In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[4] socioecology and the future of the land The Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge lies in south-central Arizona, sharing a border with Sonora, Mexico, stretching up through the Altar Valley to the west of the Baboquivari wilderness and the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation. These 116,095 acres were purchased using congressional appropriations to “provide habitat for threatened and endangered plant and wildlife species, with emphasis on the endangered masked bobwhite quail” (USFWS 7, 5, 1). One late summer day, a couple of years before Wayne Shifflett’s leopard frog transplantations (see chapter 2), I drove south from Tucson along Highway 286 to visit the refuge and its visitors’ center. The highway crosses the Mexican border in the small town of Sasabe, but shortly before it arrives there, it passes Buenos Aires to the east. No road sign announces the refuge at its northern border, but I noticed a constellation of landscape features that nonetheless signaled the refuge’s presence. The refuge generally hosts a lower density of mesquite trees in comparison to the regions I had been driving through and to the ranched area directly to my west. In the absence of a canopy, the refuge’s grass is particularly noticeable. At one point, I passed a recent burn, with the trunks of leafless mesquites supporting blackened branches, many with their thinner ends broken off. What little grass remained was short and singed. At the Buenos Aires visitors’ center, about ten miles north of Sasabe and fifteen miles west of the only slightly more inhabited Arivaca, a volunteer shared news of the wildlife refuge. She was most pleased at the recent sighting of the endangered bobwhite quail, which brought the area’s known population count to more than forty. She also shared that there were a couple of herds of “antelope” on the refuge at the moment, then drew attention to her error with the craft of an experienced educator, correcting it to “pronghorn” in pleasant and performed self-deprecation. Before I left, the volunteer had loaded me with newsletters and with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service’s December 2000 Draft Comprehensive Plan and Environmental Assessment for the Buenos Aires. The majority of these publications discuss the refuge’s prescribed burn plans. The burns are intended to reverse the incursion of woody plants and to create more grassland habitat for bobwhites and other species. One goal of the burn program left me particularly puzzled. The refuge hopes to replace introduced grasses, such as the South African Lehmann lovegrass, with native grasses, reversing changes in species composition that have been ongoing since the introduction of new grasses in the first half of the twentieth century. The refuge’s first manager, Wayne Shifflett, believes that the burn program will assist with this project. Yet this belief is not widely shared, and many of my informants scoff openly at the plan. This troubled me for two reasons. Most immediately, I love this land. Like others who do, I find it important to know unquestionably the effects of burns on grass species composition. This is the type of knowledge that ecological science is designed to produce and the type of knowledge that enables secure management decisions. At this point, however, no authority has produced a consensus on this issue that holds throughout the public arena. Disagreement over how and whether to rid the land of Lehmann troubled me for a second reason—a reason that might at first seem at odds with my quest for ecological knowledge. While the rational modern environmentalist in me wishes for a certain response to what I perceive to be an ecological problem, the rhetorical analyst in me wishes to remain sitting on a fence for as long as possible, and to examine the interconnected social, rhetorical, and ecological elements of the problem rather than reduce them to simple ecology. This internal conflict has manifested itself in other aspects of my research. For example, on the first official day of my research I foolishly turned down an offer to be introduced to a rancher wary of environmentalists , in large part because I did not know how to reconcile my environmentalist worldview with my intention to represent the integrity of my informants. I have since come to see my decision as a cause for both regret and amusement, since my research has introduced me to the complexities of debate and humbled me into the recognition that I have no clear answers...

Share