Nov 12, 2019
Imagine driving into the desert, a place of wide
open spaces where you can see for miles, and not being able to
breathe. This was Mary Sojourner's first experience with desert,
somewhere between Parker, AZ and 29 Palms.
Mary
had moved west in 1985 from Rochester NY ‘to write and fight for
the earth'. It was Edward Abbey’s ‘Monkey Wrench
Gang’, which spoke to her loud and clear.
In
2007 Mary felt Flagstaff changing – gentrification as we know it
today was happening. Mary was living in a small cabin with a wood
stove, no running water, sharing a shower house and outhouse with
other cabin dwellers. The landlord cashed in and rents were to be
raised significantly.
At the
same time, a chance encounter with a representative of Mojave Desert Land Trust
brought Mary to Joshua Tree to conduct a writing workshop and do a joint
reading with previous podcast guest, Susan Lang. Mary's
accommodations turned out to be a small cabin, on Yucca Mesa and
the experience of the Mojave desert while staying there found Mary
leaving Arizona three weeks later to live in the Morongo
Basin.
Mary
stayed in the Mojave for about a year, finding magic on walks
through washes and the trash blowing over from the local landfill,
eventually taking her leave due to her body's unwillingness to
manage the summer heat.
Mary
has written three novels, 'Sisters of the Dream', '29' and 'Going
Through Ghosts' and 35 years of her life has been fighting to stop
uranium mines near the Grand Canyon, getting a pumice mine off the
sacred San Francisco peaks, stopping developers from putting a
gated golf-course community around wetlands in Arizona, and the
ongoing struggle to get a local ski resort to stop making snow on
the sacred mountains with reclaimed water. Her activism stems completely from the deep
connection she feels with the earth.
We
talk about the idea of ‘owning a piece of the earth’ and where this
drive ‘to have’ in our current day and age has come from, why it
seems more prevalent than ever and how it’s affecting our
relationship with each other, the earth and it's
resources.