from the substance is critical in mapping
a more sustainable path for living in the
region.
DeBuys begins his examination with
the conclusion that the North American
Southwest “promises to be center stage for
the continent’s drama of climate change.
Most models predict that the Southwest
will outstrip other regions in both the rate
and the amount of change, and already
data from the field suggest that the models are correct— except in one important
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For thirty years, Orion has
stood for the values of people
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Now Orion is depending on
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A
respect: the changes are occurring faster
than expected.”
The rate of change impacts all sys-
tems, beginning and ending with water.
People, like energy production, use a lot
of water— and agriculture uses substan-
tially more. As the Southwest’s popula-
tion increases, even a redirection of water
from farms to cities provides only a tem-
porary reprieve given the region’s already
overcommitted water supply. As the cli-
mate warms, weather patterns change,
resulting in reduced winter rains and
snowpack, less spring runoff, increased
evaporation, and greater reductions in
available water despite increasing needs.
DeBuys’s research takes place in the
field, one of the real strengths of this book.
In lyrical prose rich in place and politics,
his stories take us from the Navajo reservation to research labs, from ancient ruins
on both sides of the border wall to the Red
Squirrel Refugium atop Mount Graham,
perhaps the country’s most biopolitically
contentious mountain. Each chapter is a
new study, related, yet distinct. Similar to Alan Weis-man’s The World Without
Us in how it explores systems — water, forests, immigration — A Great Aridness is
both fascinating and frightening. Clearly we are on the
cusp of substantial, likely
irrevocable changes. As deBuys notes, that’s nothing
new—the dusty remains of
ancient Puebloan and Hohokam communities show us the risks of overbuilding in
an arid environment. Yet we continue to
build and continue to extract.
Now we must ask: how can we overhaul our systems to accommodate escalating warming? As deBuys notes, it’s no
small feat: “Taken together, the fateful
combination of present inaction, rising
energy and resource consumption, and
climate vulnerability make it di;cult to
envision a safe landing for humankind.”
Back at Whitewater Draw, my daughter
and I witnessed more takeoffs than land-
ings, as the cranes began their migration
north. Come summer, this gorgeous land-
scape will be as dry as the surrounding
hills. What changes are in order to ensure
the wetlands return next winter? What
systems must we overhaul to ensure our
own migration to a more sustainable fu-
ture? Let’s begin, as deBuys suggests, with
our precious water.
—Simmons B. Buntin
When Women
Were Birds
BY TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
$23, 224 pages.
foR MoRE THAn TWEn Ty yEARS Terry
Tempest Williams has been writing books
that manage to be both fierce and medita-tive, but perhaps these dichotomous qualities have never before been
so fully apparent as they are
in her most recent book, an
unorthodox memoir called
When Women Were Birds:
Fifty-four Variations on Voice.
With her trademark the-personal-is-political ethos,
Williams sets out, in ways
both direct and discreet, to
address the question of why,
upon her death, her late
mother, Diane Dixon Tempest, left her
three shelves of clothbound journals, all
of which turned out to be blank.
This sometimes incisive, sometimes
meandering book is composed of fifty-four chapters—a number that echoes
the fifty-four years of Williams’s mother’s
life—each exploring a “variation on
voice”: hers, her mother’s, those of the
women in her family and in our world,
the voice of power, the nonvoice of silence,
