. Desertification in China and some of its neighbors now yields huge plumes of dust, some of it chemical-laden, that are pulled into the upper atmosphere and drift across the Pacific to settle in North America — and beyond. Specialists in the US regularly examine such dust to evaluate pollution levels in Asia. (In January 2008, when a milky rain fell on Grant County, Chinese dust particles were initially among the suspected causes of the strange phenomenon.)
"It's an exciting time," says Felger of the present era, "a time when there are horrific changes, many of which we do not view as totally positive. But that's the modern world."
For this scientist, our problematic situation prompts consideration of indigenous arid-zone plants as candidates for development as future food sources. Funded research has taken Felger around the world, searching for desert denizens that might help feed the hungry in low-moisture, salt-heavy environments. Two plants in particular, he concludes, hold great promise.
"Mesquite," Felger predicts, "will become one of the great New World crops. Around the hot, arid regions of the Earth, where normal agriculture as we know it is not feasible, mesquite will become a major crop." He points out that generations of early Western Hemisphere inhabitants of arid lands depended on flour ground from the tree's dangling legume pods as a sweet, nutritious food. Whereas some land-based ethnic groups have never stopped using mesquite for nourishment, modern humans have largely ignored the plant except as a source of barbeque charcoal.
The less well-known food source on Felger's short list is nipa, a salt-tolerant grass that occurs in tidal wetlands of the Colorado River delta. Harvested for centuries by the area's Cocopah people, nipa has yet to enter wide cultivation, despite its favorable characteristics. Well-adapted to a desert climate, the nutrition-rich grass tolerates saltwater and freshwater equally well. "After traipsing around the deserts of the world" looking for native food plants, says Felger, "it is one of the winners."
Commercial development of mesquite and nipa has been slow, in part because it is difficult to secure the long-term, broad-based research support such projects demand. Widespread cultivation "will require multi-year teamwork," says Felger, a pragmatic optimist in the mold of the late author Ed Abbey, a friend and former neighbor, and Gary Paul Nabhan, an Arizona research colleague whom Felger has mentored and collaborated with.
"Look at the development of corn, wheat, rice, and potatoes," urges Felger, his right index finger stabbing the air for emphasis. "That took place over decades, even centuries." At present, he awaits word on a pending grant proposal that would advance the cause of nipa cultivation.
Meanwhile, this desert rat doesn't lack for diversions. The deck outside his living room is strewn with potted specimens of exotic-looking cacti and succulents that catch New Mexico's dawn-to-dusk sun on most days. "I enjoy," he says, padding around in socks, "being able to have my doors and windows open all summer and most of the winter." (Felger did not want pictures taken for this article of himself or his home.)
The relocation he and his partner, Silke Schneider, made from the outskirts of "overly Californicated" Tucson — where Felger still has an environmental research appointment with the University of Arizona — is agreeable. Silver City is close enough that Felger can make frequent necessary trips to Tucson as well as other work-related destinations, while Schneider pursues a deep interest in horses of the Spanish Colonial epoch. (She's written an authoritative book on the subject, Arizona's Spanish Barbs.)
"This is a much more livable climate for Silke's horses and for animals like us," says Felger, who occasionally teaches and lectures locally. "It's an area that seems to be infested with interesting people. . . and it's pretty close to a lot of places where I'm doing research. For example, I'm studying the trees of the whole Gila River drainage, which extends all the way to the Colorado River." (One member of the New Mexico Native Plant Society, when asked about Felger, dubbed him "a master at knowing the Latin name of almost every plant imaginable.")
On one recent Sunday morning, Felger and some friends set out to hike Hillsboro Peak, which juts to around 10,000 feet in the Black Range east of Silver City. In characteristic fashion, Felger leans forward and describes the "excitement" of traveling through oak savannas, pion-juniper woodlands, and ponderosa pine forests en route to the summit.
"You can observe so much change in a single day of walking," Felger enthuses. "I think of this every time I look on either side of the Continental Divide, seeing the varied species cascading down as the rivers flow either toward the Ro Grande or the Colorado. Anywhere along the Divide has to be a spiritual place. Maybe that is really what draws us here."
Southwest Storylines columnist Richard Mahler is the author of 11 books, including The Jaguar's Shadow: Searching for a Mythic Cat, to be published by Yale University Press later this year. His byline has appeared in publications including New Mexico Magazine, Santa Fean, Los Angeles Times and Arizona Highways, and on columns for the Albuquerque Journal and Crosswinds. He lives in Silver City.