There is urgency to understand the environmental changes of the last 150 years of the Arizona-Sonora Border region and it’s north-south corridor.  We were given the opportunity to experience this exigency first hand by Art Lab at the Cuenca Los Ojos Ranch in southern Arizona.  Valer Austin, director of the Cuenca Los Ojos Foundation is a generous, infectious power-house and advocate for environmental restoration.

Austin’s projects located on both sides of the border are immense, inspiring undertakings.  Her vision is practical and intricate.  She foregrounds water restoration as her primary goal to re-establish healthy plant life and animal migration.  We learned the story of this land through observing Austin’s courage and passion to bring it back to health.  Her commitment has motivated me to develop a site project to further understand the environmental history of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands and human and nature’s migrations from a cultural and ecological perspective.