Sonora Desert | Tracy Perkins

Hello from sunny Tucson, Arizona! I’m spending the spring semester here as a Visiting Associate at the University of Arizona through the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice. Here’s a description of the project I’m working on pulled from the press release:

I’ll be using my time in Arizona to create a digital archive of a 1990s era campaign against a nuclear waste landfill. In particular, the project will highlight the role of five tribes along the lower Colorado River in the landfill’s eventual defeat. The visiting associateship at the Haury Program is enabling me to do the kind of scholarship that isn’t always well supported – projects developed with off-campus partners that create digital products designed to be available to a broad audience. I hope the rich stories that emerge will also inspire university libraries to create environmental justice archives out of the many personal collections currently being held in closets, garages and storage units. If these archives are lost over time, many of the experiences of environmentalists of color, in particular, will continue to be left out of the narrative of US environmental history.

Specifically, I’ll be working on the successful anti-nuclear waste landfill campaign in the Mojave Desert’s Ward Valley, with support from Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, and the AhaMakav Cultural Society, a Department of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe. Campaign participants gather every year to celebrate their victory at the site where the landfill would have been built, but for their actions. I’ve been to this event twice before, and look forward to continued interviewing at this year’s 20th anniversary ceremonies.

In the lead up to that event, I’m enjoying meeting new people, exploring the desert landscape on the weekends, and having focused time to work on my research. See below for a few snapshots of what I’m seeing at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the surrounding Sonora Desert.