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Idealism and sad, sad Cows

Arizona Daily Wildcat

Would you rather have a radioactive toxic waste dump, an overgrazed tangle of squalor and dung or an infusion of identical air-conditioned houses in your backyard? Or would you choose all three?

If you ever visited Biosphere II, no doubt your tour guide regaled you with stories about the incredible ecological advances we are making in this bubble in the desert.

Yet on the 45-minute drive north, did you ever look out the car window, thinking what a great expanse of desert we were living in, how it was wild and untamed and how Nature was surviving on her own just like she had been for thousands of years?

You were wrong.

According to the sign from the Arizona Cattleman's Association, I'm not supposed to be here on this broiling Sunday afternoon, choking on dust. To my left is the UA's radioactive landfill, seven-foot deep scars of erosion cut under the fences and cheaply assuaged by wooden pallets wired to the barbed wire. To my right is another barbed wire fence with a sign on it saying that a Revegetation Project (which involves throwing highly scientific birdseed on the ground) is in process. Bud Light cans are the only new things I see sprouting up.

Do I see coyotes? Javelinas? Pronghorn antelope? No, I see what appears to be the most abundant species in the Sonoran desert, unhappy cows, kicking up dust. The land is covered in massive piles of cow dung, as though an uncaring god was throwing raisins at us. And the reason I see these festering, fly-swarmed piles of s**t is because the natural grassland is chewed down to the mostly barren ground. This grass, former cover for the quails, squirrels, rabbits and deer, has been eaten away by bovines needing 100 acres each to survive. In the more lush and rainy settings of the Midwest, 100 acres could be used for 400 cows.

Away from their less-rainy habitats, mesquite trees and prickly pear grow where once heavily-bedded grass restricted them.

An Olympic-sized stagnant watering tank (a hole in the ground) filled with algae is the meeting place for the cows. It fills up with water when it rains, then trickles down into the radioactive soil around the Page-Ranch landfill.

Cattle ranchers buy cheap land like this out where nobody but the occasional irritating miscreant notices it, then trade it acre for acre with the State Land Department for the more valuable land near the Oracle highway, worth millions because of potential developing contracts. The rain floods away the ruined land, cutting deep swaths into the dirt due to the absence of grass needed to hold the topsoil together.

As uptight gated communities sprawl their closed-curtain ethics deeper and deeper into this fragile ecosystem, more and more land is being abused. Ranchers profit, land erodes, yet suburban numbskulls keep moving to these conformist mazes of never-ending asphalt and grass. They are enticed by the cheap pink structures with randomly bastardized Spanish names like Tierra/ Rancho/ Haciendas of Feliz/ Concordia/ Sol, where commerce is a single "Plaza" full of beige Avalons and Lexuses and khaki-wearing people buying their groceries from the same corporation. The ground has been systematically mistreated, yet we suck radioactive water up (again, thank you UA) to water the lawn, play golf and splash around in the pool.

The cattle ranchers who have overgrazed since the 1800s and swindle taxpayers out of land are just as bad as the typical SUV-driving American family that's willing to help corrupt the land for a prime property next to the newest Wal-Mart, Applebee's or Gap outlet.

At Biosphere II, children on field trips are filled with visions of self-sufficiency, where we have our own vegetable patches and get along with the world's animals, animals that aren't raised on dead mesquite or have their meat sold cheaply overseas.

Ten years after I was on that field trip, I am a few miles away in decimated Nature, illegally sitting on land that will some day be quickly-debilitating stucco and masonite visions of a viral human race, pumping non-existent water out of the malnourished ground. I am sitting on the edge of a crater full of green muck that is leaking out into contaminated soil.

When urban sprawl sprawls here, droves of people will pay $250,000 for part of the rape scene. Maybe some will refuse to on the basis of environmental protection, ranching ethics, and the hopes that those horrid, puce labyrinths will never get built.

But maybe I'm just as idealistic as the kids on their field trips.