Desert Botanical Garden’s 2040 Compass Draft Plan

 Yesterday I sat with the



Desert Botanical Garden’s 2040 Compass Draft Plan, and it felt less like reading an institutional document and more like entering an honest conversation about our shared home. The executive summary names what we feel in our bones: the desert is changing, hotter days, more people, more pressure on already‑stressed systems, and yet it keeps teaching us how to live with care, humility, and imagination.


Seeing DBG plan its role as a leader in research, education, and community engagement, naming deserts as frontlines for global solutions, gave me a quiet kind of hope.

I appreciated being asked not just to listen but to respond, to offer feedback from those of us who walk these trails, harvest from these plants, and carry community stories into the Garden.

The plan envisions scaling desert solutions, deepening storytelling, and building durable economic engines for the long haul. I thought of elders, culture‑bearers, scientists, artists, and everyday desert dwellers who’ve done this work for generations, often unnamed. It felt good to see a future where those threads might be woven together more intentionally, the Garden’s reach expanding without losing its roots.



After the meeting, I visited my plant relatives. The prickly pear pads were dotted with shy buds, the saguaros stood like patient witnesses, and brittlebush and palo verdes lit the paths in yellow against the blue sky.

The official language—north stars, endowments, capital investments, softened into something embodied: how do we earn the right to stay here, to keep calling this place home?

Between printed pages and living garden, I felt the gentle tension: a 15‑year plan’s foresight and petals that bloom for only weeks; “desert solutions” beside a cholla spine’s curve or sweetness stored in cactus fruit. That’s where the power lives, at the intersection of strategy and relationship, boardroom vision and the simple act of greeting each plant by season and by name.

I’m grateful to witness DBG naming the challenges ahead and leading with beauty, story, and responsibility. My hope is that as this plan evolves, the voices of the community and the wisdom of these plant nations continue to shape the path forward so that by 2040, our grandchildren can walk these same trails and hear the desert say, “You belong here, but you also have work to do.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Diva Marisa in the Sonoran Desert

Image
  For a moment, I opened the door to our home in Phoenix, and time folded in on itself. I did not see the woman with tired eyes from too many miles alone on the highways in many states. I saw the beautiful creature gliding down Market Street in her modified, ominous black sedan that shot fire during the San Francisco Pride Parade, like some urban hero straight from Thunderdome, her tattoo catching the sun while tourists stopped and stared. I saw her in the Earth Room at the Gregangelo Museum, draped in moss and grapes, transformed into a living feast as I tucked stray leaves into place and tried not to prick my fingers on hidden pins. I saw the night she became the spirit of spring itself, layered in green silk and yellow blossoms, every inch of her promise that winter never wins for long. She stepped into our home, into my now, as if crossing a small border between lives. We hugged so hard my ribs complained, and then there were sighs and an embrace of folding into each other, ...
Read more

Exploring Camp Naco, the Buffalo Soldiers, and the Seeds of Untold Stories

Image
  Exploring Camp Naco, the Buffalo Soldiers, and the Seeds of Untold Stories Until very recently, Camp Naco did not exist in my imagination. I had never walked its grounds, never heard its name in history class, never been told that Black soldiers once lived and trained in adobe barracks just yards from the border in southern Arizona. I’d heard “Buffalo Soldiers” in passing, maybe as a lyric, maybe as a phrase floating through American pop culture, but I hadn’t been asked to sit with the complicated human beings behind that name. So when Tanja introduced herself to me at the Arizona Indian Festival and then texted me about Camp Naco, a place she thought I might be interested in, my instinctive response was the one that has guided most of my life: I followed my curiosity. I went on a deep dive, documentaries, Smithsonian archives, PBS specials, trying to wrap my mind around this chapter of history that had somehow been standing in my own region, largely unnoticed by me. What...
Read more

Becky my First Best Friend, Sitting with Death

Image
  Becky circled as a child in a family picture Becky was my first best friend and older sister, the one who would not let me disappear. We were only a year apart, two brown desert kids sleeping in the same small rooms, sharing hand‑me‑down blankets and secrets, long before I ever had words like “shy” or “introvert” for the way I tried to melt into the wallpaper. She had other words for it. She’d turn the corner in our childhood homes, eyes lighting up with that crooked, mischievous smile, and charge at me—tumbling me to the floor, pinning me, roughhousing, tickling me until I laughed so hard I forgot I was trying to vanish. When I finally managed to gasp, “Why do you always do that?” she looked at me like I was missing something obvious and said, “Because I can, and because I love you, brother. Becky’s death came to me in fragments, phone calls, plane tickets, fluorescent hallways, but what remains, even now, are those three weeks when the world shrank to one hospital room and th...
Read more