Let's go hiking!
I enjoy the occasional rough and rocky trail. Sometimes I'll ignore the dirt part of a trail and just step from rock to rock as a bit of boulder hopping practice. The picture to the right is of a trail in Arizona, and it looks like it might serve the same purpose. However, instead of avoiding the dirt parts of the trail, I'd avoid this:
Discarded pants and plastic bags are caught in a sotol plant. Hundreds of discarded water jugs are only the beginning of the problem. Jumex drink cans, tuna tins, Coca-Cola containers, pants, shoes, women's underwear and discarded feminine hygiene products, chips and bread bags, emptied canned fruit containers, hats and a tequila bottle blanket the landscape...
To Cottingham and her fellow hikers, the problem seems overwhelming. It's just one example of pristine Sonoran Desert turned into a trash dump. Many southern Arizonans see it every day. About $2 million in newly approved federal funds should help address - though admittedly not solve - the problem in the short term, according to the Arizona congressman who helped secure the money. But some fear it's like trying to dam a river with a wine cork...
An environmental specialist with the tribe, Ken Cronin, says about 1,500 immigrants sneak through the reservation daily. Each leaves an average of eight pounds of trash - totaling six tons - a day, he said.
"It's just blanketed," Cronin says of the tribal land. "It's pretty tremendous; there's a pretty severe visual impact."
Yet another indirect cost that labor-intensive industries are sticking us with so we can enjoy "cheap" lettuce and "cheap" chicken.
Where's the Sierra Club on this? Same place they always are.
Posted to Immigration2003 at July 29, 2003 10:31 AM
