In the first of a three-part series, KJZZ explores the Navajo Nation’s complicated history with the coal industry. Plus, a non-profit in Surprise is bringing military veterans together through the art of theater, Arizona researchers are looking into ways to keep desert dust on the ground, and leaders of the Colorado River Indian Tribes say the federal government didn’t consult them enough while drawing up new plans for sharing Colorado River water.
Transcript
BRIDGET DOWD: This is KJZZ, your news and information station in Phoenix and across Arizona. I’m Bridget Dowd. Here are this week’s Stories You Don’t Want to Miss.
It’s the podcast designed to catch you up on some highlights from around the region. Thanks for listening. Here are a few of the stories for the week of August 3, 2026.
After powering the US through the Industrial Revolution, coal has long since given way to cleaner and cheaper energy sources. But President Trump is pushing for a coal comeback, which could have huge implications for the Navajo Nation. In the first of a three-part series, KJZZ’s Gabriel Pietrorazio explores the tribe’s complicated history with the controversial fossil fuel.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: For decades, deafening noise enveloped the Navajo community of Black Mesa. Those thunderous sounds from excavator cranes scraping topsoil to reach dark-band seams of coal have since been silenced.
LILY JOHNSON: Ever since I was a child, it was like that. We were so happy when the Peabody left, and I realized that one day I got up with no noise. The beltlines aren’t there no more, and it was so peaceful.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: Fewer than 500 Navajos call Black Mesa home today, including lifelong resident Lily Johnson. This snowy swath of rolling hill country also became home to a pair of once booming coal strip mines. Local Navajo leaders in nearby Kayenta agreed to lease tens of thousands of acres to the Peabody Western Coal Company back in the ’60s. So did the neighboring Hopis.
LILY JOHNSON: They had no idea of what they were getting themselves into. When these big draglines appeared, by that time it was too late, and the dozers were just knocking down trees.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: As Peabody pursued coal at Black Mesa, a longstanding territorial dispute between Navajos and Hopis boiled over. To determine who was entitled to royalties and how much, the federal government redrew the boundary between the two tribes. This all led to a congressional settlement in the ’70s. Thousands of families were displaced in part by the Kayenta Mine complex, which for generations helped power some of the West’s most populous cities — from Phoenix and Tucson to Las Vegas and LA.
Today, Black Mesa is basically barren. Sam Yazzie thinks Peabody hasn’t done enough to restore the environment since the Black Mesa Mine shuttered in 2005, followed by the Kayenta Mine closure in 2019.
SAM YAZZIE: They’re just fulfilling the contract, nothing more.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: Born and raised in Black Mesa, Yazzie actually worked for Peabody. So too did his dad.
SAM YAZZIE: They hired him on since he had a couple of mules and a wagon. He loaded up water and took it to these exploratory drill areas. Here, we grew up around blasting and herding sheep and taking care of livestock.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: But that tradition of raising animals is slowly dying off. Johnson owns a couple dozen Navajo Churro sheep and must adhere to Peabody’s strict grazing rules.
LILY JOHNSON: If they see livestock, they said they can haul it away. Feels like they had all the rights, even over the Navajo Nation.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: Yazzie accuses Peabody of reseeding reclaimed mine areas with the wrong type of vegetation.
SAM YAZZIE: And you can just see where there was no mining, it’d be green in the summer. And then you look at the pastures and it’s just brown, barren. The runoff, the water, whenever it rains and whenever there’s snow, it just makes ditches and, you know, and they’re not actively going back to fixing all of them. So it’s just a shoddy job.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: Peabody stands by its work, pointing KJZZ to an award from the Interior Department’s very office overseeing the company’s progress, but would not address the allegations raised by Black Mesa residents.
ALEX OSIF: Probably did one of the most scaring-type jobs. I was a core driller.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: Alex Osif, who is Diné and president of his local miners union, was a Peabody employee for nearly four decades. Now, he’s the benefits counselor for Arizona’s sole black lung clinic, which is helping more than 300 coal miners in the Four Corners.
ALEX OSIF: We’re starting to show cases in New Mexico, again.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: He blames a mine now owned by the Navajo Transitional Energy Company.
ALEX OSIF: I’m starting to see miners show up on our doorstep.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: As for Kayenta Town Manager Jarvis Williams, he’s proud of what Peabody did.
JARVIS WILLIAMS: I’m a coal miner’s kid. My kids are coal miners’ kids. It’ll be felt for at least a couple more generations, and really up to us to not allow that pride to fall to the wayside.
GABRIEL PIETRORAZIO: For KJZZ News, I’m Gabriel Pietrorazio reporting from Black Mesa.
BRIDGET DOWD: A nonprofit in Surprise, Arizona, is bringing military veterans together through the art of theater. KJZZ’s Jill Ryan has the details.
KURT SCHULTZ: Pasta, pasta would be easy. Yes, yes, of course, pasta. It’s not even a word. It’s a euphemism the people made up because they got sick of eating spaghetti.
IA FERARIN: What do you want to eat?
KURT SCHULTZ: I don’t know.
JILL RYAN: That’s Army veteran Kurt Schultz with his scene partner and Marine Corps veteran Ia Ferarin. These two are performing selections from the play “Proof” for the Arizona Frontline Theatre. They face each other in a small gallery surrounded by artwork on the walls.
IA FERARIN: Don’t hate me! I was living with you! I had to ...
KURT SCHULTZ: That’s, that’s enough, Catherine, stay on subject!
IA FERARIN: This is the subject! There were libraries ...
JILL RYAN: Ferarin, who only started acting in 2023, says it helps her process her anger. And when she found this theater group that connects her with fellow vets and military culture ...
IA FERARIN: It’s like, wow, I can actually let out everything, and I can actually talk about my feelings, and I’m around these like really manly men, and they’re also like letting out all their feelings. It’s like, I somehow feel so free.
JILL RYAN: That’s exactly what Arizona Frontline Theatre’s founder, Michael Maisano, says he wants to help with. He served in the Marine Corps and the Arizona Army National Guard, and he has a doctorate in clinical psychology.
MICHAEL MAISANO: One thing I keep hearing over and over again anytime I talk to a veteran of any age is the transition. You know, they’re really good about bringing in, creating who you are in your identity in the military. But after you get out, that transition back to civilian life, I guess you call it, was really lost.
JILL RYAN: So he created the Silent Survivors Project nonprofit, which houses the theater group, to support local veterans and serve as a medium to tell their stories and bring awareness to veteran mental health.
MICHAEL MAISANO: It’s the Charles Dickens model of you could preach all day long, but until you show them or entertain them, just like he did with “Oliver Twist” talking about the plight of child labor and, you know, children in London, that’s what we’re doing here.
JILL RYAN: Maisano’s’ goal is to have an entirely veteran-led company in the next five years. He says the group mostly performs plays about or written by veterans, including their showcase class, which opens this month. Greg Lutz served in the Navy and has a leading part in the play. He says performing veteran stories helps him as an actor relax into the role.
GREG LUTZ: Art, especially acting, which has always spoken to me, allows both an escape. It kind of allows you to reboot your brain, in a way.
JILL RYAN: Another Navy veteran, Michael Rogers, says he’s drawn to the excitement theater provides, whether he’s on stage in front of an audience or feeling the pressure of behind-the-scenes work.
MICHAEL ROGERS: I used to hang out of an H-60, you know, hanging on a crewman safety belt going, you know, 100 knots, 70 feet above the deck. So the rush of kind of acting and doing a scene or or making something and producing something, whether it be a costume or doing an acting scene, doing a move, doing a film or doing a play, is kind of the rush I get now. So a little safer.
JILL RYAN: In addition to the play class, Arizona Frontline Theatre will also put on “Adopt-a-Sailor” this fall, both written by veteran Charles Evered. The group is also planning a production for the Christmas season. Jill Ryan, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
BRIDGET DOWD: This is the Stories You Don’t Want to Miss podcast.
And now, here’s a segment from KJZZ’s original production, The Show.
MARK BRODIE: Arizona’s paid parent caregiver program was created to provide relief to families of children with developmental disabilities who couldn’t bring paid caregivers into their homes during the pandemic. The program continued after the world reopened, but federal funding was dramatically reduced. Now, the state is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to parent caregivers. As KJZZ’s Athena Ankrah and Amy Silverman report, a new audit concluded the agencies responsible failed to implement cost control measures required by state law. The agencies say there’s more to the story. Athena Ankrah starts this report.
ATHENA ANKRAH: According to the audit, Arizona’s Medicaid agency, AHCCCS, and the Division of Developmental Disabilities, or DDD, could have saved the state between $133 and $493 million in the most recent fiscal year if they had employed the cost-saving methods cemented in state law last summer.
AMY SILVERMAN: Some families call the program a lifesaver. Shawn Cutting’s son Dominic, who has autism, was approved for DDD services when he was three. Finding caregivers was a challenge.
SHAWN CUTTING: And I started finding different support groups, and that is really how, word of mouth. And then I was working at a gas station, and a customer told me about where her daughter worked.
ATHENA ANKRAH: Cutting told KJZZ in January that she was able to quit her job at the gas station and provide care for her 7-year-old son full time.
SHAWN CUTTING: That’s how I started my journey as a paid caregiver, is finding that company through her, because I was overwhelmed. No, there was no help.
AMY SILVERMAN: Like many other states, Arizona has long had a shortage of paid care providers. The demand became clear after the state extended pandemic-era approval to allow family members like Cutting to be paid to provide that care themselves. By 2025, spending had more than doubled in the prior fiscal year alone. Gov. Katie Hobbs signed legislation to address that.
AMY SILVERMAN: Guardrails include a new assessment tool to determine how many paid service hours a child qualifies for. According to the state’s audit released July 30, many of those requirements still haven’t been fulfilled. A 40-hour cap was set in 2024. In one week alone, auditors found 257 parents were paid for more than 40 hours of care.
ATHENA ANKRAH: The new assessment tool has still not been put into effect. Gov. Hobbs paused that after outcry from parents who felt the new guidelines were unreasonable. That tool is being tweaked and is set to take effect on Dec. 1.
AMY SILVERMAN: Cynthia Macluskie isn’t surprised by the audit’s findings.
CYNTHIA MACLUSKIE: Well, first of all, it’s nice to be vindicated, because for months and months now, we have been asking DDD about what exactly was happening and were they meeting those metrics that they were supposed to be meeting, and we were constantly being told it was going great. But it didn’t seem like it was going great when I was talking to families and providers.
AMY SILVERMAN: Macluskie is the advocacy director for the Autism Society of Greater Phoenix. She says that from the outset, many in the community raised questions about the program’s sustainability.
CYNTHIA MACLUSKIE: Before this was rolled out, we had meetings, and there was many of us that said, “What are the guardrails? What is the plan? Does anybody not see that this is going to be a problem?” And the answer back from AHCCCS and DDD is, it’s going to be just fine, thank you. There were many of us that were like, “Oh my god, this is going to be a train wreck.”
ATHENA ANKRAH: John Meyers, executive director of the Arizona Developmental Disabilities Planning Council, has reservations about the audit’s findings.
JOHN MEYERS: They should have at least asked more questions before they made sort of overarching statements about how Arizona’s program could be improved.
ATHENA ANKRAH: But the audit wasn’t wrong about everything, Meyers adds.
JOHN MEYERS: I think what happened with Arizona’s system was largely, if not entirely, a result of implementing the Parents as Paid Caregivers program incorrectly, not having good controls over it, not enforcing the rules that were spelled out.
AMY SILVERMAN: Gov. Hobbs declined comment for this story. State Legislator Matt Gress, a Scottsdale Republican who has been involved in discussions regarding the paid parent caregiver program, did not respond to a request for comment.
Both AHCCCS and the Department of Economic Security, which oversees DDD, provided responses to auditors. Both say they can’t comply with the assessment tool yet, since the governor imposed delays.
ATHENA ANKRAH: AHCCCS argued the increased spending cited in the audit isn’t only attributable to this program, but to other costly, widely used services like ABA therapy. The agency also said it has been moving toward a 40-hour cap and has valid reasons for continuing to pay some families more. DES says it’s been compliant with the law and is requiring parent caregivers to sign forms acknowledging the 40-hour limit.
For KJZZ News in Phoenix, I’m Athena Ankrah.
AMY SILVERMAN: And I’m Amy Silverman.
BRIDGET DOWD: Arizona has recognized adult adoptions for more than a century, and Maricopa County saw a slight increase in them during the fiscal year that just ended. KJZZ’s Matthew Casey recently visited Probate Court to meet people hoping to become an official family.
MATTHEW CASEY: Adult adoptions happen in the old courthouse, where there are high ceilings, judges sit on raised benches, and witnesses still take an oath.
LINDSAY KUNASCH: Do you, each of you, solemnly swear the testimony you’re about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
GOODMAN FAMILY: Yes.
PROBATE COURT OFFICIAL: All right. Thank you all very much. Have a seat, make yourselves comfortable.
MATTHEW CASEY: The people who just said yes are a mother, her adult daughter, and a man wearing a shirt and necktie in the summer heat. Shaina, the mom, explains why they’re here.
SHAINA GOODMAN: I feel like we’re getting complete, and it would just mean the world to me.
LINDSAY KUNASCH: That the state recognize you as an official family?
SHAINA GOODMAN: The Goodmans, yes, beccause right now it’s like —
LINDSAY KUNASCH: Piecemeal?
SHAINA GOODMAN: Mm-hmm.
MATTHEW CASEY: Shaina is a Midwest transplant. About 10 years ago, she was a single mom who followed her own mother south from Wisconsin. She met Heath Goodman online not long after getting here.
SHAINA GOODMAN: He did send me some generic, “Hey, how are you?” at like 4 in the morning, and I was like, ugh, I don’t normally respond to that, like you have to be funny.
MATTHEW CASEY: Shaina and Heath fell in love quickly. The first time he met her daughter was for ice cream after school.
SHAINA GOODMAN: I pretty much knew from the beginning Brook was going to take to him. It’s been her and I this whole time, never really had a guy in her life.
MATTHEW CASEY: Brook is short for Brooklynn, now a lifeguard, college student and aspiring nurse. Explaining why her last name is different from her parents was always a long story.
BROOK GOODMAN: I no longer have to like make things complicated when I say who my dad is.
MATTHEW CASEY: The bond Brook developed with Heath led to questions about his job as a longtime Arizona State trooper. Brook would ask about injured motorists and other people he encountered.
BROOK GOODMAN: But I was always curious to know more, like, is the family OK, or like what the parents think. And he never knew, but I would end up getting the final story if I became a nurse and like maybe get to find out a little bit more about if they’re OK.
MATTHEW CASEY: Brook is 18. Adults in Arizona are eligible for adoption until they turn 22. Older relatives and former foster children can also qualify under certain conditions. Maricopa County Superior Court Commissioner Lindsay Kunaschk handles between two and four adoptions per month.
LINDSAY KUNASCHK: It’s the absolute best part of my job. It is one of the only times I get to deliver constant good news to people. I very rarely say no to adult adoptions. It is it is rare that it is not in the best interest of the parties or the public.
MATTHEW CASEY: Kunaschk and her colleagues in Maricopa County finalized more than 200 adult adoptions last fiscal year, a roughly 4% increase.
LINDSAY KUNASCHK: It’s individuals that have lived as families for a very long time but for whatever reason couldn’t proceed with an adoption.
MATTHEW CASEY: Brook calls Heath her dad, but he had to use Google to learn if adoption was possible.
HEATH GOODMAN: Before she turned 18, we found out that we could do it. And so on her 18th birthday, we took her to a steakhouse, and I gave her an envelope for her birthday gift that had the adoption paperwork in it.
MATTHEW CASEY: Heath and Brook also bonded over sports — golf and volleyball especially. He praises her athletic versatility and trustworthiness, and Heath’s proud she’s focused on her future.
HEATH GOODMAN: When she does bring home a boy, I will do my best to scare the crap out of him the first time we meet, and make sure he’s going to shake my hand, make sure he’s going to come to the door. I want him to treat her with respect.
MATTHEW CASEY: At the end of the short hearing, Brook is declared the child of Shaina and Heath. Then, the Goodmans celebrate with ice cream. Matthew Casey, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
BRIDGET DOWD: This is the Stories You Don’t Want to Miss podcast.
A year after rejecting Project Blue, a large-scale data center formerly attached to Amazon, the city of Tucson approved new regulations for these types of developments. As KJZZ’s Taylor Griffith reports, the changes adopted Wednesday stop short of a desired moratorium.
TAYLOR GRIFFITH: Throughout an hour of public comments, residents were unanimous in their call for a ban on data centers. Margo Itule is from Tucson.
MARGO ITULE: When the share, our share of a shrinking river just got cut by 40%, when our electric bills have increased by 14%, we must conclude that data centers absolutely do not belong in the desert.
TAYLOR GRIFFITH: The council members agreed, state property laws would likely prohibit a local ban, but they want to explore workarounds. The new zoning code will only apply to data centers larger than 25,000 square feet, or that require more than 20 megawatts of power. But it will make those projects among the most regulated land use in the city, second only to power plants. Taylor Griffith, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
BRIDGET DOWD: Leaders of the Colorado River Indian Tribes say the federal government didn’t consult them enough while drawing up new plans for sharing Colorado River water. KJZZ’s Alex Hager has more.
ALEX HAGER: The tribe in Western Arizona has some of the most powerful water rights in the state. It holds nearly a quarter of all the Colorado River water in Arizona. Tribal Chairwoman Amelia Flores says she was encouraged by some parts of the new federal plan, but it was put together too quickly and didn’t give the tribe enough time to send meaningful input. She also says the Bureau of Indian Affairs has failed to properly maintain the tribe’s irrigation systems, making it hard for them to use and conserve water. The Colorado River Basin is home to 30 Native American tribes, and they’ve been excluded from conversations about how to share water going back more than a century. Alex Hager, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
BRIDGET DOWD: This is the Stories You Don’t Want to Miss podcast.
The Mesa City Council voted to delay Falcon Field Airport’s landing fee program amid an ongoing lawsuit and investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. KJZZ’s Connor Greenwall reports.
CONNOR GREENWALL: The landing fee program, which the City Council says is to fund the airport, has been the subject of scrutiny since it was first approved in March. Two flight schools have sued alleging the fees are illegal, and the FAA is investigating the program. City Attorney Jim Smith says the FAA asked Mesa to delay the implementation of the fees by 90 days, which were scheduled to take effect last week.
JIM SMITH: This delay in the implementation is to give an opportunity for our outside counsel, a national expert, to provide that independent review and to to determine whether to provide confirmation on the fees or to propose and recommend new fees.
CONNOR GREENWALL: In a statement, the city of Mesa says it remains committed to the fees to keep the airport self-sustaining. Connor Greenwall, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
BRIDGET DOWD: Measles continues to spread in Arizona, and as kids are heading back to school, most classrooms across the state have immunization rates below the level recommended to prevent an outbreak. KJZZ’s Katherine Davis-Young reports.
KATHERINE DAVIS-YOUNG: Arizona has had 342 measles cases since last year. That’s the highest tally the state has seen in more than three decades. The majority of those cases have been among unvaccinated kids. Medical experts say measles is so contagious about 95% of the population needs to be vaccinated to stop its spread. Only a quarter of Arizona’s kindergarten classrooms hit that target last year. And in Greenlee, Mohave, La Paz, and Yavapai counties, there were no schools reporting 95% immunity.
WILL HUMBLE: That’s just a perfect environment for bigger outbreaks in the future.
KATHERINE DAVIS-YOUNG: Will Humble directs the Arizona Public Health Association. He says measles is likely to be active in Arizona until vaccination rates rise higher. Katherine Davis-Young, KJZZ News, Phoenix.
BRIDGET DOWD: This is the Stories You Don’t Want to Miss podcast.
And from KJZZ’s original production The Show, Arizona researchers are looking into ways to keep desert dust on the ground. Here’s co-host Mark Brodie with the details.
MARK BRODIE: Dust getting in the air can be a big problem in the desert as we’ve seen this week, when heavy winds pick it up and create a moving wall of dust. But my next guest says dust storms aren’t the only issue. Recurring lower levels of dust in the air also have implications for public health and aviation, among other things.
So researchers at Arizona’s public universities have been looking into ways to keep dust on the ground — and not just by spraying it with water, as you can often see at construction sites.
Ferran Garcia-Pichel is one of those researchers. He’s a professor in ASU’s School of Life Sciences and the Biodesign Institute, where he researches microbiology and environmental microbiology. He says, at some point, scientists realized microbial communities that live in the desert could be part of the solution. And, as it turns out, he says, they can be a big part.
Garcia-Pichel joins me to talk more about his work. And Ferran, you’re looking at these microbial communities, and it seems you found there’s a short-term solution and a longer-term solution?
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: So there is two routes to this idea. One is, it comes from our lab, and we've been working for many years on these communities, and if you look at the composition of the dust in the air, and you do a little bit of forensics or CSI by looking at the DNA that's in this dust, you can tell that all of the signal that you find in this dust comes from areas of the desert that are human-impacted. But the natural desert does not emit much at all. You can't hardly find any signatures from the things that are typical there. So that tells us the natural desert, the untouched desert, is impervious to erosion pretty much.
And so that's why making or trying to figure out how to return these natural communities called biocrusts to the top of the desert would be a solution to this problem. So when a field goes fallow, for example, if we could accelerate the return of these communities, we would solve the problem in a way that is not just effective, but it's also self-sustaining. These are living communities that every time that it rains, they grow a bit more and they recover.
MARK BRODIE: And you're not using more water to do it, right?
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Well, it just what comes from the air.
MARK BRODIE: Right.
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Yes. So that was one leg. The other leg comes from the engineering sort of thing, side of things. And this is a methodology called EICP, which that was originally developed to self-restore concrete, but that found an application, various other applications. And this is based on adding a mixture of chemicals with a particular reaction that happens in there, that essentially makes also a crust, but it's a chemical crust.
And this is a chemical process, and we have developed it to apply to those fallow fields, and you can make a crust that's impervious, that makes the soil impervious to erosion within a day. So the idea of this project was, can we put A and B together and do a one-two punch approach? Really like think about this as reforestation.
MARK BRODIE: Mm-hmm.
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: But instead of using trees, we use microbes.
MARK BRODIE: Right. How easy or difficult would it be to scale that up? I mean, if you have a fallow field, we're talking about a lot of land here.
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Correct. And so this is a problem. And at this point, we were really pushing the envelope a bit. We had been doing sort of demonstration scale experiments, pilot experiments, sort of square-yard size, and it works. But this was already an issue for us. Can we scale it up to the acre scale? And each one of them has different problems associated with it, or with each.
For example, the chemical process, yes, it's a problem to have enough materials, but the delivery becomes a problem. For the biological restoration, the issue becomes, how do we get enough inoculum to put back? How do we develop effective nurseries or microbial nurseries, should I say, to get the inoculum?
MARK BRODIE: You have to grow it.
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: You have to grow it.
MARK BRODIE: So is it fair to say then that what you're finding is more applicable for fallow fields and keeping the dust on the ground than, for example, an active construction zone where people are going to be walking around and would presumably be stepping on and kicking up the biocrust that you'd be putting there anyway?
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Yes. I think you're right in the logic of it. We can't say for sure because we haven't done construction sites. The research we've done is on these fallow fields. So anyway, we've been, you know, we've been at it for four years now, and we have made some progress, and we also have found out things that were not expected and so, which I think are important.
MARK BRODIE: Like what?
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: So for example, one of the things that we were surprised about was that in some cases the best thing to do to make the fallow field crust is do nothing. And that was very surprising to us.
MARK BRODIE: Just leave it be?
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Just leave it be. That's not what we're doing as a society, and I'll explain this. So we picked a site as a test site along I-10 in Pinal County, an area that's really prone to these episodes of high dust in the air. And one of the things we had to do because this was an experiment is we had to ask the farmer, "Please do not plow the field." And what happens was the soils crusted by themselves.
And so that turned then into, OK, so now we have a different approach to apply our eventually successful approaches. If we don't have to treat absolutely everything, but let's just go treat the soils that have low carbonate because they will not crust. So that sort of suddenly, we had a way of prioritizing.
MARK BRODIE: Oh, interesting. So you didn't have to do the whole field necessarily, for example, just the areas where there was a certain level.
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: More or less correct. The whole field is probably acting as one, but in terms of regional, there's soils that have high carbonate, soils that have — so we did a survey between here and Tucson, and we found out which soils are more prone to self-crusting, we don't need to touch this.
Now, the problem with not doing anything is that it's not possible, because farmers have also a mandate to plow to prevent the growth of weeds. So now we have a regulatory issue here because they are mandated by one agency to plow the field and prevent weeds from growing. From the other one, they are also mandated to keep the dust down. So as scientists, we cannot solve that.
MARK BRODIE: What does all this cost? Like, how feasible is it financially to, for example, in the areas where if you leave it, it's not just going to crust over on its own, to either grow or import a crust?
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Yes. The actual cost will probably go down the bigger we go. However, it is not cheap. You need people, you need monitoring, but how much is the cost of public health? I don't have an answer for you at how much it would eventually cost, but it wouldn't be cheap.
MARK BRODIE: So for non-farm areas where there's a lot of dust, at least for the foreseeable future, is trying to tamp down the dust with water the answer? Like, are there other things that you're maybe looking into for construction sites, for example, or for the open desert?
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Yes. For the open desert, if it's a pristine desert, you need nothing. It does not provide a lot of dust if it's open and untouched, so. If you're patient, even the agricultural fields, the construction sites, the natural crust, if you don't keep the human pressure on it, will eventually come back. 20 years?
MARK BRODIE: That's a long time, yeah.
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: Are you willing to wait for 20 years? So that's the key. The intervention would make it a couple years.
MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Ferran Garcia-Pichel. He is a professor in ASU's School of Life Sciences and the Biodesign Institute. Ferran, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
FERRAN GARCIA-PICHEL: It's my pleasure to talk about what I do. I love it.
BRIDGET DOWD: This has been the Stories You Don’t Want to Miss podcast, made possible in part by the Catena Foundation, BASIS Charter Schools, Palo Verde Generating Station, SRP and the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust. Thank you for listening and for your generous support. I’m Bridget Dowd. This is KJZZ. Listen more, learn more online and on the KJZZ mobile app.
