Arizona State University - Sun Devil Spark / Sahuaro Yearbook (Tempe, AZ)

Page 20 text:

Human and most other life on this storied, marbled planet is about to come to an end. 14-Environmental Crises by janet Keating The question of What is the world coming to? can be understood in many different ways. For some it is a joke, just another rhetorical ques- tion. For others it has deeper significance because their answer is very much in doubt. Professor Mark Reader ad- dressed himself to the problem directly in his lecture Life in Death: On Surmounting the Environmental Crisis. He begins with defining that particular aspect of the future he is concerned with. The parameters of our present-day circumstances are fixed by six irreducible facts and their consequences: Firstly, human and most other life on this storied, marbled planet is about to come to an end. Both the pleading of our scientists and the grievings of our senses VICULW RESEARCH QUEEUMEQLEQUMUMQQ

Page 19 text:

fubokn--.. .. Q- Vg l .Q Bruce and I went to the Mesa Grande site with the photographer. My curiousity was piqued by Richard's article, which, I realized, was more poet's observations than journalism. But, once there, l realized how overwhelming the mood of the place is. We wandered around a bit, looking into the holes of chipping, dusty people, and feeling quite amateurish and intruding. Then, our meanderings led us back over the hill and into Sonny Cockrell, who, pre-warned of our visit, preceeded to give us the grand tour. Mesa Grande is really an embryonic site, mostly covered with the packed-dust, yellow topsoil typical in desert climates. Yet, under the tutelage of Sonny, the dusty hills and enigmatic bumps in the earth took on a new meaning. He walked along one buckled ridge of land and called it the wall of a village compound, looked back over the enclosure and described the little cluster of rectangular dwellings that huddled against the protecting wall leaving room for ball courts and meeting areas in the center. Sonny picked up pieces of stone, showed their sharpened edges and called them tools, he chose heavier samples of a porous substance and demonstrated how metates are used to grind corn even now by some Indian tribes. A babbling rivelet of water nearby marked a canal centuries old, now used by the Salt River Project. He was fascinating, and I felt the overwhelming desire to enroll in an Anthropology program and join this amazing group of dedicated, sweating dreamers. We walked back through the site over dust feet and centuries away from an old race of people who played games and cooked food in little fireplaces in the doorways of their homes, who knew magnetism and the true north and invented a calender better than lulian's, who were akin to the Aztecs and who knew how to survive in this frightful dry place. And who were long gone. We went back to the car and the air-conditioning chilled our sweating bodies as we drove away. CSM Mesa Grande Site-13

Page 21 text:

Elllllllwllllllllmllll EEEUSES DOCDXASDAV REPORT tell us this. lf we are not the last generation of living people on this earth, then we are giving birth to the one that is. An unusual situation exists, therefore: simultaneously, we are becoming conscious of the fact that we are witnessing the earth's first remembered sur- vival crisis and that we, our- selves, are awaiting extinction. Secondly, not everyone agrees that our situation is ciritical. Some reject our assessment because they ro- manticize history and human nature, some, because they cannot be sure about the magnitude of our difficulties and over-estimate our abilities to manage them, some, be- cause they are caught in a web of parochial thinking and self- ish interests. Thirdly, it seems likely that we shall suffer an irreversible disaster within the foreseeable, rather than the remote, future. Thus, if we wish to prolong life beyond the present moment the decision-making time in which to do it is short. Fourthly, the crunch of time and the magnitude of our problems dictates that we act before all of the facts are in and without the as- surance that our actions will sustain us. lf we are to have a future, we must be able to rely upon the thoughtful creativ- ity of each other. Fifthly, we have only limited human, natural and techno- logical resources to commit to the struggle for existence. This de facto power shortage implies that we must gear our collective decisions and ac- tions to maximize life's chances and, simultaneously, free as many people as possible to engage in our mutal struggle for existence...Once a vital lf we really wish to live beyond the present, we shall have to take risks in our daily lives. . .