The Killing Fields of the American Southwest: Notes from the Arizona Borderlands, Part 3

The arid border region that encompasses the American Southwest and the Mexican northwest is an area where the nexus of water scarcity and climate change in the face of growing human demands for water, emerging energy scarcity, and economic change comes into sharp focus.

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Vertebrate paleontology, stratigraphy, and paleohydrology of Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, Nevada (USA)

Geology of the Intermountain West ◽

10.31711/giw.v4.pp55-98 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

pp. 55-98

Author(s):

Kathleen Springer ◽

Jeffrey Pigati ◽

Eric Scott

Keyword(s):

Las Vegas ◽

Late Quaternary ◽

Plant Macrofossils ◽

Distinct Species ◽

American Southwest ◽

Local Fauna ◽

Climatic Oscillations ◽

Las Vegas Valley ◽

National Monument ◽

Desert Wetlands

Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument (TUSK) preserves 22,650 acres of the upper Las Vegas Wash in the northern Las Vegas Valley (Nevada, USA). TUSK is home to extensive and stratigraphically complex groundwater discharge (GWD) deposits, called the Las Vegas Formation, which represent springs and desert wetlands that covered much of the valley during the late Quaternary. The GWD deposits record hydrologic changes that occurred here in a dynamic and temporally congruent response to abrupt climatic oscillations over the last ~300 ka (thousands of years). The deposits also entomb the Tule Springs Local Fauna (TSLF), one of the most significant late Pleistocene (Rancholabrean) vertebrate assemblages in the American Southwest. The TSLF is both prolific and diverse, and includes a large mammal assemblage dominated by Mammuthus columbi and Camelops hesternus. Two (and possibly three) distinct species of Equus, two species of Bison, Panthera atrox, Smilodon fatalis, Canis dirus, Megalonyx jeffersonii, and Nothrotheriops shastensis are also present, and newly recognized faunal components include micromammals, amphibians, snakes, and birds. Invertebrates, plant macrofossils, and pollen also occur in the deposits and provide important and complementary paleoenvironmental information. This field compendium highlights the faunal assemblage in the classic stratigraphic sequences of the Las Vegas Formation within TUSK, emphasizes the significant hydrologic changes that occurred in the area during the recent geologic past, and examines the subsequent and repeated effect of rapid climate change on the local desert wetland ecosystem.

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Faculty Opinions recommendation of Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains.

Faculty Opinions – Post-Publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature ◽

10.3410/f.725557316.793507330 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Scott Collins

Keyword(s):

21St Century ◽

American Southwest ◽

Drought Risk ◽

Central Plains

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THE FUTURE ‘WARM LIA’ SCENARIO ACROSS THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST

10.1130/abs/2017am-298087 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Julie Loisel ◽

◽

Glen M. MacDonald ◽

Marcus Thomson

Keyword(s):

American Southwest ◽

The Future

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The Only Wonderful Things

10.1093/oso/9780190652876.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Melissa J. Homestead

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

American Southwest ◽

Advertising Agency ◽

Greenwich Village ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Park Avenue ◽

Fresh Perspective ◽

The Cold War ◽

Relationship Of ◽

First Time

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.

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Backpacking with the Saints

10.1093/oso/9780199927814.001.0001 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Belden C. Lane

Keyword(s):

American Southwest ◽

Spiritual Practice ◽

Spiritual Journey ◽

Human Response ◽

John Muir ◽

Hildegard Of Bingen ◽

Wide Range ◽

Thich Nhat Hanh ◽

In The Wild ◽

John Of The Cross

Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters--Bell Mountain Wilderness with Søren Kierkegaard, Moonshine Hollow with Thich Nhat Hanh--demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature. The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Just as the wilderness offered revelations to the early Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder. Lane engages the practice not only with a wide range of spiritual writings--Celtic, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi Muslim--but with the fascination of other lovers of the backcountry, from John Muir and Ed Abbey to Bill Plotkin and Cheryl Strayed. In this intimate and down-to-earth narrative, backpacking is shown to be a spiritual practice that allows the discovery of God amidst the beauty and unexpected terrors of nature. Adoration, Lane suggests, is the most appropriate human response to what we cannot explain, but have nonetheless learned to love. An enchanting narrative for Christians of all denominations, Backpacking with the Saints is an inspiring exploration of how solitude, simplicity, and mindfulness are illuminated and encouraged by the discipline of backcountry wandering, and of how the wilderness itself becomes a way of knowing-an ecology of the soul.

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