Score One for the Desert

Article Date: 2005-04-18   Source: http://magazine.audubon.org   Comments: 1

By Keith Kloor

Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A. - For decades Tucson's urban sprawl swallowed up the magnicent desert and wildlife that drew people to the area from far and wide. Then, in the heat of a recent battle, opposing sides banded together to adopt a pioneering plan that balances biodiversity with development.

In 1997 passions over a reddish, muffin-size bird were beginning to boil over in the Arizona desert. The cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, its population in the state down to a dozen and clinging to the last patches of saguaro cactus not yet swallowed up by Tucson's booming suburbs, had just received federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Environmentalists and developers were already embroiled in a legal battle over the site of a high school to be built on one of the bird's few remaining nesting grounds. Construction was temporarily halted after a pygmy owl was spotted in the vicinity. Leslie Dierauf, then a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist based at the agency's regional headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, could see trouble brewing. The pygmy owl was on the verge of becoming the Southwest's version of the northern spotted owl - whose status as an endangered species briefly brought the Northwest's logging industry to a halt in the early 1990s. She turned to a colleague one day and said, "They [county officials] don't know how difficult this listing is going to be."

So Dierauf hopped on a plane to Tucson, in search of Pima County administrator Chuck Huckelberry, whose jurisdiction included the site of the pygmy owl battle. When Dierauf showed up unannounced, she was told Huckelberry was too busy to see anyone that day. So she waited in the lobby outside his 10th-floor office. She had heard Huckelberry "looked like a big overgrown kid who whistles and laughs while he walks," and when a man fitting that description appeared, Dierauf introduced herself and asked if she could ride down in the elevator with him to discuss the pygmy owl issue. "I had 10 floors to sell my story," she recalls, chuckling. Dierauf explained to Huckelberry the implications of the pygmy owl's listing - the impending train wreck between business and environmental interests - and advised him to initiate a Habitat Conservation Plan, a provision in the Endangered Species Act that allows future development to take place in accordance with a federally approved plan that minimizes harm to the designated species. She also told him the plan could be structured to cover a host of similarly vulnerable species in need of protection. Huckelberry listened politely. When the elevator reached the ground floor, Dierauf thanked him and returned to Albuquerque.

Later that day Huckelberry bumped into Maeveen Behan, a lawyer in his office. At the time neither of them knew much about the pygmy owl or about the dozens of species that depend on the biologically rich Sonoran Desert ecosystem framing Tucson. Behan, lanky with shoulder-length blond hair, laughs at the memory. "Chuck told me to ‘talk to this person [Dierauf] who would talk to me about the pygmy owl and everything else that's in trouble,' " she says. "He assigned it to me in passing."

Today, seven years, 250-plus technical reports, 600 public meetings, several near-death experiences, and one successful $174 million open-space bond measure later, the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan is a done deal. Since voters in Pima County overwhelmingly approved the bond measure by 66 percent to 34 percent last May, $45 million has been spent to execute the plan. It sets out a course of management, monitoring, and vital habitat acquisition for 54 native plant and animal species, including the lowland leopard frog, the Gila chub, and the federally endangered pygmy owl.

But that's only one cornerstone of something much grander in design. The plan also recognizes that ecosystem repair, via the creation of linked biological corridors, is essential to the recovery of those 54 species, and that creating those corridors, in turn, requires measures to manage Tucson's sprawling growth. To this end the plan steers future development away from ecologically important areas - perennial streams, for instance, and groves of paloverde, saguaro, and ironwood - and toward existing urban cores. The species targeted for protection were expressly chosen to represent the Sonoran Desert's diverse web of life.

It is an audacious and novel undertaking, covering about 2 million of Pima County's 5.9 million acres - a landscape larger than the state of Connecticut that ranges from scrub desert and grasslands to limestone caves and 10,000-foot mountains. "There is no other plan in the country that has done anything on this scale or with such integration," crows Behan, who became a pivotal behind-the-scenes player. Environmentalists and planners agree, and are already touting the plan as an ideal model for other communities seeking to balance growth and conservation in one fell swoop. "The unique thing is that it sees the preservation of the natural environment as something that can be accomplished along with development," says Bruce Knight, planning director for the city of Champagne, Illinois, and a board member of the American Planning Association. "Sustainability is a nice concept that people have been talking about for years," he adds. "This plan is really implementing sustainable concepts."

While national environmental issues received scant attention in last November's presidential election, on the local level the subject of sustainable growth weighed heavily on the minds of voters across the country. Fed up with traffic congestion and with cookie-cutter suburbs that lack town centers or greenways, they are increasingly turning to bond measures to buy forests, wetlands, farms, and ranch lands and protect them from development. In 2004 voters supported 120 of 161 conservation measures on ballots across the United States, at a total cost of $3.25 billion.

What's notable about Tucson, though, is that the vote for open space last May was a loud retort to unchecked sprawl and a ringing endorsement of a far-ranging conservation plan. In a larger sense it also symbolized the last leg of a torturous journey that the community has been on for some time.

Comments

On 2007-12-12, from Henderson Nevada wrote: "I live in Henderson Nevada and last year in November an owl appeared in my tree and lived there for the winter including some of the spring months. It resembles a pygmy owl from pictures that I have seen. My husband and I took care of it during the cold months of winter due to the owl almost dying and it actually let us pick it up and kept in our garage for 3 days until it was well enough to leave. I had fed it mice while it was in the garage,in a box with no human contact, as I wanted to be as natural as could be. Once well, the owl left the garage on its own. Now this year, winter has come again and we have found that he/she has returned for these harsh winter months. We are keeping mice on hand for the owl again, and will continue to care for it as long as he/she needs help."

Comment on the above News article.