Top Conservation Stories of 2014

Here are a few of the most important conservation stories from 2014:

--Gila River Proposed Diversion approved by ISC

--Mexican Gray Wolf critical habitat expanded to include most of NM and AZ south of I-40

Zone 1 is where Mexican wolves may be initially released or translocated.  Zone 2 is where Mexican wolves will be allowed to naturally disperse into and occupy, and where Mexican wolves may be translocated.  Zone 3 is where neither initial releases nor translocations will occur, but Mexican wolves will be allowed to disperse into and occupy....where Mexican wolves will be more actively managed...to reduce conflict with the potentially affected public.  However, in AZ east of Highway 87 there will be a "phased approach" to managing wolf populations.

--U.S. Congress Omnibus spending bill approves the Resolution mine landswap in AZ, grazing lease terms expanded to 20 years, and Valles Caldera becomes newest National Park

--Drought in CA (7% snowpack) ... and NM.  (e.g. Heron Lake resevoir levels fall, fail to make San Juan-Chame deliveries to Rio Grande)

-- US EPA and NRCS try to regulate agriculture under CWA....and fail.  The problem of increasing toxic algae problem in Ohio lakes came to a head in 2014 when Cleveland had to turn off their city water intake from Lake Eerie due to a toxic algal bloom. The proposed rule would have allowed EPA to regulate "non-point source" water pollution from farms that did not have a NRCS-approved conservation practices in place.  But apparently the outcry was too much, and early in 2015 the rule was amended.  Note that the final rule, even though it no longer contained this provision, was still vehemently protested in 2015.

--  Gunnison Sage Grouse listed as "Threatened" under the ESA, Colorado appeals.

-- Colorado River Pulse....mostly just grows more tamarisk.

--  Pleistocene megafauna extinction due to meteor impact, new study finds.  

-- Wilderness turns 50 years old

-- New "stacked trait" GMO potatoes and soybeans approved in the U.S.

And a random tidbit:  rabbits eat more forage in utah than bison...leading ranchers to question the state's continued bounty for coyote skins.

A New Conception of My Home-Watershed: the Gila River Basin

It took me three years of living and traveling extensively around Tucson to understand the local watershed. I grasped early on the basin and range topography of parallel North-South mountain ranges, but these ridges served to confuse rather than clarify the overall drainage, since I did not know how the meandering rivers and dry washes of the bottomlands connected. Some went north, others flowed south. Where was the continental divide? Where did they meet the sea?

It was only by fortuitous circumstance that the last year found me exploring the full scope of an area I finally recognized as my home watershed. I new conception of the Gila River Basin emerged from these vast peregrinations, a new understanding of the lay of the land and a meshing of medium and large scale aspects:

The Sonoran desert in Arizona exists in the Gila Basin, surrounded on three sides (north, east, and south) by concentric rings of grassland valleys and mesas, woodland hills and forested mountains. The Gila, which rises on the continental divide to the east (in NM), is joined by tributaries from the north and south, representing, respectively, the Mogollon Rim divide and another divide which roughly approximates the U.S./Mexico border.

This general schema is interrupted, of course, by the basic and range, which further divides ecotones and watersheds, creating a kind of comb effect wherein numerous drainages flow parallel before their confluence with the Gila. The Gila itself is also indistinct, since it virtually disappears in an amorphous wash in the middle of its basin. And, since it flows through sparsely inhabited parts of the countryside, it is even easier to ignore its central role in ordering the landform. Most people living in the large metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Tucson do not realize their place along the cusp of the Sonoran lowlands, or the importance of the placements of their cities at the ecotone divide between grassland and desert, where rivers [used to ] bring water from the mountains before evaporating in the desert. [Theoretically,] the Gila eventually flows into the Colorado, before that crosses the U.S. Mexico border, reaches its estuary, and flows into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). The Colorado rises from the western rocky mountains and the high colorado plateau to the north of the gila basin. To the south, in Mexico, streams flow directly off the Sierra Madre into the Sea of Cortez, without joining together in a large basin such as the Gila. To the east, on the other side of the continental divide, are the Chihuahan desert and the Rio Grand. These areas combined form the Southwest, and a large part of three out of four of the N. American deserts.

Aldo Leopold Centennial in the Southwest

100 years ago, in 1909, Aldo Leopold first traveled to the American Southwest. What he discovered there -- in the land and in himself -- would change the world. Here, he was inspired to conceive of and campaign for the first designated Wilderness:


Aldo Leopold: "Forester and wildlife manager - outdoorsman - ecologist - philosopher and practical idealist - interpreter of nature - pioneer in wilderness preservation. He taught an ethic of the land and by his teaching, writing, and example gave added depth, breadth, and insight to conservation. Overlooking the Gila Wilderness, which he helped establish - First National Forest area so designated - this tablet is here placed by the Wilderness Society, of which he was a founder. Dedicated as a tribute to him for the National Wilderness Preservation System he helped create - in the thirty-first year of this System, September 12, 1954."


"Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" -A. Leopold


"Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel...I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debtate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old." - A. Leopold