The Show for July 27, 2026: How cactuses respond to wildfire, 'The Unruly Wild' and more

KJZZ's original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona's largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona. bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I'm Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here's today's episode.

Good morning. It's The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I'm Mark Brodie. Coming up, why the unmasking of an anonymous online critic of a Valley city government has some legal experts concerned. And what a small northern Arizona cactus can teach us about resilience to wildfires. But first, Arizona voters will be deciding a number of issues at the ballot box this fall, but exactly how many and which ones are still up in the air. That's because of legal challenges to some of them. There have been and will continue to be in the near future hearings on those challenges. With me now to check in on where we are with those is Howie Fischer of Capital Media Services. Good morning, Howie.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, Howie.

HOWIE FISCHER: Good morning. Remember, when you put three attorneys in a room, I'll get you 17 different opinions.

MARK BRODIE: That's right. Well, so we are waiting for opinions on most, if not all of these.

But let's start with a hearing that was held on Friday, waiting for a ruling. This has to do with the single-subject rule. Basically, can an initiative is supposed to stick to one subject? Challengers to the proposal, which is known as Proposition 145 — we're going to have to get used to these numbers now — this is the protecting vouchers for families of folks in the military, but also includes what a lot of folks call the poison pill that would basically do away with another voucher initiative. We're still waiting for a ruling on this.

What were the arguments here?

HOWIE FISCHER: Well, it comes down to the question of there are clearly a lot of Republican lawmakers who do not want Proposition 212, which is the Arizona Education Initiative, on the ballot. There were efforts to negotiate to say, "You drop this and we'll drop that," and see what happens. That didn't occur.

So what they did at the last minute is put together, as you say, Prop. 145. And it's very simple. It says if, in fact, there's any measure that's passed that goes ahead and takes away voucher money that is banked by students from military families — which is allowed currently now, you can save it for college — then any other measure that gets rid of that would be void.

Now, again, the issue isn't that it would overrule the part of any other measure about banking. It would overrule the entire other measure. It would overrule the part about the $150,000 limit on salaries on what parents could make. It would overrule the limits on you can't be purchasing your birth control devices with voucher funds, things like that.

And so the argument is you're being asked to take this as a "take it or leave it," that you're going to have to go ahead, if you want to protect military families, you're going to go have to head and vote for all of this, versus be able to vote on these as separate issues.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So, Howie, sticking with the vouchers issue and Prop. 212, the Goldwater Institute and others are trying to knock enough signatures out of contention so that the measure would not appear before voters this fall.

Where are we on that challenge?

HOWIE FISCHER: Well, we're kind of waiting to see what happens. The Goldwater Institute, as you point out, filed a measure saying they got more than ... they submitted, they say, more than 450,000 signatures. Thing is, you need about 259,000 and change to be valid in order to get on the ballot.

The argument is that many of the circulators did not comply with state law. Now, some of it is very simple. You have to have, if you're a paid circulator, you have to register with the Secretary of State's Office. They say some of them didn't. They also claim that some of them have been found guilty of certain crimes, which make them ineligible to circulate.

Now, the reason you go after circulators versus individual signatures is if some circulator has turned in 100,000, 150,000 signatures, you disqualify the circulator, you disqualify all the signatures. Now, we're still set to see how many of these can be done. These tend to be very fact-intensive hearings where they'll sometimes subpoena the circulator. If the circulator doesn't show up, sometimes they'll just simply disqualify the signatures. So it's part of the little gamesmanship that's played on these things.

MARK BRODIE: Is there a hearing date set for that yet?

HOWIE FISCHER: There is not a hearing date set for that at this point. They're still filing amended complaints. I think that's going to end up being heard in August, given everything else that's going on now.

But meanwhile, you've got various other issues, as you point out, same thing with the vouchers. There is a separate lawsuit pending over the fact that the attorney general is supposed to put a small statement of fact on the ballot in terms of, here's the ballot number, here's what it does, here's what a yes vote means, here's what a no vote means.

Kris Mayes wants to be able to tell voters on the ballot that if you vote for Prop. 145, which is the protection of military families, you entirely nullify Prop. 212 and the voucher law.

House Speaker Ben Toma, Senate President Warren Petersen say, "No, no, because of the fact that 212 doesn't exist, you can't tell people what it might do." That also is set for a hearing.

MARK BRODIE: Okay. So I think — I think — that takes care of the voucher issues.

But clearly there are other lawsuits about other initiatives, including one that the teachers' union and other unions are concerned about, Prop. 143. This is the measure that is basically going after teachers' unions. They're concerned about wording that suggests that other public service unions, not just teachers, could be affected as well?

HOWIE FISCHER: Well, this is one of those things that sometimes you need to be very careful on how you word something. The intent clearly of Prop. 143 is to tell schools you cannot use any public funds for anything that helps with a teachers' union. Now that could be dues check-off, that could be allowing some materials to be distributed through the school system.

But one section of that talks about the ability of public sector unions to negotiate for contracts. Argument here is the Arizona Constitution generally says you can only put a single subject and semi-related things on the same ballot. If you're asking to go ahead and get rid of not just the teachers' union ability but the other unions — A, have you violated the single-subject rule? And B, this goes to a whole another part of the law, which everybody's going to get one of those huge pamphlets in the mail from the Secretary of State's Office, and the argument is that the Legislative Council, which is controlled by Republican lawmakers, said this only deals with teachers' unions.

So again, yet another lawsuit to say, "No, you're misleading voters."

MARK BRODIE: OK, so Howie, about a minute or so left. Lest we think that these lawsuits are just about current initiatives, there was a hearing and a ruling last week in a ballot measure from a couple of years ago dealing with immigration where the judge basically said, I can't or I won't stop it quite yet?

HOWIE FISCHER: Exactly. This is Prop. 314. It's modeled after what they call Texas's SB 4. And it says that state and local police, if they see someone crossing into the country at other than the port of entry, or they have video or other evidence, they can arrest them on state charges, can bring them before a state judge, and the state judge can either try them or say, "If you don't want to be tried, I will order you deported."

Question is, is that in fact the role of the federal government only, or can the state have some question there? This group called the Florence Project that provides legal help to migrants, they sued. They said it's going to affect the ability that they have to defend folks.

Judge said, look, I'm not going to get into this because this law theoretically took effect only on July 14th — because it was delayed for several legal reasons. You don't have anybody who is damaged here. So how can you go ahead and ask me to delay a law when you haven't been damaged, there's no evidence that the Florence Project has been damaged, and you don't actually have a victim who is in fact trying to be arrested or deported?

So he has bounced it, at least as far as a temporary restraining order. However, the case is far from over.

MARK BRODIE: All right, lots to keep our eyes on as always. Howie Fischer of Capital Media Services. Thanks, Howie.

HOWIE FISCHER: Have a great morning.

MARK BRODIE: An investigation into an anonymous Facebook comment that led to a Tempe City Council meeting being shut down also led to the unmasking of a longtime online critic of the city's government. But some legal experts say the way that all happened violated people's First Amendment rights. Taylor Seely of The Arizona Republic has been following this and joins me now to talk more about it. Hi, Taylor, good morning.

TAYLOR SEELY: Good morning.

MARK BRODIE: So let's talk first about this Katie Marie post, which referenced a "Game of Thrones," very popular TV show, which shut down a City Council meeting. What happened?

TAYLOR SEELY: Yeah, so this was in August of last year. The City Council was expected to have this really contentious meeting. And just before that meeting was about to begin, a councilman gets a comment on his profile page from a username named Katie Marie. And the comment had a "Game of Thrones" GIF. So it showed a silhouetted woman, and if people are familiar with the show, they would know it was Queen Cersei overlooking a town that was engulfed in a green smoke explosion.

And the caption read, "Konner Culver watching tonight's meeting." And now Connor Colver isn't obviously particularly well known probably across the state, but he actually is fairly well known in the city of Tempe because he's been a real thorn in the side of City Hall for some time. He had been a vehement critic of the mayor and the city manager and always had some of the best gossip and insider details.

But the city perceived that comment to be a potential threat, a potential bomb threat. So they decided to shut down the meeting, launched an extensive investigation into the Katie Marie account and eventually the Konner Culver account that led to his unmasking.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, worth noting that both Katie Marie and Konner Culver, not the real names of the people who are posting. So this investigation, in part, was who are these people?

TAYLOR SEELY: Correct, but one thing I want to clarify a little bit about that is that Katie Marie, her name is Kathleen Marie Tierney. So the city has a couple times referred to her as using a fake name or a pseudonym. It wasn't so much a fake name as much as it was a shortened name. Kathleen goes by Katie. Marie is her middle name.

So there was definitely suspicion on the part of the city because after the meeting, the next day when they go to investigate, OK, let's go look at this Katie Marie profile, the profile account was deleted, and they thought that was very suspicious. But yes, Katie Marie actually Kathleen Tierney; Konner Culver, certainly not his real name.

MARK BRODIE: OK, so what is it that investigators did to try to get to the bottom of who Katie Marie was and ultimately who Konner Culver is that has some First Amendment folks concerned?

TAYLOR SEELY: Well, the thing that we have to remember is that the comment that was left, "Konner Culver watching tonight's meeting," and a Game of Thrones GIF isn't inherently, obviously, a threat, right?

When we talk about a true threat, the sort of legal term, this has to be something explicit, directed where there's really no uncertainty that absolutely, yes, that was a threat. So that's sort of the first thing here. You know, can you put yourself in the city of Tempe's shoes? Can you look at, "Hey, we just want to act with the utmost caution here"? Sure. But at the end of the day, that speech itself is protected expression.

So when you go to investigate and then you find no real threat, which is what law enforcement found that night. They abruptly shut down the meeting, they swept the premises for any threats, they did not find any threat. They eventually executed search warrants and they also in those search warrants found no behind-the-scenes plan or coordination amongst anyone to even, not to threaten anyone and not even to attempt to scare someone into thinking it was a threat, which is also criminal activity. So that was not found here.

And then when it comes to Konner Culver and his unmasking, they executed search warrants into his Facebook profiles, into his many email accounts to identify who he was. They sent law enforcement to his homes in both Arizona and Oregon to identify him and to ask him questions. OK, that's one thing.

Another thing is when you then go and put that man's name in a publicly released police report after the fact, after you know he actually did not have anything to do with this, he was not connected. And for listeners who may not realize, because I think this does come as a surprise to people sometimes, but the First Amendment protects anonymous speech. It is actually a core American tradition. The founders of this country engaged in pseudonyms and anonymity to express politically unfavorable or really bold ideas.

MARK BRODIE: What is the city's justification for how it handled this?

TAYLOR SEELY: The city's justification for the extensive search warrants is that they did believe that this was a threat and that they were acting in the name of public safety, that they needed to, you know, search down every last lead to ensure that this was not actually going to endanger anyone and to hold people to account.

After they arrested Tierney, they accused her in a press release of interfering with democracy. So you can see how seriously they took this.

With regard to Konner Culver, I didn't get a good answer from them, I didn't get any answer from them on why they opted to put his name in the publicly released police report other than we comply with public records law.

MARK BRODIE: Oh, that's really interesting. All right. That is Taylor Seely with The Arizona Republic. Taylor, thanks as always. I appreciate it.

TAYLOR SEELY: Thanks so much.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It's The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I'm Mark Brodie. Coming up, what can historical art tell us about the future of the American West? We'll hear from the author of a new book examining foretellings found in the photography, painting, and writing of centuries past.

But first, research taking place in northern Arizona could offer clues about how some cacti respond to fire. Clare Aslan is an NAU professor and a conservation biologist. She's been monitoring the paradine plains cactus in areas burned by the Dragon Bravo and White Sage fires last year. She says she gets that it may seem like scientists are paying a lot of attention to an admittedly very small cactus. But Aslan says trying to understand how, when, and where systems recover from fire is important for managing the landscape. That's especially true, she says, as fires become bigger and more intense. Aslan joins me to talk more about this.

And, Clare, could you please describe what this cactus looks like for those of us maybe who have seen it but aren't quite sure?

CLARE ASLAN: Sure, sure. So this cactus, the paradine plains cactus, is extremely small. It actually can fit in the palm of your hand quite easily. It's also very low to the ground. So when you are standing above it looking down, it often looks like it's barely poking up above the surface. It's almost flush with the ground itself.

It's kind of a little bit of an olive green color with some fairly soft spines. It won't it won't poke you like a prickly pear might do. And it contains these these flowers in April and May, which are very beautiful. They range from kind of white to a peach color that are almost as big as the entire surface of the plant. So oftentimes the flower is what you see first.

MARK BRODIE: OK, and am I right that this particular type of cactus has some kind of unusual seasonal behavior irrespective of how it interacts with fire?

CLARE ASLAN: Yes. So this particular cactus and its close relatives have what's called contractile roots. And this means that when the cactus feels stressed, and this may be because it's very dry or possibly because it's very cold, those roots can actually contract and pull the entire plant down kind of into the ground. And they live in a very an area with very sort of loose sediment, and so that sediment can sort of sift over top of the plant, which means that the plant can actually go underground.

So, and then when things improve, when it gets warmer or when it gets a little bit wet, those roots sort of reinflate and push that plant back up, and they pop back up. And so you can go to a site and not be able to find them and go a month later and there they are.

MARK BRODIE: So does that make it any less surprising to you that these cacti maybe act a little bit differently when they come into contact with fire than other species?

CLARE ASLAN: I think it does indicate that these cacti are very responsive to their environment and to relatively short-term changes in the environment, and also that a lot of what is going on with regard to these cacti is happening underground.

And I should say that we know from old herbarium specimens where people actually dug up whole plants, so this may have been 50 years ago, that a lot of the plant is below ground. So as I describe it to you as this super tiny plant that you can barely see, that's not the entire story. There's more of this cactus going on down there.

So when it comes to fire, I do think that that might be part of the reason that we've seen some resilience in these individual plants is that they may have that kind of built-in protection that perhaps is intended for temperature or for moisture, but it may come in handy when it comes to a fire event as well.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. OK, so tell me what exactly it is that you're going to be looking at and looking for during this project up in the area where there were some pretty significant fires over the last year or so.

CLARE ASLAN: Yeah. So this cactus is known as a species of concern. It's actually not a listed endangered species, but a number of very close relatives are. And because it's a species of concern, and actually to try to prevent it from becoming endangered, there's been long-term monitoring that's been going on. We've been tracking these cacti kind of year to year, checking out their flowering, looking at their pollinators, getting a sense of where the central populations are.

So then the fire comes along, and some of the most high-severity areas, particularly of the White Sage Fire, but also some portions of the Dragon Bravo Fire, overlapped directly with where these cacti occur.

So I went out there a few weeks after the fire was finally declared fully over last October, and remarkably found that almost the only green thing you could see in some of these sites were these super tiny cacti. So that really led us to realize, wow, these these plants, at least some of them, have survived in the immediate aftermath of the fire. We have all this monitoring data. Let's try to see if we can use that data to compare how the plants are doing now with how they were doing in the past and get a sense of how well they're going to do going forward.

So over these next couple of years, our goal is to monitor individual plants to determine if their survival lasts — basically, can they make it a whole year after the fire, particularly in cases where the plant was visibly damaged? And then do they still reproduce? Are they able to carry out their functions as this community starts to recover from this event?

MARK BRODIE: Oh, that's interesting. So is there a chance maybe that the individual plant survives but like it won't be able to reproduce? That it might be the last one of that particular kind?

CLARE ASLAN: Right, that's kind of the the question. Mainly because some of these plants do show some damage. So there's a little spot of green, which is remarkable, but when you get close, there's kind of burned cactus spines surrounding sort of in the in the soil surrounding that. So we know that there was some damage.

Also, again, because they are mostly underground and we don't want to risk disturbing them further, we don't really know whether any form of soil heating might have affected the broader cactus structure underground. So this year, we were able to observe flowers, which was really wonderful. They they did flower, but I haven't observed very many fruits, and a cactus has to invest a lot of moisture to create a fruit.

And that leads us to wonder if perhaps these plants are still so stressed out, they may be still recovering from this damage or still feeling that damage, so they haven't yet been able to make that investment in fruits.

MARK BRODIE: Do you have a sense of why it is that some of the cacti maybe had some damage and some didn't? Like is it just a matter of where the fire happened to burn, or is there maybe reason to think that some of the cacti were in the fire but didn't actually get damaged?

CLARE ASLAN: Yeah, it's a great question. I do think I'm seeing that. There's one particular area where we have an unusually high density of the plants, and that area does happen to coincide with some of the higher severity portions of the of the fire. So the trees that are above these cacti, so kind of the canopy, a lot of those trees were killed by the fire. And in that same area, I do see some individual cacti that are clearly damaged. As I mentioned, there's some burn spines, but there's still some green portions. There's a few that are totally dead and clearly burned, but then there's quite a few that look great. They kind of look like nothing happened.

And so the question I kind of have in my head, and I may never know the answer, is, is that because those particular ones happened to be underground at the moment that the fire burned, or was there some other reason that they escaped? But we do really see the entire range of conditions.

MARK BRODIE: Do you think it's possible — and maybe it's not possible to know this yet — but do you think that it will be possible to take what you learn from this particular species of cactus and extrapolate it out to look at how other species of cactus or other even other species of plants respond to fire?

CLARE ASLAN: We do know that these systems in this region are fire-adapted. So all the plants, all the plant species, will have experienced fire to some degree, and plants respond to fire in different ways.

Some of them may not survive the fire themselves, but they are able to reproduce, and their offspring will emerge quickly after fire. Others can actually survive the fire itself. It's a wide range.

I think the thing that makes this particular plant so unique is this funny behavior it has of kind of disappearing and reappearing, its rarity across the landscape, and its extremely tiny size. It's such a remarkable sort of distinction that this plant has compared to others that in terms of being the only green thing that we saw after the fire, it does make me wonder if it's giving us some insight into some new forms of adaptation to a fire that we hadn't necessarily described before.

MARK BRODIE: All right. Clare, thanks so much for the conversation. I really appreciate it.

CLARE ASLAN: Yeah, thanks so much for being interested.

MARK BRODIE: Clare Aslan is a professor at Northern Arizona University and a conservation biologist.

MARK BRODIE: Juliet Stromberg sees plants as her friends. The retired ASU researcher, plant ecologist, and botanist loves climbing trees, and she knows many of the ones on her property personally. For the last quarter of a decade, she and her partner have been rewilding their property near South Mountain, restoring it into a lush riparian landscape. It's the kind of effort you might assume uses only native plants in an effort to restore the desert back to its quote-unquote natural state. But Stromberg is not a believer in the so-called native biology paradigm. She rejects the idea that some plants are invasive, alien invaders to our ecosystems. And in her new book, The Unruly Wild, she asks us to think about why certain plants arrive in our city or yards, and maybe welcome them. It's a reimagining of our relationship with the plant world, as she puts it. She told my co-host, Lauren Gilger, she didn't necessarily feel like she wanted to write this book, she felt like she needed to.

JULIET STROMBERG: I did feel like I needed to write this book, and that stems from a position of both science and and love. I'm a botanist and I love plants. I love the Earth's ecosystems, and I'm a scientist who likes to understand why things work. I've been studying the vegetation of the Southwest for, you know, four decades now.

And it just seems that the approach that land managers, conservationists, even some gardeners are taking are not benefiting the vegetation and the ecosystems, and in many cases what we're doing is harming. And so I wanted to challenge the current paradigm, which is based in sort of fear and control. The field of invasion biology is sort of is based in a in a war metaphor. And I just don't think the idea of of going to war against plants is getting us what we want.

LAUREN GILGER: I've never thought about it that way, but it is. Like calling something an invasive species is like being saying you're being invaded by an army.

JULIET STROMBERG: Yes, the science of invasion biology is actually it's it's a science imbued with psychological warfare. And it's become so mainstream that we sort of forget that ecologists and botanists, conservationists did not always view the world this way.

It's a fairly recent development in a sense, I mean, in the 1990s is sort of when ecologists started and conservationists started using the term invasion, invasive species. And it's become deeply ingrained and it just seemed to me it's time for, uh, for some pushback, or for, let's change course a little bit and just examine, what in the world are we doing?

In 1999, President Clinton did sign this executive order on invasive species, which called for managers to not just control these so-called invasive species, but also to study them. And so during that quarter century, many new studies have come out, meta-analyses, sort of studies of studies, that are challenging some of the basic tenets of invasion biology.

And so I think part of me was saying this this science, this new science, needs to get out there. People need to understand that there is a there's a group of of scientists and conservationists that are saying this is kind of an outmoded way of looking at the world.

LAUREN GILGER: It's super interesting. So you're basically saying that an invasive species, like, you know, buffelgrass is a big one in Arizona, we hear a lot about, right? Or I keep thinking about stinknet, this invasive species is little yellow balls you're seeing pop up in your yard and all over the sides of roads, that it's being called an invasive species. Are you saying they're not bad for the environment here?

JULIET STROMBERG: Um, well, let me step back a second and say I really do not like to use the term. That label upfront shapes the way we're viewing the species. And I'm saying let's step away from that viewpoint and just say, here's a new plant that has arrived. Let's approach it with curiosity, with a maybe some degree of of respect, um, and just with an open mind.

Let's talk about oncosiphon. I like to call the plant globe chamomile, some people do call it stinknet. I think it smells great. So this it is a plant that arrived from South Africa not that long ago into the Valley. So it's a migrant. It's it's an immigrant species, and there have actually not been that many studies done about the plant. And yet, we're labeling it.

And the label invasive implies sort of ubiquitous harm, like naughty by nature some people say. And so that's like, that's a big strike against the plant. And then it's partly based in sort of fear, here's someone from the unknown, we don't know about it, it could harm us, and and then these ideas propagate.

It's just like a meme that propagates and suddenly everyone is hating this plant and fearing this plant instead of saying, OK, well, why is it here? Where is it growing? Let's understand it from an ecological point of view and from a less, um, fear-based standpoint.

LAUREEN GILGER: Right. We we might not condemn it if we understood why it came, what it could do here.

JULIET STROMBERG: Exactly. Open your mind to understanding why someone is here, kind of opens your heart to welcoming them here.

LAUREN GILGER: I think that's a wonderful thought. And I have definitely done segments on stinknet or globe chamomile. So I'm I'm completely guilty of this.

JULIET STROMBERG: Yeah, and and interestingly enough, basically what we're doing in cities, when we blow litter layers with our, you know, gas-powered leaf blowers, and we have irrigation structures that are creating little pockets of water year-round, we're basically we're creating ideal habitat for these disturbance-adapted ruderal-type species.

And when you go and try and clear them away and weed them out, you're basically just creating habitat for more of that type of plant. What we've seen in our own yard, because we've been rewilding a property of four acres for 25 years now, and during that time period, globe chamomile arrived in our property.

LAUREN GILGER: Right.

JULIET STROMBERG: And so we've seen other creatures adapt to it. We've seen what happens if we just leave it alone, because we don't remove it. It's just a little aster that is keeping the soil cool, it's feeding pollinators. And if we leave it alone, other plants like brittlebush will grow up, shade it out, and it's it's just coexisting with other members of the ecosystem.

LAUREN GILGER: That's fascinating. So there are it sounds like some examples lots of times in which you can you can document something that's known as a quote-unquote "invasive species" that's actually very helpful when it arrives in a new place.

JULIET STROMBERG: Yes. And one chapter of the book, I talk about this idea of the importance of environmental context and the phrase ecologists often use when someone asks them a question is they will say, "Oh, it depends." Um, and so if is the plant harmful? Well, it depends. It depends on where it's growing, what is the context, harm to who? And are there benefits accruing as well?

MARK BRODIE: That's Juliet Stromberg, a plant ecologist, botanist and author of the new book "The Unruly Wild" speaking to my cohost Lauren Gilger. We'll have more of their conversation in just a moment.

Good morning. It's The Show. And let's return now to our conversation with Juliet Stromberg, a plant ecologist, botanist, and author of the new book "The Unruly Wild." She spoke with my co-host, Lauren Gilger, about her somewhat controversial point of view rejecting the idea of invasive species in the plant world, and how she thinks about plants more as individuals than organisms.

LAUREN GILGER: So, I mean, I got to ask you, Juliet, because the way that you talk about plants and trees and the way that you write about them in the book is really remarkable from my point of view, right? Like you write about them like not only as living things, which they obviously are, but you write about them like as friends, like as sentient beings in a way that is really kind of striking. Tell us why.

JULIET STROMBERG: I guess there are a couple reasons for that. One, from a scientific perspective, there is much new research going on now about plant sentience and plant communication.

LAUREEN GILGER: Can they feel? Can they speak? Can they respond? Yeah.

JULIET STROMBERG: Exactly. So so there's this revolution going on in terms of how we're understanding plants. And, um, certainly they're sentient creatures. But there's also there is a a love connection with plants. And I trace that back to, I think, you know, being four years old and gardening with my mother and having her talk to the plants.

And so I started talking to the plants, and you formed a relationship with plants. And I think this lack of forming relationships with plants, and so many of us have become disconnected from nature and from plants because we many of us don't grow our own food anymore, it comes from the grocery store. We don't, um, make clothes from it, so so we're we've distanced ourselves from plants.

We have to make an effort now to to rebuild those relationships with plants. Um, and when I was a a scientist, those feelings were always there when I was an academic at ASU, but I maybe I suppressed them a little bit and viewed things that them as my study organism. ... And and now that I've been retired for eight years and it's like, OK, well, you can go back to being my friends now.

LAUREN GILGER: So I mean, as you mentioned, you have been rewilding, as you call it, this this property where your home is near South Mountain in south Phoenix and and turned it into sort of this incredibly lush desert landscape.

JULIET STROMBERG: A lush riparian landscape, yeah. It it we we planted many things, but we also then welcomed plants and and shrubs and herbs that that the birds brought in, mockingbirds are big berry eaters, they they brought in elderberries and things like that, and the wind blew in many plants. So, yeah, so it's this co-created oasis. It's beautiful.

But living there for for a quarter century now, you it does give one the chance to form relationships with individual trees, and not just view things as as species or as populations, but as but as individuals that are distinct and you know, like with a mesquite, for example, each the trees have a different shape, they their pods are different colors, and they taste slightly different, and you get to know and and I love to climb trees. There's that too. Some are better climbers than others, and um, so yeah, it's, um, it's been a chance to immerse myself in the plant world in a deeper way than perhaps I did as as a scientist.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us before I let you go about one tree that you have a a really close relationship with.

JULIET STROMBERG: When we moved in, the the irrigation had been shut off for a few years. So most of the trees died. So it was a had been a citrus grove. But most things were dead, but there was one Mexican paloverde, some people call them retamas, it's Parkinsonia aculeata, that had managed to survive because the irrigation system is leaky and and when the neighbors irrigate, there's a little bit of trickle.

So anyway, this tree survived and now with irrigation, she has become huge. She's one of the largest Mexican paloverdes in the state ... and in the region and and she's just a lovely climbing tree. And she's she's sort of the matriarch. And she's she's surrounded by by all her her new babies.

And I um, partly I I'm drawn to her because when I look at her, I think about what's going on on the Salt River, which is, um, through Phoenix, there there was a federally funded restoration project, and they have target goals for certain acreages of Fremont cottonwoods and Goodding willows that they want to be there because they used to be there in the past. And they're applying herbicide to kill off trees that aren't on their target desired list.

And one of the trees they're they're applying herbicide and killing is are these Mexican paloverdes. And so it it kind of saddens me to think that this tree is being targeted and killed simply because they cross some territorial border that exists in our minds. And the planet is warming, plants are migrating, if the environment is changing, plants are changing their range, and we can't stop that process.

So we we create this mismatch between the environmental condition and the plants. The plants that are thriving today are responding to the current conditions and I guess the main approach I'm taking in the book is let's let's reverse the changes where we can.

If we can reduce global warming, if we can put water back in the rivers, if we can restore particular environmental conditions, let's do so. And I spent a lot of my academic career trying to do that. But in a lot of cases, we just can't.

Because I used to be nativist myself for a while, and I thought well, let's just restore all of the species that were just native to this region. But I sort of tossed that aside over the years because now it's like, if you can grow in these conditions and thrive and fix carbon and feed other creatures with your tissues, you're welcome. Come on in!

Let's not spend our limited time and energy trying to kill you because there's so many other more critical issues we need to focusing on.

LAUREN GILGER: We'll leave it there. Juliet Stromberg, author of the new book "The Unruly Wild," she's a plant ecologist, botanist as well. Juliet, thank you very much for coming in and telling us about this. I appreciate it.

JULIET STROMBERG: You're welcome. Thank you so much for inviting me here.

MARK BRODIE: What can art from more than a century ago tell us about the future of the West? William R. Handley explores that question and others in his new book called Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West. Handley, an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California, looks at paintings, photography, writing, and other art forms from the 19th and 20th centuries to try to get a sense of what types of problems people then may have seen in the future in this part of the country. Handley joins me to talk more about this.

And, Bill, can we start with a sort of thumbnail version of exactly what it is you're looking at in this book?

WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: Yeah, so climate change has forced people to rethink our notions of history and progress, given that Enlightenment notions of progress are what led to the technological revolutions that have also now imperiled us.

So I'm interested in looking at writers and artists in the past who, even though they did not understand what was what was coming, nonetheless saw in the American West the capacity for catastrophic downturns. So what can we learn from them about how to prepare ourselves for this future that we face?

You know, the West is often associated with Manifest Destiny and progress in the triumphal version of settler colonialism, but I'm arguing that, in fact, a number of factors led writers to understand that things might not just work out the way we think.

MARK BRODIE: So in your reading of it then, writers, artists from let's say the 1800s, maybe had a sense that in the, you know, in the 2000s and beyond that things might not be all all rosy in this part of the world?

WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: Well, they already knew that they weren't so rosy right then. So, and I'm not the first scholar to argue this, but the vast exploitation of resources and the development of the railroad had huge costs not only for Plains Indians, but also for the natural world.

If you just think about the fact that in around 1800 there were about 60 million buffalo and by 1890 there were 1,000. They were well aware of what natural resource exploitation could produce.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, well how closely do you have to look at some of the the artwork and the writings from that time to get a sense that people understood that maybe things weren't ideal at that moment and would continue to not be ideal into the future?

WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: Well, I'll just give you one little example, that's the writer Willa Cather. You know, she's much loved, very popular writer in her time, and what struck me about her fiction, which I had long kind of wrestled with, was that things happen in her books that don't seem to have any particular meaning in terms of plot.

A young man, for example, in "O Pioneers!" is, just, just got married and he's got this optimistic future and suddenly dies of a burst appendix. Or Ántonia's father in "My Ántonia," a Czech immigrant, a Bohemian immigrant, comes to Nebraska only to take his own life out of despair in the middle of the winter. Cather knew that, you know, a faith in a a rosy future wasn't necessarily going to create it, that things happen.

And also, I look at rephotography — 1990s and early 2000s photographers who went out to try to recreate the very spot where they, where the survey for the US Geological Survey photographers photographed much of the West for the purposes of developing the railroad, but also in terms of wanting to find evidence for theories of what was called in geological science, catastrophism.

The notion that the geological and fossil record suggest that some really big upheavals happened that didn't follow any known laws of nature. So that was the big tension. So even just in the geological record, we have evidence that a lot of unexpected stuff occurred.

MARK BRODIE: When you look back at what folks were writing about and and creating art about in the 1800s, did they have a sense of what potential problems might be on the horizon for us today, or just the fact that there could and maybe would be problems on the horizon?

WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: No, I think — well, of course they wouldn't have thought about it in terms of climate change. That that would have been unimaginable, but what they certainly could understand is that civilizations can fall.

Because one example I talk about in the book is the discovery by white Americans in the 1870s of the ruins at Mesa Verde of ancestral Puebloans, which became a, the photographer William Henry Jackson and a geologist friend created these models of these cities for the centennial of the Philadelphia Exposition, and they drew as many people as Alexander Graham Bell's phone. And so there was a kind of chilling premonition that that could be the fate of any civilization.

MARK BRODIE: When you talk about ancient people and you talk about, you know, geological formations and the kinds of things that you see in the West, it seems like an interesting juxtaposition between the timeframes that we're talking about with those kinds of things and the timeframes we're talking about in terms of like getting the railroad built and telephones and, you know, some of the technology that we see now in our modern society.

Like it just seems like some is very slow, like we're talking millions of years, and some, you know, we're talking weeks, months, or even a year or two.

WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: Yeah, you've you've kind of nailed one of my fascinations in writing the book was just with these incommensurable time scales and speeds. You know, if you look at the Grand Canyon, that's about a billion years of geological history on view.

But we're talking about in terms of climate change that since 1945 alone, three-quarters of all of the human-caused carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been produced. And of course the huge technological changes that transformed the whole look of the West. So I think that the slowness of time has been used to try to give us a sense that there is a there's a sublime divine presence in the landscape.

But I'm sort of arguing these writers understood that what you're looking at when you look at the Grand Canyon is a history of millions of years of catastrophic upheavals. And it's humbling. We need as a species to be humble about our very short blip of time in which we've had such a huge impact.

MARK BRODIE: Do you think that art maybe allowed people at that time, and maybe allows us now, to think about and grapple with these issues a little bit differently than, you know, if somebody had gotten up on a soapbox and given a speech or or whatever?

WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, and let me let me give you one example that I start the book off with. There's a famous painting by Albert Bierstadt called "The Oregon Trail," and it shows covered wagons heading into the sunset. And, you know, it stands as a kind of icon of the Western promise from the settler point of view.

But I do this reading of it where you can see there are tipis sort of vanishing into the golden light on the distant horizon and there are ox skulls in the foreground. And what I'm arguing about it is, given how invested white Americans were in this sense of the triumphal march of progress, standing on a soapbox and saying you've got it all wrong would have convinced absolutely no one.

But if you look long enough at Bierstadt's painting, something unsettling happens, and you realize that he's giving these little hints about the limits of this whole enterprise of settlement and conquest. And in part, especially if you know the date of the painting, it's 1869, it's when the railroads were completed, and so this mode of transportation that we romanticized, that Hollywood films picked up on, the covered wagon, they're obsolete when he's painting it.

So it's a, it's a painting not so much of hope as it is mourning and nostalgia as well. And I think it's that ambiguity, you know, when, when we see how art really forces us to contend with what we think of as opposing ideas or feelings, I think we become more nimble in our own thinking when when we're exposed to that kind of work.

MARK BRODIE: Do you ever wonder if people in that time saw that painting in that way?

WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: I do wonder, and I'll bet you most people did not. But I'm sure others did. I'm sure certain artists did. A lot of people don't even look at that painting that way today, but — and it's weird how art that didn't seem to communicate certain things at the time that it was created does later.

MARK BRODIE: William R. Handley is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California and author of the book "Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West."

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for listening to The Show's podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban. Our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.

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