Word: saguaro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From Southern California to Texas, towering saguaros on front lawns are the hottest thing since plastic pink flamingos. The demand has encouraged an illicit industry: cactus rustling. Many of the specimens bought by homeowners and collectors have been stolen from Government-owned wilderness lands. In Arizona last year more than 200 thieves were fined or given warnings for digging up a variety of state-protected species, most of which have shallow roots. Conservationists are now lobbying for stricter state and federal laws to stop poachers, who are lured by substantial profits. Saguaros, which can take more than 100 years...
...late afternoon at Canyon Ranch, "America's first total vacation/fitness resort." The sun slants across the roofs of the patio homes strung out across the desert, tinting the Santa Catalina Mountains, lengthening the shadows of the giant saguaro cacti...
Even in Arizona, which has the nation's toughest plant-protection law and pistol-packing lawmen to back it up, cactus rustlers make away with an estimated $500,000 to $1 million worth of plants each year. Among them: the giant saguaro (pronounced sah-vrar-o), Arizona's state flower, which grows to 50 ft. or more. The fruit of the saguaro is an important food source for practically all desert birds and is used as well by humans to make preserves and, yes, cactus wine...
...California desert adjoining Arizona has been picked almost clean of saguaro, red-barrel cacti and other species. It takes a cactus-naper 15 min. to uproot a plant that may have taken more than a century to develop. And the frail root systems of most big cacti seldom survive the shock of transplanting. Plant experts in Arizona estimate that their cactus population, a major part of the flora, will virtually have disappeared in three or four decades. Though scientists do not entirely understand the full role of Cactaceae in the delicate ecology of the desert, they do know that...
...Species (CITES), ratified by the U.S. and 66 other nations (but not Mexico), has not helped much in reducing the depredations. Though the treaty's aim was to regulate the trade in rare and protected species, few signatory nations have customs officers with sufficient botanical knowledge to distinguish saguaro from sassafras. One solution would be stronger enforcement of existing laws that prohibit removal, transportation and sale of imperiled plants. But conservationists face a prickly task in persuading lawmakers to vote funds to save the cactus, which cannot compare in political sex appeal with such threatened creatures as the whooping...