by Adelheid Fischer

The Chiricahua Mountains rise steeply out of the tabletop grasslands of southeastern Arizona. Measuring toe to tip, the isolated range spans 5,000 feet of elevation in a single precipitous climb. From a distance, they look surreal, like a cardboard cutout of mountains pasted against the improbable blue of the desert sky.

Ecologists refer to the Chiricahuas as a sky island. Some two dozen other mountains like it cluster at the confluence of Arizona, New Mexico, and the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. Together they form a 200-mile-long archipelago of discrete ranges that tender their peaks from a vast sea of arid grasslands.

The sky islands are a crossroads. Plant and animal species that travel the spine of the Rockies from the north mingle with more southerly species from Mexico’s Sierra Madres. Adding to the ecological fusion are species contributed from the Sonoran Desert to the west and the Chihuahuan Desert on the east. So rich is this commingling that Conservation International recently designated the Sky Islands as a hotspot of global biodiversity.

“It’s a unique regional landscape with a distinctive character of place,” says Paul Hirt, an environmental historian at Arizona State University.

But maintaining its special identity has become enormously challenging. Scientists want to better understand the threats facing the sky islands borderlands. To do so, Hirt helped organize a field visit for a group of fellow scholars. In May 2007, he joined a caravan of 16 faculty and graduate students from ASU, the University of Arizona, New Mexico State, and the University of New Mexico.

The scholars probed the remote corners of the region. Their goal is to stimulate research that will support ecological health, sustainable economies, and cooperative international relations in the region. At the same time, they hope to find ways to better inform the public about these scholarly discoveries.

Hirt says that one of their dreams is to develop a summer field institute. In this immersion course, educators from around the country as well as borderlands citizens could learn about the region from the people who live and work in it.

The ASU scientist says that the need for a better understanding of the borderlands is more urgent now than ever. He took his first camping trip into the Chiricahuas more than three decades ago. Hirt was taken by the beauty of the steep rhyolite canyons along the mountains’ eastern slope. So taken, that he and his wife bought a tiny cabin nestled in one of their most spectacular reaches.

Hirt is working to preserve the beauty and ecological integrity of his home away from home. He joined with other members of the local community to found the Sky Island Alliance. The group is an influential corps of scientists and volunteers. The alliance actively participates in a range of research and conservation projects throughout the region.

But change is occurring at warp speed. Once sparsely settled, the sky islands borderlands are undergoing economic, ecological, and social upheavals. Stepped-up traffic in human and drug smuggling across the U.S.-Mexican border is wreaking havoc in fragile desert and mountain habitats. At the same time, scores of desperate migrants die each year along these remote crossings.

Predictions of drier conditions due to global warming are expected to deepen water woes at a time when many parts of the region are facing sunbelt-style population explosions. And ranching, which once dominated the economy, is giving way to tourism, second-home development, and NAFTA-stimulated commerce.

How well citizens, businesses and governments manage these stressors will depend, in part, on their understanding of how the region has coped with change in the past. But Hirt explains that the history of the sky islands borderlands is not very well known.

That may change, thanks to the unusual academic effort mounted by Hirt and his colleagues. During their intensive weeklong tour of the borderlands, landscape photographers sat cheek by jowl with environmental historians who, in turn, shared seats with cultural geographers. They logged several thousand miles in a round-robin of discussions, lectures and field visits with a wide array of stakeholders. They ranged from landowners, ranch managers and wildlife biologists to grasslands scientists and public officials.

The borderlands field study provided lots of opportunities for informal exchange. It also proved to be an especially effective method for interrogating the land. Collaborative field work, as the group discovered, is a little like assembling the pieces of a black-and-white puzzle and watching it come to life in living color before your eyes.

Case in point: In the borderlands, nothing seems more lackluster to the uninitiated visitor than the endless miles of open cattle range. But when it comes to the history of a landscape, appearances can be very deceiving.

For example, Hirt says that before the Spaniards introduced cattle to the sky islands region in the 17th century, the land bristled with native grasses and plants that were adapted to grazing by small mammals. Prairie dogs and herds of antelope thrived in the area. Shortgrass savannas dominated the drier plains and uplands while taller grasses flourished in watered lowlands.

The San Simon Valley is near Hirt’s summer home in the Chiricahuas. The valley was typical of the region’s rich diversity. Here, a small river switchbacked in lazy curves on the valley floor. Beavers dammed its waters to create marshy oases in the sun-baked land. Lush grasses grew so tall that they brushed the bellies of horses wading through them.

That ecological bounty allowed landowners to operate sprawling ranches. Back then, utilitarian objects ranging from dining chairs to boots were made out of leather. So cattle were primarily harvested for their hides and not butchered for their meat, says Dan Arreola, an ASU geography professor and tour member. Herds of cattle and acres of land were the currency of wealth and status.

All that changed with the advent of refrigerated transport. Cattle began to be exported as meat. But the once-prosperous ranching economy is on the wane in many parts of the sky islands region. More than two centuries of heavy grazing by livestock has tipped the ecological balance in favor of pesky species such as mesquite trees and creosote bush. The plants now spread in thickets all the way to the horizon.

Today, Hirt says, history is repeating itself—with surprisingly modern twists. Emerging in the place of the old cattle barons is a new breed of landowner. And with them has come an agenda of restoration. Collectively, their conservation efforts have come to rival—and in some cases surpass—environmental projects carried out by state and federal governments.

Some of them have formed coalitions such as the renowned Malpai Borderlands Group. These long-time landowners located in the boot heel of New Mexico have engaged fellow cattle ranchers in a wide range of restoration activities.

Individuals are leaving their mark on the region as well. Among them is the conservation-minded media mogul Ted Turner. He is one of a growing number of property holders in the borderlands who are bolstering teetering populations of native animals and restoring the productivity of the habitat that will support them.

There is no better example than the vast acreage contained in Turner’s Ladder and Armendaris ranches in New Mexico. Overseeing their rangelands is a staff of biologists and wildlife scientists. Instead of wrangling steers, this new cowboy generation is restoring habitat for endangered species.

They’re digging breeding ponds for Chiricahua leopard frogs and scouting prime terrain for the reintroduction of prairie dogs, burrowing owls, desert bighorn sheep, and desert tortoises. They’re helping federal scientists erect holding pens for endangered Mexican gray wolves that will be released into the wilds of Arizona. And they’re building temporary feeding stations that are designed to ease the transition of aplomado falcons from captivity back into the skies of southwestern New Mexico.

The future of many of these borderlands animals, however, depends on a free flow of travel in their home territories or along established migratory paths. No animal has captured greater attention for this cause than the jaguar. Beginning in the 1990s, ranchers and hunters began filing credible reports of jaguars making secretive forays into Arizona from Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountains. Since then, remote motion-sensor cameras have documented dozens of other sightings.

Hirt explains that in many parts of the borderlands today, however, the free range needed to sustain these big cats, not to mention prairie dogs, grassland birds and mountain lions, is being sliced and diced by development. One of the most destructive changes could be the construction of a massive fence along the U.S-Mexico border that has been proposed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The project calls for a continuous impenetrable wall stretching from California to Texas. Adding to the disruptions for wildlife are roadways, stadium lighting, and traffic patrols by vehicles and helicopters.

The researchers say that framing many of these charged issues in a larger historical context will help promote better management and public policy in the region. Members of the borderlands field group all work for universities.

“Our mission is research and education,” Hirt says. “We seek to do problem–based research. Our goal is to provide information to communities, to teachers, and to policy makers. We want to help them solve some of the environmental and social problems of the region. We picked the border because it’s a place of critical contemporary problems, many of which can be illuminated by a historical perspective.”

Borderlands research is supported by seed grants from ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research and the North American Center for Transborder Studies (NACTS). For more information, contact Paul Hirt. Ph.D., History Department, 480.727.9084. Send email to Paul.Hirt@asu.edu