I love walking, whether it’s on a well-traveled trail or finding my own path in nature, if I can, wondering what things might have looked like 50 or 500 years ago. The Catalina Mountains in Coronado National Forest are only a 10-minute drive from my home but a world away. Whenever I set out, determined to finish the 8.2 mile there-and-back-again trail — I never do — my mind starts speculating. I wonder: What would the vegetation have looked like in the past? Would there have been any roads nearby, or traffic, or as many people passing through?
I never do find solid answers, even if I remember to search for my exact location on Google Maps afterward. Most satellite images go back only about 40 years and aren’t high-definition enough to reveal every corner of the West. I’m thankful for that; I would hate for every patch of nature to be that well-documented, for all our secret, solitary refuges to be so easily discoverable.
Recently, I learned about Landscape Explorer, an online tool developed by Scott Morford, an applied spatial ecologist at the University of Montana in Missoula, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After digitizing 170,000 aerial images taken by U.S. Army pilots during the Cold War, his team of researchers stitched them side-by-side with modern satellite images from Google Earth Engine. The resulting aerial views give clear evidence of how human development has affected open space, floodplains, forests, coastal areas and more over the past five decades. “We don’t always notice what’s unfolding on the land over longer timespans, especially when environmental changes are slow-moving,” Morford said when his tool became available.
Southeast of my home, in Tucson, Arizona, Landscape Explorer shows how Davis-Monthan Air Force Base once sat in the middle of an open landscape of desert grasslands and saguaros. Now the base is surrounded by suburban housing developments and parking lots, equipment graveyards, solar panel installations and a growing network of roads. Due to its longtime use by the U.S. military, the public water systems in this corner of southern Arizona are now contaminated with toxic PFAS, also known as forever chemicals. The nearby neighborhoods are home to many working-class Latinos who have been asking for remediation for years.
In 2017, the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Clockshop asked my husband (HCN Visuals Editor Bear Guerra) and me to research the Bowtie parcel, an 18-acre strip of land along the concrete banks of the LA River. The site was once the headquarters of Southern Pacific Railroad, which, like Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, dumped toxic chemicals into the water and the soil for years. Today, the Bowtie parcel is one of a number of plots purchased by California State Parks, which plans to remediate them before turning them into green areas once again.
“We don’t always notice what’s unfolding on the land over longer timespans, especially when environmental changes are slow-moving.”
Los Angeles is no stranger to such conversions. In 2022, LA County officials announced that a new 142-acre regional park would rise from the former Puente Hills Landfill, previously known as the nation’s largest dump. The land has sat fallow for almost a decade, and wildlife and hikers have already returned. The park is set to break ground in 2025.
As we interviewed people for our project about the Bowtie parcel, Bear and I kept hearing the same things over and over again: that open land had an intangible worth to locals, that people wanted to learn more about the land’s history, and they wanted to be part of the process of keeping it in public hands. This was an obvious realization: The best future could be a throwback to the past.
Land development may appear to be an inevitable part of modern life. Infrastructure and buildings, after all, have become synonymous with jobs and commerce, a self-propelling engine of never-ending growth. But such growth comes at a cost. Suburban sprawl in Phoenix has exploded exponentially over the last decade — this, in a region with precarious water sources. During that time, Arizona has also witnessed the rapid disappearance of local species, such as the pygmy owl, due to habitat loss.
None of this is inevitable. Not today, when we have the data and images to show just how land use has changed and what we may have lost in the process. The answer may lie on the other side of the coin: degrowth. The term first emerged as an economic theory in the hallways of 1970s academia, but now it represents one of the most viable options for our future. Its thesis is simple: Endless economic development is incompatible with the limited material resources available on our planet. Degrowth does not necessarily reject capitalism; rather, it brings an awareness that rampant economic expansion without proper planning has serious human and environmental consequences. Degrowth advocates for policies that focus on economic and social metrics that can benefit both ecosystems and human well-being — infrastructure projects that have a smaller carbon footprint or use only native vegetation and stay open to the public — in other words, projects that serve both humans and nature, not just the market. Even as we continue to build and settle new places, degrowth makes the case for simultaneously, actively restoring other landscapes.
Degrowth advocates for policies that focus on economic and social metrics that can benefit ecosystems and human well-being — not just the market.
At the edge of my city is a gated community that abuts the Coronado National Forest. It used to bother me to pass it and walk alongside some of the homes every time I set out to hike the 8.2 miles to the top. But now I think it must be just as frustrating for the homeowners to live this close to such beautiful mountains and to have to see strangers marching past their houses all day, every day. Fortunately, the Catalinas belong to all of us — and they’re protected from future development, because they’re located within a national forest. May they stay just as they are — or as they were — for another few centuries and beyond, and may we, the people who live near them and use them, keep seeking that delicate balance between growth and preservation.
“Encounters” is a serial column exploring life and landscape during the climate crisis.We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the June 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Can the future be the past?”
