“…Gary is a perfect hire for this type of department. He is a desert rat. He is also someone who is really well-known in certain circles. He has great articulation with the outside community, both in Mexico and here. It will put us at the next level of being a really vital regional center.”
~ Joe Wilder, director of the Southwest Center
Crossing Boundaries:
Gary Nabhan Joins the
Southwest Center
Due to the generosity of Agnese Haury, Gary Nabhan -- world-renowned ethnobiologist, nature writer and “desert rat” -- will join the UA Southwest Center.
When Gary Nabhan was in high school, he wanted to be a painter. Unfortunately, he discovered he was color blind. Nabhan’s teacher encouraged the despondent youth to become a scientific expert on color blindness and to use that knowledge to inform his art. As Nabhan investigated the physics of light and the neurobiology of color perception, he felt a new world open up to him. This was his first foray into discovering how art and science could complement each other in rich and unexpected ways.
Since that time, Nabhan has found a spiritual and ecological home in the Southwest, and his calling in examining the relationship between plants and humans and between science and literature.
This ability to examine a topic from multiple perspectives is what makes Nabhan, who received the MacArthur “genius” award, such a wonderful hire for the Southwest Center.
“When you are hiring for the Southwest Center, you need someone who has a broad feeling and knowledge of the region, someone who is interdisciplinary,” says Joe Wilder, director of the Southwest Center. “Gary is a perfect hire for this type of department. He is a desert rat. He is also someone who is really well-known in certain circles. He has great articulation with the outside community, both in Mexico and here. It will put us at the next level of being a really vital regional center.”
The Southwest Center is a research unit in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences that explores the varied cultures, languages, customs, architecture and geography of the Southwest. Faculty include Wilder, folklorist Maribel Alvarez, research architect John Messina, anthropologist Tom Sheridan, and research social scientist David Yetman, host of “The Desert Speaks” on PBS. Affiliated faculty include such local icons as “Big Jim” Griffith.
A Model of Interdisciplinary Thinking
Nabhan, who is currently on sabatical and the director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University (NAU), will begin his position at The University of Arizona in the fall of 2008.
He received his B.A. in environmental biology from Prescott College, his M.A. in plant sciences and his Ph.D. in arid lands resource sciences from the UA.
Nabhan’s connection to Tucson goes beyond obtaining his graduate degrees at the UA. He was previously the director of conservation science at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. He co-founded the Tucson-based, nonprofit conservation group Native Seeds/SEARCH, which runs a seed bank containing over 2,000 seeds. His wife and children are also UA alumni.
Above: Chia seeds, hot chile peppers, ripe mesquite beans and desert cholla cactus.
Nabhan is dedicated to collaborative conservation efforts among diverse constituencies, including ranchers, tribes, fishermen and farmers. He spearheaded the Ironwood Alliance, which was responsible for research and public support that led to the 120,000 acre Ironwoods Forest National Monument. He’s also been a member of the Congressionally-appointed National Parks System Advisory Board.
Nabhan is regarded as such an expert on the Southwest that it is a bit surprising to learn that he is of Lebanese descent and grew up in the Indiana Dunes.
“I quit high school and within a year’s time made my first trip to the Southwest. I fell in love with the region immediately,” says Nabhan. “But it took another 10 years or so before I felt that I was no longer just an outside observer — that I was a participant in the landscape with something to offer local communities. I’ve been invited by tribes to assist in helping Native American groups advance their land claims cases in protecting sacred sites, and once you become a participant in those kinds of things, well, it doesn’t make you a native, but it makes you a partnering citizen with those cultural communities.”
Nabhan, who counts Thoreau among his earliest influences, is equally esteemed in both the scientific and literary communities. He has received a Pew Scholarship on Conservation and Environment, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Conservation Biology. Likewise, his writing is widely anthologized and translated, and he won the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, a Western States Book Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
Nabhan has never felt compelled to divide the world into the sciences and humanities. Early on, he was inspired by an anthropologist who came to his college literature class to implore the students to write even scientific material with “grandeur and richness.” It is a mandate that Nabhan has taken to heart, and it differentiates him from many others in his field.
“He is a great storyteller,” says UA Professor Tom Sheridan, who has collaborated with Nabhan in the past and is a close friend. “He is able to weave all sorts of anthropological and biological information into stories that captivate nonscientists as well as scientists.
Nabhan has written more than 20 books, including “Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes and Cultural Diversity” (2004), “Renewing America’s Food Traditions” (with Ashley Rood) (2004), “Cross-Pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry” (2004), “Singing the Turtles to Sea” (2003), “Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods” (2001), “People, Plants and Protected Areas” (with John Tuxill) (1998), “Forgotten Pollinators” (with Stephen Buchmann) (1996), “The Geography of Childhood” (with Stephen Trimble) (1994), “Gathering the Desert” (1985), and “The Desert Smells Like Rain” (1982).
The topics Nabhan researches center on the relationship between people and plants, and cultural connections to place. Nabhan founded the million-dollar Renewing America’s Food Traditions consortium that works with ethnic communities across the continent to conserve their local plant and animal foods that provide them with new sources of income so that they can stay on the land. In addition, some of these plants, from prickly pear to chia seeds, can help prevent diabetes and other nutritional diseases.
Nabhan is a proponent of eating locally, and when he lived in Tucson, Nabhan tried to live for a year on only those natural foods he could hunt, gather or grow within a 250-mile-radius of his home. He continues to try and gain more than half of all his food from local sources.
Nabhan has also examined the potential risks of bioengineered crops to pollinators, and pioneered inquiries into the societal risk of what is now called the “nature deficit disorder” among urban children deprived of contact with wild places and creatures.
Much of Nabhan’s recent work draws upon his Lebanese heritage. In September 2004, he traveled to the Middle East to participate in the first formal seed exchange between Jewish and Palestinian farmers. In a new book he has recently completed for the University of Arizona Press, he looks at the cultural, agricultural and culinary heritage shared by residents of American and Arabian deserts.
Nabhan is also currently working on projects with the Seri Indians of Mexico, promoting their wild-harvested oregano and mesquite products and restoring their shellfish habitats through sustainable harvest and reseeding techniques. He is hoping to spearhead a work group at the UA that studies and celebrates traditional foodways of ethnic communities in the U.S./Mexico borderlands, what he calls the “Chile Pepper Nation.”
A Model of Private-Public Partnership
Wilder has been trying for a few years to get Nabhan back to Tucson and to the UA, where he firmly believes Nabhan belongs. But with state monies cut in recent years, Wilder could not get the hire fully funded. So he approached Agnese Haury, who is not only a longtime supporter of the Southwest Center, but a person who appreciates Nabhan’s work.
Haury becomes animated when she speaks of Nabhan. She says she has known him and supported his work for decades, originally seeing him on television spreading seeds of traditional indigenous crops. She is greatly impressed by his vision and innovation: “He is a forward thinker and a natural researcher.”
Haury has committed $500,000 for the hire. This gift is a reflection of the new ways that universities are doing business — not only raising money for scholarships and buildings, but for hiring faculty.
Wilder is aware that such partnerships are increasingly necessary, especially in small research departments such as his. “This is the new way of doing things. The way we are able to add faculty hires is to bring something to the table.”
Haury is the widow of noted UA archaeologist Emil Haury. She has supported the UA generously throughout the years, including helping finance the Tree-Ring Lab Building, and funding the Emil Haury Graduate Fellowship in anthropology, the Emil and Agnese Haury Curatorial Fellowship Fund in the Arizona State Museum, the Agnese Haury Institute for Court Interpretations at the James E. Rogers College of Law, and, recently, the Agnese and Emil W. Haury Endowed Chair in Archaeological Dendrochronology. In total, she has donated more than $5 million to the UA.
Haury’s support of the Southwest Center over the years includes donating $200,000 to help hire a research architect, buying the unit a car to use for field work in Mexico, and funding various research projects.
It is clear that Wilder and Nabhan are not only very grateful to Haury, but are very impressed by her.
“Agnese Haury is a remarkably literate and learned person who has done incredible things in terms of pioneering and supporting human rights issues, conservation and archaeological preservation,” says Nabhan. “She’s a woman with great wisdom and a great sense of how some of these issues are interrelated.”
“Agnese is very self-effacing,” says Wilder. “She sees herself as a vehicle to effect good things in the world. She believes the good things in the world are what are deserving of praise and publicity, not her."
Wilder adds, “She is very special. We all love her. She’s like family.”
Coming Home
Prior to his start date in 2008, Nabhan will begin collaborating with researchers at the UA to ensure a smooth transition. He is excited to return to his old stomping grounds. “To me, the UA is a world leader in both the natural and social sciences in terms of desert research.”
Wilder, for one, is thrilled with the opportunities that hiring someone of Nabhan’s caliber will bring to the Southwest Center. “Gary is a major figure in what we take to be Southwest regional studies. And he has been for decades.
“In our world, he’s a superstar,” Wilder says.
For more information, contact Lori Harwood at 520-626-3846 • Editor