Word: pima
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Fame has a peculiar way of reducing an individual to a couple of arbitrary acts. Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian and World War II Marine, was given his slot in the historical record for two things: he helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima and died an alcoholic - both of which were widely chronicled in the media and in a song by Johnny Cash. This past fall, the complete story of Hayes's life was laid bare in Clint Eastwood's epic film Flags of Our Fathers, coming out on DVD. Cast as Hayes was Adam Beach, whose stirring portrayal...
...bobcat regularly saunters up the arroyo leading to Paul and Carolyn Zeiger's desert property in Pima County, Ariz., and leaps onto the flat roof of their adobe-style house. As long as their pet terrier, Stella, is inside, they don't worry much. "The bobcat jumps around up there and takes care of the mice," says Carolyn, 61, a clinical psychologist from Boulder, Colo. The Zeigers also get the occasional rattlesnake on their porch, and in the summer they have to stay indoors to avoid the midday heat. But despite those inconveniences--and in part because of them--they...
...exception, they discovered, was Pima County, which covers 9,186 sq. mi. of southern Arizona, including the city of Tucson. Pima has developed a conservation plan that permits growth while protecting the desert environment--a plan that has become a template for communities across the Southwest. "The old debate about whether growth is good or bad is irrelevant," says Chuck Huckelberry, Pima County administrator. "We have been growing for 50 years [in Tucson]. But we control where our growth occurs so it maximizes benefits and minimizes impacts...
Once a desert landscape has been despoiled, it recovers slowly, if at all. "Where you have rain, things grow back in 20 or 30 years. In the desert Southwest, it takes centuries," says Huckelberry, an engineer by training. Pima County, he is quick to point out, is not antigrowth--far from it. Every year for the past decade, the population has grown by 15,000 souls and covered 4,500 acres of desert in new housing. The newspapers are flush with property advertisements, the roads out of town dotted with signs for new developments with names like Coyote Creek...
...Pima County board of supervisors ratified the plan, dubbed the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, and last year the county proposed a $174 million bond issue to buy up open land for conservation. The measure passed easily, with 65% voter approval. Under the plan, the county allows concentrated growth in designated areas while preserving swaths of open space in environmentally sensitive core areas in a large ring around Tucson. That open space preserves the characteristic desert vistas while providing corridors for wildlife to move around the edges of housing areas. Huckelberry aims to preserve 263,880 acres in that...