Sweeping Deserts

This project was one of the most fun to create during grad school. I originally started the project by working together with a partner, where we came up with the idea to focus our presentation on addressing major issues through satire. We were given a site to study, and an aspect of that site. For our class, we focused on Fort Huachuca, Arizona. While researching, we started to focus on environmental reports and were horrified by the number of heavy metals and pollution in the area, at which point we started to develop the deadly satire that I ended up carrying through the entire project. It started by creating trading cares of endangered animals and postcards depicting environmental disasters presented as idyllic situations. I was really heavily inspired by the traditional postcards and marketing common to the 1950s/60s in America. Among these postcards are lizards sleeping on radioactive barrels and people relaxing by the pool while getting a tan from the nearby nuclear testing.

In this post, I have included my part of my presentation, which I gave surrounded by the remains of a tourist trap that had been built. With a site model on a stand, with posters stapled to it, popcorn and Coca-Cola being sold next to the postcard rack full of the previously mentioned postcards, and a children’s rocking chair, where the seat was an elevation model covered in pleather, with the furniture nails that held it in place represented coordinates for my actual remediation efforts, and where my plants would be placed on the topography. The finer details of my design, I address in the speech to the right.

Speech begins: “Welcome! Please grab your drink, and sit back, the tour
is about to begin. Welcome to the Sweeping Deserts: A Proposal for Invasive
Phytoremediation. If at any time you get lost on the tour, please look for the
skeleton wand stick.

The Sweeping Deserts Proposal gets its roots from the Sentinel Landscape.

“The primary goal of this landscape is to use collaborative, community-driven strategies to tackle issues such as water conservation, agricultural viability, wildlife habitat restoration, and military mission protection.”

– Sentinel Landscape

Why are those the goals of the project? From studying the Sentinel Landscape in class, and through the studio project, I have realized that these goals need to be adjusted as they fail to consider the full scope of the ecological issues that are currently plaguing the region.  

This project gets its inspiration from Andy Warhol who said it best, when he said,

“Land really is the best art”

-Andy Warhol

So, when I was studying the landscape, I quickly realized that there was one breathtaking piece of art, spaced through the middle of the landscape in this region, The San Pedro River and the San Pedro River Basin and Watershed. And when studying this, I realized that this single River is a clear example of how this public space was able to change character, function, and meaning. However, even the Sentinel Landscape acknowledges that as one of the last free-flowing rivers, it is in critical danger. My proposal is to focus on tackling heavy metals- from sources such as copper mining and trace elements, particularly from the Cananea Sonora Mexico Mine.

The mine has been in operation since 1899 and has been underneath the ownership of Grupo Mexico. The mine has formations that trace back to the Precambrian age. Other companies involved include the TAKRAF, and Tenova. It is also the largest copper mine in Mexico and is open pit. However, it has also had several major issues. While it stopped mining in June 2007, it has been the home of a series of strikes, fights, and major contaminations. Since the material comes from porphyry copper deposits, all of the major spills have contained heavy metals and sulfate contaminants. The two worse spills occurred during December 1977 and April 1985, and when they occurred it killed the majority of aquatic life within a 100 km radius reach to the north. Additionally, before 1971, all waste was being dumped directly into the water, to the point that the local waters ran red. The plant was able to produce 54,750 tons of copper cathodes per year. This made me realize that one of my interventions will have to be here and focus on heavy metals and phytoremediation. This postcard drawing focuses on that concept.

Next, is the water and waste management that I have grouped together for this presentation. The San Pedro is actually one of the very few rivers that flows north. The San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area was created in 1988, and the Bureau of Land Management, the one that is currently fighting with the local government, manages roughly 57,000 acres of public land. I’ll get back to that fight I mentioned, in just a moment. Making this area even more unique, it is one of two riparian areas in the United States, to clarify the other is still in Arizona, not too far away. The latest lawsuit, that fight I mentioned earlier, was filed from the Center for Biological Diversity, in conjunction with the Land Management, and was filed in October 2020. One of a series of them. They are alleging that the government is covering up overdrawing of water, contaminations, harmful misuse. Additionally, they claim that the Fort is failing to act under the Freedom of Information Act and willfully avoiding producing documentation. That being said, the official website offers the services of the fort lists: user test, Communications, electronic proving grounds, Intelligence (C4I) testers. They have Antenna, BEEO, Beacon, Environmental Test, Fabrication, GPS, and more.

One of the major complaints of pollution in the San Pedro is the Fort Huachuca complex. Currently, this is sprawled across roughly 115 sq. miles of terrain. However, the effects of the pollution- if there is any- remains up to debate. The government assures that the base remains in compliance with the codes, however, the Fort was served with a lawsuit, a biological report/reprimand, and several other conflicts over the last few years. As of 2018, The ADEQ and the USACE are in debates still about the acceptable risks, while the corrective action report remains up for grabs and still has not been signed off on.

The list of contaminants that are claimed to be directly from the fort as well as from the testing it undergoes is: metals, including heavy metals, VOCs, Munition’s constituents, petroleum hydrocarbons, MECs, organochlorine pesticides. 

Now looking to the future, I have created a way to combat this, and create a spectacle. I propose using Desert Broom plants, to draw up the heavy metals in the soil, which will then allow us to safely remove the toxins. Desert Brooms have an added bonus of having a rather beautiful plumage of speeds, which like dandelions will be dispersed by the wind. Causing a rather beautiful sight. My designed landscape is the first image below and the design is based on my research.

Thank you for stopping by, on your way out, be sure to check out our gift shop, featuring our environmental issue postcards, and animal trading cards.” End Speech 

Additionally, studying and creating a better water management plan, as well as focusing on the way we address water was a secondary concern for this project. These drawings are a mixture of all of my studies, and several of the additional plants I wanted to include in my landscape. As this studio was more of an exploratory studio, other than the map at the top, the goal was more to develop a topic, research and present that research, and then focus on implementing a design strategy. As such, I never focused on designing or creating a site plant, or some of the more traditional drawings seen and associated within the field.

Above is my postcard regarding water management, which I drew some inspiration from Roswell and UFOs, when designing. Down below is my series of postcards, or at least some of the best of my series, as I made way too many to present on a single post. While they are humorous, each represents and has the research to back it up, about very real struggles that the region is currently facing. When creating these, the goal was to spark enough interest that it would encourage others to get involved and learn more, and hopefully one day, promote change.

During the first half of the project, my partner and I came up with the idea of creating trading cards with facts on the back about each species. The color in the background indicates the conservation status. At one point, I played around with the idea of making them all into photoshop collage, but eventually decided to stay on closer to the aesthetics you can currently find for official National Park Merchandise.