Serraglio

A menace is loose upon the landscape. It is spreading like hives
across the skin of the earth, slowly strangling the saguaros and
choking the chollas that define our Sonoran Desert. To date, it has
proven to be tenaciously resilient, spectacularly successful and
utterly uncontrollable.

It is Pennisetum ciliare, more commonly known by the rather
innocuous name of buffelgrass.

A mature clump of buffelgrass has a strangely eruptive look to it,
as if boxing promoter Don King had dyed his notoriously erect, chaotic
coif a horrific shade of blonde. A survey of the hillsides around
Tucson invites paranoid fantasies that the city is surrounded by an
army of Cousin Itt clones, and that it’s only a matter of time before
squadrons of them swarm over us, leaving a trail of shriveled saguaros
in their wake.

But the true threat of P. ciliare surpasses any such fantasy.
Methodical assassination of native flora is little more than a means of
preparing the terrain for the final solution. As buffelgrass
metastasizes on the landscape, it creates conditions sufficient to
support an apocalyptic conflagration the likes of which the Sonoran
Desert has never seen. Buffelgrass burns at temperatures up to 1,400
degrees Fahrenheit and can raze an area the size of a football field in
a matter of minutes—causing a fire fast and hot enough to turn a
saguaro into a cucumber on the Barbie, and a stucco mini-mansion into a
million-dollar lump of coal. And when the smoke clears, the one thing
guaranteed to rise from the ashes is … buffelgrass.

Metaphorical hyperbole aside, it is no exaggeration when scientists
and land managers throw around terms like “ecosystem transformation,”
which translates roughly, in layman’s terms, to “ruined desert.”
Unfortunately, buffelgrass is not the first agent of ruination visited
upon our besieged desert, nor even the first grass non grata. It
is merely the most destructive of an embarrassing list of exotic
species imported to this continent to facilitate the bovine plague that
has destroyed so much of our native habitat.

The pertinent question, then, is what is to be done? Land managers
have been counterattacking for years with the brute force of manual
labor. Unfortunately, yanking the stuff out of the ground has proven
about as effective as trying to eradicate an ant colony with a pair of
tweezers. Not surprisingly, considering our society’s self-destructive
love affair with nasty chemicals of all stripes, the next step was
poison. But even the magic of herbicide requires arduous application.
And therein lies the basic problem: It has not yet proven possible to
deploy enough humans to do the hard work of hunting down and killing
their latest ecological monster.

Enter the helicopters. (I can hear Mr. Burns now: “Smithers, release
the choppers!”) In the true spirit of technological worship, some
believe that only a combination of toxic chemicals and air supremacy
will win this war. The proposed aerial application of Roundup has
embarrassed county officials, made environmentalists squirm and
inflamed neighborhood activists who correctly sense yet another
emergency situation in which desperation trumps caution, not to mention
common sense.

There has been an awful lot of doubletalk served up with this
proposal. In various fact sheets and public hearings, I have heard
statements such as, “Roundup is a safe, widely available,
over-the-counter herbicide.” As if the fact that it has been approved
for massive commercial distribution by a politically compromised and
conflicted regulatory apparatus—liberally salted with former
lobbyists, executives and employees of Monsanto (the company that
manufactures Roundup)—makes it safe. In fact, it really isn’t
possible to know whether Roundup is safe, because it really isn’t
possible to know what’s in it, since its composition is
patent-protected.

“Animal toxicity is practically unheard of.” Unless you’ve heard of
the studies concluding that Roundup is “extremely lethal” to
amphibians. “Roundup is safe, as we plan to apply it.” Except that the
current debate centers on a test that is supposed to determine whether
this “new technology” is indeed safe. “We need to eradicate
buffelgrass.” Sorry, but buffelgrass will never be
eradicated.

I am not a scientist, merely an observer. But in my few short
decades of observation, I have often seen this sort of, “We gotta do
something!” mentality lead to some very disastrous policies. If
we’re going to have this debate, let’s have it on realistic terms.

The true question is this: Considering the obvious and serious
threat posed by buffelgrass, is it worth the risks—known and
unknown—to spray herbicide aerially over large swaths of desert
in an effort to enhance control? Will we gain anything with such a
strategy? Or will we do more harm than good?

This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2009.