This week on Arizona Illustrated…how demand for a psychedelic substance could spell trouble for the Sonoran Desert Toad population; the art and science of bonsai has strong roots in Southern Arizona; the Desert Laboratory restores it’s fossil collection and poet Raquel Gutiérrez reads ‘On the Crisis of Abandonment.’
Sonoran Desert Toad Psychedelics
The Sonoran Desert Toad is endemic to the Sonoran Desert. It is also the only animal that naturally produces 5-meO-DMT in large quantities. Once plentiful in the region, the herpetological community is worried that it could now be overly exploited for the psychedelic substance it produces.
50 Years of Tucson Bonsai
The Tucson Bonsai Society is celebrating its golden anniversary. Since it was founded in 1972, it has inspired generations of people to delve into this ancient tradition right here in Arizona. In addition to monthly meetings and outreach, the group also holds special events and has classes to teach people about the art and science of bonsai.
Fossil Collection
The Desert Laboratory's Vertebrate Paleontology Collection houses over 20,000 fossils, many of them from right here in the Sonoran Desert. The collection focuses on a time period when humans coexisted with now extinct megafauna like mammoths and mastodons. Today the collection is in great shape, but that wasn't always the case. Meet the people whose passion for fossils helped restore the collection to glory.
Raquel Gutierrez
In this installment of Arizona Illustrated’s poetry series, a collaboration with the UA Poetry Center, the acclaimed poet and writer, Raquel Gutiérrez, reads On the Crisis of Abandonment, a poem about living next to Aviation Freeway.
Raquel Gutiérrez is the author of Brown Neon (Coffee House Press, 2022), winner of the 2023 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, and Southwest Reconstruction (Noemi Press, 2022). A 2017 recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, they run Econo Textual Objects, which publishes intimate works by QTPOC poets. She is a poet and writer based in Tucson, Arizona.
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