Yesterday I was sad and depressed by a mental image of a desert that I loved ravaged by fire.
Tonight, I viewed Sarah Thomas’s pictures of three tragedies. Sarah is the Land Program Manager for CSU.
One tragedy, the blackened landscape sharply defined by a road that my dog and I have walked on many times. I know that old tire in the foreground. I have walked a ways up those small trails. I recognize the cactus now scorched from heat.
I knew this blackened landscape to one side of the road, seemingly in the shadow of an unscathed desert on the other. The first tragedy.
There are tortoises who live here. When they emerge and look for food, there will be none. The second tragedy.
And then I realized that the land the fire had spared was the land targeted for the ugly scar of the Northern Corridor Highway.
The third tragedy, not yet here but dangerously close.
Tonight, I am saddened about the carelessness with fireworks that has cost us a precious land and tortoise lives. And I am angered about the avarice to take the land, spared by fire, and desecrate it with yet more concrete and steel.
We must take action to restore this scorched earth and to prevent further desecration by construction. And we will.
Art Haines, Vice President
Conserve Southwest Utah
July 16, 2020, 9:00 PM
To view Sarah Thomas’s photos. CLICK HERE