In August, Northern Arizona University hired ethnobiologist and writer Gary Paul Nabhan to become the university's first Director of the Center for Sustainable Environments. Housed in Hanley Hall, CSE is a catalyst for coordinating work across campus related to environmental issues, supporting environmental programs and initiatives, and fostering collaborative work among and within four core areas: research, curriculum development, outreach and stewardship.

A resident of the Tucson area for the better part of 25 years, where he co-founded Native Seeds/SEARCH, Nabhan was Director of Science at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum before coming to NAU. Educated at Prescott College and the University of Arizona, Dr. Nabhan has authored, co-authored, or edited more than a dozen books, including The Desert Smells Like Rain, Enduring Seeds, The Geography of Childhood, and the forthcoming Coming Home to Eat - The Sensual Pleasures and Global Politics of Local Foods, to be published by W.W. Norton in the spring of 2001.

A gifted writer who crosses ethnic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries with apparent ease, Nabhan is an internationally respected ethnobotanist and authority on issues of biological and cultural diversity.  He was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship for 1990-1995.

The following conversation between Nabhan and Flagstaff resident Patrick Pynes took place in late August.

Patrick Pynes:  What initially attracted you to the Sonoran Desert?

Gary Paul Nabhan: I was a high school dropout, and while I was leaving high school, I heard about Prescott College, and its experimental Southwest field programs. So I came to Arizona not so much to study deserts, but to see the whole range of habitats here.  Frankly, I was as lured by the grasslands and the sandy steppes of  northern Arizona and southern Utah as I was to the Sonoran Desert, but landed in the Sonoran Desert after five years, because I found that I could work on a team with folks who were taking into account both the cultural history and the environmental history of the region.  And, with a number of mentors, I began to work in close collaboration with communities of Tohono O'odham and Seri Indian people on their natural resource issues, trying to safeguard their knowledge of plants and animals.

Did you have an interest in indigenous cultures and people before you came to the Sonoran?  Where did that interest come from?

I'm one generation removed from Lebanese herders, herbalists, and farmers. I grew up in a multicultural ghetto in the Midwest, where I was still hearing stories about the old country and the old foodways.  And, within two weeks of coming to Arizona, I was down among the Seri Indian community, kayaking out to Tiburon Island.  But I think a turning point in my whole career as a natural scientist happened in 1974, when I got a Sierra Club scholarship to go to the Galapagos Islands.

The research institute that was supposed to take us out to the Galapagos went bankrupt while we were down there.  So, instead of spending more time in the Galapagos, we spent a lot of time in the Andes, where I got a sense of the high elevation  lands of South America, and of how strongly human cultures had influenced the landscape. In the Andes you couldn't walk very far without being reminded of the deep cultural history that had affected the plants and vegetation. I came back from that trip less enamored with a strictly Darwinian ecologist's view of the world and more attracted to an ethnobiologist's view, and I also gained a sense that the South American landscape could not be understood without knowing Pablo Neruda and Vargas Llosa and the literature....

Ethnically speaking, do you identify yourself as a Lebanese American?

I do. My mother's family is Irish, but I grew up around all of my Lebanese relatives, and I think their values for cross-cultural negotiation and their strong family values and their way of relating their own cultural identity to their traditional foods profoundly affected me.  I think the key moment for me in dealing with indigenous cultures happened one Thanksgiving, when I went to stay with a Pima family on the Gila River Indian Reservation.  We were helping  a woman prepare some mesquite and tepary bean and cholla bud dishes, and her daughter mentioned to her that I was Lebanese, and she said-this elderly Pima lady said to me--"I love Lebanese food, but I don't  know where to get the ingredients.  It seems like I can't find the seeds or the herbs anymore. I used to work as the cook for a Lebanese businessman in Phoenix and grew to love that food, because it was so much like our food,  a lot of legumes and a lot of herbs...." And she said, "what's happening to that food tradition?  Can you still get those things?"

At that  point, I realized that every ethnic tradition is really facing the same pressures of globalization. We either lose things entirely because our relationships with the land are disrupted, or our foodways become commodified to the point where Southwestern food in restaurants is nothing like the Southwestern food that people grew up with a half century or a century ago.

I'd like to ask one more question having to do with the issue of ethnic identity.  Do you think that it's possible for people who are not indigenous to the Americas to actually become indigenous to the Americas, after many generations of living here, or after some sort of initiatory experience?

I have two reactions to that.  First, when I am in Mennonite or Amish communities in the Midwest, or in certain Hispanic communities in the Southwest or northern Mexico, I have a strong feeling that those people have been here long enough, that the community and its commitment to a particular landscape allows members of the community to think and to behave as Natives to that land.  I'm less sure that as individuals, we can think as Natives in isolation.  I think that what characterizes Hopi, Zuni, or even Mennonite communities is that in addition to individual will and interest in the land, you also have this strong oral tradition reinforcing and guiding you.  So I'm suspicious of immigrants who claim they've become Native if they're living in isolation from a larger community.  I would like to have more tangible indicators that that's true. In the end, rootedness in the land cannot be an individual, heroic act.  It needs to come from continuity within a community.

I'd like to shift the focus a bit now to what you're doing here on the Colorado Plateau, in Flagstaff, and at Northern Arizona University.  It sounds like your connections to the Sonoran Desert are very deep, and yet you were willing to migrate northward, from the Gadsden Purchase to New Mexico Territory, as it were, from one bioregion to another. What is it about this cultual landscape that motivated you to come here?

First of all, I'm not a stranger to northern Arizona in the sense that I spent three and a half years living in Prescott and was closely tied to a family that is scattered between  Flagstaff and Tuba City and Moab.  I also spent a lot of time in the early '90s up on the Colorado Plateau working on the book Canyons of Color, as well as teaching Hopi, Tewa, and Navajo kids in the Arizona "Poets on the Road" program in the mid-70s.  Part of my imagination has always been inspired by this landscape.

When the invitation came to consider moving up here to Flagstaff, what made it plausible for me to do so was meeting the people here.  Just as I believe that you can't be Native in isolation, you need to be Native in community, I believe that you can't have vision in isolation: you have to be part of a collective vision that only a community can generate, elaborate, and keep alive into the future.  Otherwise, the term "vision" has no staying power. I have come to believe that it's the right time in my life to enter into extended collaborations across cultures and across disciplines with people who can sustain a vision for how to better care for the Colorado Plateau as an ecological region.

As part of that vision, how do you see the relationship developing between the Center for Sustainable Environments--which includes so many different entities on campus-and other communities in Flagstaff, and across all of northern Arizona? How does the Center for Sustainable Environments go about establishing relationships with communities outside of the university?

My metaphor for good collaboration is what I see among good jazz musicians. Each of them may bring not only very different talents and instruments into play, but they all read one another well, and their music emerges from careful listening and imaginatively complementing one another. There's a certain amount of mutual respect among jazz musicians, but they also challenge one another to contribute to a collective melody. More than any other place I know of in the United States, I see the possibility for fair-handed, multicultural collaborations regarding natural and cultural resource issues taking place here in Flagstaff. As I said last week at the Ethnobotany Conference [at NAU], if the Colorado Plateau is one of the top five ecoregions of North America in terms of biological and cultural diversity, if the Plateau has the richest remaining spectrum of Native crops and adapted livestock breeds of any region in the country, and, if a sustainable future is possible, then I believe that it's possible here. 

In other words, I think there are cultural and natural blessings in this region that need to be honored and re-woven into a cohesive fabric.  If we do that, I really believe that we can turn land use in this region around, so that the Colorado Plateau will not be characterized by anyone as a region that is losing its uniqueness, but as one that is building upon its uniqueness.  My long-term vision is that we aim for food, fiber, and energy self-sufficiency here on the Colorado Plateau.  I don't mean to the exclusion of being part of a larger economy or a network of communities, but I think a reasonable goal is that people living here try to obtain four-fifths of all our food and fiber from the Colorado Plateau and allow-as a lot of traditional cultures did-another fifth to come in from exchange with surrounding regions. That way you honor the exchange and it's a value to you, and you're not overwhelmed by it.  You have a selective filter on what you take in from other regions.

It sounds like you find some real hope for a sustainable future in what is right here on the Colorado Plateau, in what has remained....

Yes...this is a semi-arid climate, a pretty rugged landscape, and it's not going to be as overwhelmed by the products of globalization as other regions.  The same kind of corn that grows well in the Midwest, the Mediterranean, and the South American plains, for example, simply isn't going to make it here.  There are enough climatic and soil peculiarities here in this region to give us a chance of doing well with what's best adapted to this place.  The crops that are widely disseminated as "silver bullets" for the entire world's population really do poorly under these conditions. Therefore, we have a reason to pay more attention to ecologically and culturally adapted resources that are unique to this region because they still serve us well.

Is there anything that has happened on the Colorado Plateau recently that gives you hope for a truly sustainable future? I have to admit that I'm often cynical about the long term prospects. Is what we're trying to do just a way to make a decent living on the way to the end of the world, or is there real hope in practical things?

I'm encouraged by three relatively recent developments.  I think, for instance, that the Zuni Wellness Program and the tribe's resource mapping programs are exemplary for what any indigenous community is doing anywhere in the world.  By a combination of exercise and diet and community support, they're beating the diabetes problem at Zuni better than any other community I know of.  They also have a very comprehensive way of integrating management of their natural and cultural resources....The pro-active, affirmative stance of the Zuni community to safeguard their own resources is very inspiring. 

I also am really inspired by the Navajo churro sheep efforts, particularly how they relate to the small business developments around Tierra Amarilla and Los Ojitos in northern New Mexico, where they've generated income from local products in community-controlled businesses involving both women and men, Hispanics and non-Hispanics. There are very positive community-based actions going on there.

The third development I'm hopeful about is Black Mesa Trust's efforts to get Hopi and Navajo groundwater rights back from Peabody Coal. Charles Wilkinson [law professor at the University of Colorado] and Vernon Masayesva [former Hopi Tribal Chairman and founder of the Black Mesa Trust] uncovered documents which demonstrated that a Utah lawyer was working for Peabody Coal and the Hopi Tribal Council at the same time that he was putting together the agreements that allowed the Secretary of the Interior to give his permission for Peabody to mine and to use groundwater up on Black Mesa.  It's technically illegal for any lawyer to work for opposite parties at the same time.

It sounds like a situation similar to what happened with oil on the Navajo Reservation during the 1920s, when lawyers working for the Department of the Interior created the Navajo Tribal Council to allow oil companies legal access to the tribe's petroleum resources.

Yes, the remarkable thing is that that lawyer formed the Hopi Tribal Council, because up until then the elders on the mesas made decisions on behalf of their communities, especially when they were dealing with government agencies.  So the Black Mesa Trust is leading a letter writing campaign to try to encourage Secretary Babbitt to negate the water agreement with Peabody Coal.  I think that will open up completely new possibilities for the Navajo and Hopi Nations to more fully determine their own futures.

Was the successful campaign to end pumice mining on the San Francisco Peaks part of the hope for a sustainable future that you see?

Yes, what Andy Bessler and others did with the Vulcan Mine was, I think, another great example of the multicultural coalition to turn around something that is not only damaging to the environment, but insulting or irreverent to cultural traditions. I think the long-term benefit of the closing of the Vulcan Mine will not be restricted only to the acres that were mined.  The closing of the mine is the beginning of more multicultural coalitions on behalf of healthy land and healthy communities here on the Colorado Plateau.

That coalition in a way challenged one of the main arguments of the book I've written about the Navajo Forest, in the sense that I was arguing that there isn't very much common ground between European American "preservationist" groups [like the Sierra Club or Forest Guardians] and indigenous "conservationist" groups.

Nabhan:  Well, I think that's still true.  I think that while I have hope for those kinds of bridges between cultural perspectives, we're still dealing with one hundred years of environmental activism in this country that has been driven by the dominant culture at the expense of other communities.  And so I think that the environmental justice movement-- which I still see as stronger in New Mexico than in Arizona-- is another source of hope.  In general, I think that the closing of the Vulcan Mine is the exception that proves the rule.  It was such a stunning victory because--unlike so many other environmental efforts--it did take several different cultures' perspectives into account.

It could signal a shift in spiritual ecology, some sort of change in the trajectory of history...

Yes.

Just two more questions before we go. What is biodiversity? And why is biodiversity important?

Biodiversity is the remaining living riches of this world.  It is the variety of all life around us, and it is the greatest antidote to monotony, monopoly, and monoculture that we have.  Biologists now have an almost spiritual belief that tending to biodiversity is essential not only for scientific reasons, but because we have a deep intuitive sense that if we don't, every place in the world will look like every other place.  In that world Phoenix, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Salt Lake City will not be inherently different from one another, structurally or in terms of their content, and many biologists literally can't stand to see the world impoverished of its variety any more.  And so although there are many very objective-looking papers on conservation and biodiversity, I would say that it's not value-neutral science, that it's accepting the fact that the heterogeneity of life on this Earth matters to human health, to community health, and to the human imagination....

I think there are two other important elements of biodiversity. One is that we literally can't take care of the remaining biodiversity on this planet unless we realize its connections to cultures. Nearly all of the refugia that contain the greatest array of species are located in places that have been tended by traditional cultures.  At last biologists are seeing that the link between cultural diversity and biodiversity may not be coincidental. Where traditional cultures have resisted globalization and the spread of monocultures, that is where we find what biologists now call "hot spots" of biodiversity.  It may be that the tallgrass prairies once had comparable biodiversity, but now we'll never know, because the Great Plains were easy for industrialized monoculture to march over and diminish. Each region has its own value, even if it may not be a biodiversity hotspot, but it happens that the places where traditional cultures have maintained control over land and water resources are exactly where we find most of that diversity remaining today.

I think I saw that connection between cultural and biological diversity as a child living in Latin America. With my family I visited so many places that were still in indigenous hands, and it was so powerful to see those cultural landscapes south of the U.S./Mexico border, and then to see places in the United States that had a similar kind of beauty and luminosity, like the Great Smoky Mountains.  Because of the cultural differences on both sides of the  international border, I never could quite understand the connections between those landscapes, but you're suggesting that a main source of this luminosity was the presence of indigenous people, past and present.

Yes.  And, you know there's another whole issue to this that is particularly relevant to this region, to the Colorado Plateau.  That is, where we see traditional cultures interacting with the land, there's a deep understanding that peoples' lives depend on the plants and animals around them.  Now the average American has his food travel 1,300 miles before it reaches his mouth. For the most part in American society, we're disconnected from how the larger biotic community benefits us.  What I worry about is when futurists predict that the largest industry in the world by the end of this decade will be tourism.

I worry that we're succumbing to a view of the world only as scenery rather than one of necessary interaction to keep ourselves alive and to keep the other creatures in our environment alive.  I believe that ecotourism is not without its downsides, and although I feel we need to be inspired by interacting with the landscape through exercise, gatherings with friends, river-running, and all of that, I would feel terrible if there were no working, food-producing landscapes left on the Colorado Plateau, and that all of it was scenery for tourists.

You have been living in Flagstaff for a month now.  What do you think of the place so far?  Any first impressions?

Well, I think the most amusing thing was that I've sort of been contacted by people on both sides of the Canyon Forest Village issue, and my immediate response was that newcomers to the region can only speak of an issue that complex with ignorance:  ignorance of who the players are, ignorance of what the alternatives are, and ignorance of who has the strongest vision of what the future of Grand Canyon gateway communities can be like. And so I was amused that some people assumed that because I was an environmentalist somewhere else for twenty five years, that I would have a crystal ball to know what's right for Flagstaff right now.  I'm a novice here, and I'm really humbled by being in a community that I don't know as well I want to, either ecologically or politically. I don't mind being humbled and starting from scratch again because I think I'll learn a lot and that will be exciting. 

But I think that I love the level of debate about environmental issues here.  It's clearly not based on a bunch of simplistic truisms about whether development is all good or all bad or that farming and grazing are all good or all bad.  It's how we do it and how we express it and whether the benefits that we propose for any particular land use can be verified and evaluated by the community.  And so I like the level of heated dialogue that I already see up here.  On another level, I am most comforted by the range of people who really have strong values about both the larger biotic community and the human community and how they want to be citizens.  I really see the level of awareness from businesspeople as well as students and activists in town as the right kind of tone and level of commitment to move Flagstaff and Coconino County and the Colorado Plateau along.

From one newcomer to another, welcome to the Colorado Plateau.

Thanks.

Patrick Pynes is a cross-cultural specialist at the Bilby Research Center at NAU. He was born in Texas and grew up there and in the Panama Canal Zone, Mexico and Honduras. Pynes has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque on the interdisciplinary history of the Navajo Nation's ponderosa pine forests. During his years in New Mexico, Pynes made several trips to the Colorado Plateau, which he considers the spiritual heartland of North America. He is also an avid organic gardener and beekeeper.