In Frog Mountain Blues, Tucson author Charles Bowden makes a passionate argument for the conservation of the Santa Catalina mountains. The largest and highest peak, Mt. Lemmon, towers a mile and a half above the adjacent city of Tucson and was known by the Tohono O'Odham as Frog Mountain. I really liked some of his quotable quotes regarding conservation. Here are my favorites.
- "Any proposal for a national forest that means there will be less national forest still standing in the end is a bad idea."
- "What kind of national forest are we running where the existence of black bears is a problem and the existence of a bunch of cabins, ski runs, and a lodge is not?"
- "Land Of Many Uses is the slogan of the Forest Service. But so far as I can see, there is actually only one use: anything goes for one species, human beings."
- "The way we live and work kills wild ground and when the wild ground is gone, we will vanish also."
- "All the wild ground our ancestors called tractless wastes--now those spots are our last memories of a better world."
Written a quarter century ago, the book is still timely. Luckily, not much has changed. Well, let me qualify that. The city has sprawled right up to the edge of the national forest, the road has been widened, the village of Summerhaven is still rebuilding after a disastrous wildfire. Restrictions have apparently failed to prevent the extirpation of bighorn sheep. A horrible bear attack some years ago led to many being captured and relocated to more remote areas. People have completely freaked out when mountain lions showed up in a popular recreation area.
But a lot of what Bowden poetically writes about in the book, the remote canyons and rocky peaks, remain completely wild. Many have been decimated by fire, but are slowly coming back.
It's a long-winded, rambling book, nowhere near as focused as his earlier work Blue Desert (which is a must-read for anyone interested in Southern Arizona). He meets with some of the people who have figured prominently in the history and development on Mt. Lemmon. He speculates on how a stint with the forest service on Mt. Lemmon may have affected a young Aldo Leopold and talks about some of the early exploration of the range, including the mythical lost Mine With The Iron Door.
He concludes with a sidelong attack on the concept of multiple use, envisioning a Mt. Lemmon where all human structures have been "decommissioned", the radio towers, observatories and ski lifts removed, the road torn up, and private residences bought out. By his own admission, it's too radical for anyone to take seriously. Personally, I'm quite biased, the place where I work runs those observatories, and they are on the forefront of near-Earth asteroid detection (hence may literally save our skins). I'm hopeful that such balance as there is between development and conservation in the Catalinas can be maintained for future generations.
